Volume 27 — THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXVII., No. 159.—JUNE, 1878.

THOREAU AND NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM.^[72]

There is a story told of an illiterate cobbler who was wont to attend the theological discussions in an Italian university, and who, despite his ignorance of Latin and the points discussed, always discovered the disputant that was worsted. To a friend who expressed surprise at his acuteness he explained that he had noticed that the arguer who first lost his temper was the one who also lost the victory.

The cobbler’s test admits of wide application. The consciousness of truth begets serenity. What chronic ill-temper was there amongst the first Protestant Reformers! And even to-day a Protestant controversial author writes as though he were aflame with rage. The doughty Luther, warmed, possibly, as much with the wine whose praises he so lustily sang as with polemical zeal, hurls such names as sot, devil, and ass at his opponents. He has declined and conjugated the word “devil” in all cases, moods, tenses, numbers, and persons. We can imagine his broad face purple with rage, and his bovine neck throbbing apoplectically, as he pours out the vials of his wrath upon that “besatanized, insatanized, and supersatanized royal ass,” Henry VIII., whose accredited book won for the monarchs of England that most glorious, though now, alas! inappropriate, title, “defender of the Faith.” The meek Melanchthon had the tongue of a termagant; and Bucer must have suggested to Shakspere some of the characteristics of Sir John Falstaff, so far as a command of billingsgate goes; for the wordy combats of that Reformer (Bucer, we mean) recall the conversational victories of the knight of sack.

Morbid irritability and unwholesome sensitiveness were the characteristics of the movement known, rather vaguely, as “New England Transcendentalism,” which, forty years ago, promised America a new life in religion, literature, and art. This ill-temper was a forecast of defeat. 290It brought the movement under the suspicion of weakness and error. It was a voice crying in the wilderness; it had not, however, the trumpet-tones of strength and conviction, but was rather the puny wail of complaint and despair. We were just ceasing to be provincial and were opening to world-wide influences. Our national boastfulness was hugely developed, and we flattered ourselves that no pent-up Utica contracted our powers. De Tocqueville says of us that we are a nation without neighbors; and this, of course, means that we are without standards or comparisons of excellence, and so, like the Buddhist devotee, we aim after perfection by self-contemplation. New England was filled with schoolmasters who had read Carlyle and translations of the Encyclopædists, and who in consequence began to have doubts about what not even Pyrrho would have considered a doubt, so far as it had any existence in their minds—religion. The stern-eyed old Calvinism which watched them like a detective became inexpressibly odious to them, and they hated “Romanism,” too, with all that contradictoriness that baffles explanation. It was soon discovered that Scotch Puritanism was unfitted for the latitude of New England, though it must be said that the mechanical virtues and the staid habits of the people owed much to that strange fanaticism which, whether happily or unhappily for them, has passed away for ever.

How to throttle Puritanism, and yet preserve its corpse from putrefaction as a convenient effigy to appeal to, became a problem for which no solution presented itself. The American masses even to this day venerate the Pilgrim Fathers, and no amount of historical evidence will shake their veneration for those fierce and ignorant fanatics, whose memory should long ago have been buried in charitable oblivion. It is only the Catholic historian and philosopher that can to-day respect the inkling of truth which they held, and which St. Augustine says is to be found in every heresy and doctrinal vagary. They attempted to make the Bible a practical working code of laws—an idea which to-day would be greeted with laughter by their children, who have long since unlearned veneration for the Scriptures. There is something quite noble, though irresistibly ridiculous, in the old Puritan notions about the Bible. One wonders that they did not revive the rite of circumcision. Protestants are beginning to acknowledge the wisdom of the church in not making the Scriptures as common as the almanac or the newspaper. The whole atmosphere of New England became Judaic. Biblical names of towns abounded. Scriptural names were given to children, with a disregard for length and pronunciation that in after-years provoked the ire of the bearers. The Mosaic law was ludicrously incorporated with the legal enactments of the civil law. The old Levitical ordinances were carried out as far as practicable, and the minister of the town just barely refrained from donning the garments of the high-priest and decorating himself with the Urim and Thummim. This anomalous society survived even the great social changes which were wrought by the Revolution.

Puritanism repressed all individual eccentricities of religious opinion. The boasted independence of Protestantism scarcely ever 291did exist, except in name. Let a man to-day dissent from the opinions of the sect in which he has been brought up, and he may as well become a Catholic, though that is the crowning evidence of being given over to a reprobate sense. What liberty did Luther give the Sacramentarians? What divergence of opinion did Calvin allow in Geneva? He punished heresy with death. What toleration was there in the Church of England for Dissenters? And there is a quiet but effective persecution kept up in the English church to-day against all “Romanistic tendencies.” There is not a greater delusion prevalent than the lauded Protestant freedom of investigation and liberty of conscience. The Catholic Church, even as judged by her enemies, was never so intolerant as that obscurest of Protestant sects, the Puritans of New England. The harshest charges that have been falsely made against a merely local tribunal, the Spanish Inquisition, are historically proved against the full ecclesiastico-civil tribunals of Massachusetts in the punishment, not of turbulent and contumacious heretics, but of wretched and harmless old women accused of witchcraft. Every Protestant church is a complexus of social and business influences, all of which are cruelly and unfairly brought to bear against any member who uses the Protestant right of private judgment. If he will disjoin himself from church communion, though his interpretation of the Scriptures may assure him that the Father is worshipped in spirit, he is looked upon as an infidel and blasphemer. The petty persecution of the Protestant church is a subject admissive of infinite illustration.

Cramped and crippled by a fierce Scotch Covenantism, what were the aspiring minds of New England to do? A natural idea struck them. Some of the fathers of the Revolution were infidels. That great and glorious light of American history, Benjamin Franklin, who was held up as a model to every New England boy, was a sort of deist. The influence of that man’s example and writings has been one of the most baleful in our country’s history. The fathomless depths of his pride, the cool assurance of his “virtue,” the intensely worldly spirit of his maxims, and his Pharisaical reward of wealth and honors in this world have been imitated by thousands of American youth. That nauseating schedule of “virtues” which he drew up; such hideous maxims as “Rarely use venery” and “Imitate Jesus and Socrates,” which seem to us infinitely more shocking in their cold calculation than a wild debauch or a hot-headed oath; his constant prating about integrity as the high-road to health and wealth; and, in short, the whole wretched man, body and soul, furnished the worst yet widest-copied example of American virtue and success. Add to such influences the schoolboy beliefs in liberty and independence, the solemn Fourth-of-July glorification of individual freedom, the vision of the Presidency open to the humblest youth in the district school, and the gradual weakening of faith in the Bible, brought about by the rapid multiplication of the poor, deistical histories and scientific miscellanies of fifty years ago, and the end of Puritanism was soon predicted. The heavy hand of the clergy was shaken off. The curiosity deeply planted in the Yankee nature looked around for a new religion. At once all the vagaries of undisciplined thought, so long held 292in silence by Protestantism, burst out in Babel speech. Chaos was come again. If Puritanism had dared, it would have sent the “Apostles of the Newness,” as they were called, to the scaffold or the pillory, or, at the very least, it would have pierced their tongues and branded them with symbolic letters.

And what a revelation! We laugh at the wild rhapsodies of George Fox, and Mr. Lecky, in his late book, England in the Eighteenth Century, has rather cruelly, we think, dragged up Wesley’s and Whitefield’s eccentricities for the laughter of a world which should rather be in tears over the vanishing of such earnestness as both those deluded men had; but the laughter which New England Transcendentalism evokes is hearty and sincere, from whatever side we view it.

In the first place, there is no meaning in the name. The logician knows what transcendental ideas are—the ens, verum, bonum, etc.; and what philosophy calls the transcendental is really the most familiar, as connected with universal ideas. But Transcendentalism in New England was understood to mean a high, dreamy, supersensuous, and altogether unintelligible and unexplainable state, condition, life, or religion that escaped in the very attempt to define it. Dr. Brownson complains that he had much difficulty in convincing a philosopher that nothing is nothing; and we feel much in the same mental condition as that philosopher, for we cannot see how Transcendentalism (a polysyllable with a capital T) is nothing. It is infinitely suggestive. It is any number of things, all beginning with capitals. It is Soul, Universe, the Force, the Eternities, the Infinities, the βία καὶ κράτος. It is Any Number of Greek and Latin Nouns. It is, in fact, a Great Humbug (in the largest kind of caps). Mr. Barnum’s “What-is-it?” is nothing to the Protean forms of Transcendentalism. A fair definition might be, Puritanism run mad. There was a certain method in it, and it would be false to say that the absurdity ever went so far in America as Fichtism or even Hegelism in Germany. The old Puritan leaven was too strong for that; and the Yankee common sense, which not even the wildest flights of Transcendentalism could wholly carry from earth, instinctively rejected the German theories. Not even Comte’s Positivism, which has quite a following in England and an influential organ in the Westminster Review, ever gained ground amongst us. We do not believe in Cosmic Emotion or Aggregate Immortality, ponderous and unmeaning words, to which, listening, a Yankee asks, Heow?

The surprising fact is how, in the name of all the philosophers and the muse that presides over them, did New England fall a victim to the “Apostles of the Newness”? It was worse than the Protestant Reformation, which is said to have developed more crazy and eccentric enthusiasts than any other physical or social convulsion recorded in history. The shrewd Yankee genius was supposed to be insured against spiritual lightnings. The cold and common-sense temperament of the people seemed farthest removed from the action of “celestial ardors.” But the fierce old Puritanism was taking only a new form. The spirit that sent Charles I. to the scaffold was nurtured amid the gloomy woods. Only that the sweet providence of 293God, mysteriously permitting and clearly punishing evil, is gradually withdrawing even the physical presence of that spiritually and intellectually unbalanced race, what chance would there be for the action of his all-holy will as wrought out by the church? New England is largely Catholic to-day, yet New Hampshire will have no popery in her councils. “This spirit is not cast out without prayer and fasting.” Milton, who lacks spiritual insight, fails to identify the spirit of pride with the spirit of impurity. New England, alas! has been filled with the spirit of pride, and of hatred against the City of God, and lo! now she is slain by the spirit of impurity, and the stranger within her gates has taken her place and will wear her crown. And that stranger is the despised and hated “Romanist,” who now enjoys the blessing foretold in that mystic Psalm whose counsels New England despised—the blessing of progeny. It is a prophecy and a history (Ps. cxxvi.): “Unless the Lord buildeth the house, they labor in vain that build it. Unless the Lord keepeth the city, he watches in vain that keepeth it. It is in vain for you to rise before the Light. Rise after ye have sat down, and eaten the bread of sorrow. Behold, children are an inheritance from the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows in the hand of the mighty, so are the children of them that were rejected.”

This is the divine “survival of the fittest.” Would to Heaven that the solemn significance of this great Psalm could sink into the heart of New England and cast out the foul demons that have so long lurked within it; that, having partaken of “the bread of sorrow,” she might rise to the contemplation of the true Light!

No sooner was the restraining power of Puritanism cast off than Transcendentalism, like the genie in the Arabian Nights, rose like an exhalation, and afterward defied the command of the invokers to return to its former limited quarters. The men who assisted at this liberation of a powerful and anarchic spirit soon discovered, to their fear and disgust, that they could not control it. It was worse than Frankenstein, for it appeared to have symmetry, and the land was quickly enamored with its beauty. Every theorist felt that the millennium had dawned. A truce to common sense was called. The leaders of the movement were put in the painful but logical predicament of inability to object to the consequences of their teachings. The over-soul was reduced to such limitations as the necessity and obligation of using bran-bread in preference to all other forms of food. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus happening to appear at a time when the inspiration was fullest, Sartorial heresies became the rage. Bloomer costumes asserted their rights. The old sect of Adamites revived, and nothing but tar and feathers, which hard-headed Calvinists bestowed with unsparing vigor and abundance, prevented many from rushing into a state of nudity. There arose prophets of vegetarianism, and, says Lowell, every form of dyspepsia had its apostle. Money, the root of all evil, was condemned by impecunious disciples, who drew largely upon treasures which they imagined they had laid up in heaven. Furious assaults were made upon the Bible, which was stigmatized as a worn-out and effete system. A 294crew of anti-tobacconists, who regretted that they could not find a condemnation of the weed in Scripture, were joined by a set of teetotalers, who did not hesitate to condemn our Blessed Lord’s use of wine, and, as they were unable to see the high, mystic significance of the Eucharist, they vented their foolish wrath upon such of the Protestant sects as retained wine in the Lord’s Supper, and this with such effect that it became quite common in New England to administer bread and milk instead of wine in the communion, thus destroying even the semblance to the blood which we are commanded to drink in remembrance of That which was shed for our redemption, and which, in the divine Sacrifice celebrated by Christ on Holy Thursday, was then really and truly poured forth, in the chalice, unto the remission of sin.

The revulsion from the unspeakable harshness of the Puritanic interpretation of the Scriptures was so complete that men cast about for an entirely new theological terminology. The transcendental pedants were ready for the want. What was grander than the old Scandinavian mythology? What is Jehovah to Thor? What is the Trinity to the sublimity of the Buddhistic teachings? The cardinal doctrine of the New Testament is the golden rule, which was familiar to the Greeks, and expressed in our own terms by Confucius. Satan’s master-stroke was thus levelled at the Bible, which was the word of life to the New-Englander. Take the written word away from the Protestant, and the gates of hell have prevailed against him. The inscriptions upon the Temple of Delphi preserved Greek mythology for centuries. Infantine belief in the poor, adulterated word of the Scriptures, which, after all, were never subjected to the full action of the Protestant theory, kept alive some remnants of Christian faith and hope. But to cast away the Bible for the Vedas, the Krishnas, the Mahabarattas, the skalds, and the devil knows what other vague and windy compilations of Scandinavian and Brahminical superstitions was to inaugurate a chaotic era, the like of which history does not record. There is no sympathy between the American mind and the Buddhism of the East, much less between the minds of the Yankee Transcendentalists and the wild beliefs of Danish sea-kings, who would have knocked their brains out, as puling and scholarly creatures unfit to wield a club or harpoon a seal, and consequently objects of the just wrath and derision of Odin and Thor. Yet these strange mythologies, intermixed with fatalism, Schellingism, and nature-worship, formed the olla-podrida to which New England for at least ten years sat down, after the unsavory dish of Puritanism had been thrown out of doors.

The spiritual squalor and intellectual poverty of most Transcendentalists were studiously kept out of sight, and the school—for it would be blasphemy to call it a religion—pushed forward into notice its exponents, who, under the stricter requirements of writing, considerably toned down their sentiments, and sought to give intelligible and literary form to their extravagances. A magazine, called the Dial, was published in Boston, in 1840 and a few following years, and notwithstanding the petulant genius of Emerson, its editor, who only now and then yielded to the spirit of newness, the strangest gibberish 295began to mumble in its columns. The following, from the “Orphic Sayings” of Bronson Alcott, who was considered to be one “overflowed with spiritual intimations,” is an illustration of the jargon. It might be proposed by a weekly paper as a puzzle to the readers:

“The popular genesis is historical. It is written to sense, not to soul. Two principles, diverse and alien, intercharge the Godhead and sway the world by turns. God is dual. Spirit is derivative. Identity halts in diversity. Unity is actual merely. The poles of things are not integrated. Creation is globed and orbed.”

The leaders of the movement cared nothing about letting their infidelity be known; but the mass following were loath to break completely with their religious traditions. They did not know what Kultur meant, and had neither knowledge of, nor sympathy with, Wilhelm Meister or Werther. The Atlantic Monthly, which may be regarded as having taken the place of the Dial, became the repository of Transcendental thought, though, with Yankee shrewdness and savoir faire, the editors managed to give it an unsectarian and, in time, even a national character.

The Atlantic never committed itself to Christianity, or, if it did so, it was to that spurious horror which in rhyme, idea, and general relativeness joins Jesus with Crœsus. A peculiar school of literature, marked with the patient study of German idealism, grew up around the Atlantic, which, with characteristic New England assertion, claimed to be the critic and model of American letters. The orphic style was sternly kept down in the Atlantic, but it would assert itself. Any one who cares about illustrating this idea has but to turn over the older Atlantics to see the painful efforts made to paraphrase the name of God, which, whenever boldly printed, has some title of limitation. We have any quantity of Valhallas and mythologies, and poems about the Christ that’s born in lilies, etc.; but it is tacitly understood that Kultur is the presiding genius. It must be admitted that New England Transcendentalism developed, or at least engaged, considerable literary and poetic talent. Not to speak of its High-Priest, Avatar, Inspirationalist, Seer, or Writer (with a big W), or Whatsoever you call him—Emerson, who has retreated from its altar and seems to be swinging his Thor-hammer wildly in every direction, there appeared a number of writers, all under the mystic spell. They aimed at a certain vague and beautiful language, and were given to pluralizing nouns which are one and singular in meaning. A certain kind of poetry, after the manner of Shelley, but not after his genius, sprang up and monthly bedecked the Atlantic with flowers. The literary men of New England were made to feel that inspiration sprang from Transcendentalism alone.

Nathaniel Hawthorne became its novelist, and Thoreau, whom we have been keeping at the door so long, suggested to him the idea of Donatello in The Marble Faun—a finely-organized animal, acted upon by human and otherwise spiritual influences. Hawthorne’s morbid genius, for which we confess we have little admiration, was unnaturally stimulated by the Transcendental seers. He is for ever diving into the depths of inner consciousness, and always appearing with a devil-fish instead of a pearl. His Note-Books show him to have 296been a spiritually diseased man, for whom the stench and ugliness of moral fungus growths had more charms than had the flowers. He has the besetting weakness of false reformers, chronic irritation, quite as vehement against the pettiest crosses and vexations of life as against its awful tragedies and crimes. This is the evolution of Transcendentalism. It began with enthusiasm and ended in worse than Reformation anger at everything and everybody, not excepting itself; but it was not an anger that sins not.

Theodore Parker was its theologian by excellence, and as the one god he believed in was himself, we suppose he may be allowed the title. Margaret Fuller Ossoli was co-editor with Emerson of the Dial, and was a strong-minded woman, whom her admirers insisted upon calling Anne Hutchinson come again—so strong, after all, were their New England traditions. Dwight wrote their music, if music can be limited in expression. William Ellery Channing was the poet of Transcendentalism, and Henry D. Thoreau was its hermit.

Thoreau was born at Concord in 1817, and he died in 1862. He was the only man among the Transcendentalists that allowed their theories the fullest play in him, and the incompleteness and failure of his life cannot be concealed by all the verbiage and praise of his biographers. Emerson’s high-flown monologues ruined him. A trick of naturalizing and botanizing which he had, and which never reached the dignity or usefulness of science, was exaggerated by a false praise that acted more powerfully than any other influence in sending him into the woods as a hermit, and among mountains as a poet-naturalist. He appears to have cherished some crude notions about the glory and bountifulness of Nature and her soothing and uplifting ministry, but these notions are, in the ultimate analysis, admissive of much limitation and qualification, if they be not altogether ægræ somnia mentis. The Transcendentalists worshipped Nature and built airy altars to the Beautiful, but they did not venture into the woods on a rainy day without thick shoes and good umbrellas. Thoreau gave up his life to this delusory study and adoration of Nature, and got for his worship a bronchial affection which struck him down in the full vigor of manhood. We have no patience with an ideal that takes us away from the comforting and companionship of our fellow-men. What divine lessons has Nature to teach us comparable with her manifestations in human nature? Why should we run off into solitude, and busy ourselves with the habits of raccoons and chipmunks that are sublimely indifferent to us? How much better is old Dr. Johnson’s theory: “This is a world in which we have good to do, and not much time in which to do it,” and who, on being asked by Boswell to take a walk in the fields, answered: “Sir, one green field is like another green field. I like to look at men.”

Life in the woods is very good for a mood or a vacation, but man escapes from them into the city. The old proverb about solitude runs, Aut deus, aut lupus—no one but a divinity or a wolf can stand solitude. One of the weaknesses of Transcendentalism was an affectation of seclusion. It was too good for human nature’s daily food. Man is such a bore! “O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!” 297Now, all this is sinful and unreasonable. Why should we shrink from the bad and evil and objectionable in mankind to herd with the wild beasts of the forest? The only thing that sanctifies solitude is the Catholic faith; and, even when the monastic idea sought to realize complete isolation from the world, the superiors were loath to grant permission. They felt that it is not good for man to be alone, and St. Benedict, in his Rule, has a reflection that there were monks lost in solitude who would have been saved in community. The true idea is that we can be solitary in spirit in the midst of crowds. There is no necessity of betaking ourselves to the woods.

Very likely the high praise of isolation, as nutritive of genius, acting upon a naturally retiring disposition, first led Thoreau to his sylvan life. The common idea that he was a hermit or a misanthropist is fully disproved by his biographers. In our opinion he is just the reverse, and if we were disposed to bring in evidence we could show that he was wild for notoriety. His private letters are more affected than Pope’s, who wrote with an eye to publication. All Thoreau’s books are full of his private experiences, thoughts, and emotions. He never suffers you to escape from his overpowering personality. He never sinks the ego. He reminds one of the diary of the private gentleman in Addison’s Spectator: “To-day the beef was underdone. Took a walk. Dreamt about the Grand Turk.” Thoreau is for ever telling us about his personal feelings, his method of baking bread, and his dreams about tortoises, etc. There is something funny in his writing six volumes for men on whom he fancied he looked with Transcendental contempt. The fact is, he was a fine, naturally talented, and poetic man, who was bewitched by the theories which we have sketched; and the contest within his spirit has led his biographers and critics into pardonable misapprehensions of his life and aims. Left to himself and his aspirations, he would have developed into a fair poet or a good naturalist—perchance an Agassiz or an Audubon. He had no theological or philosophical ability, but a deep sense of truthfulness, which made him experimentalize upon the theories which he heard. He found it much easier than would most men to live in the woods, to take long walks, to navigate rivers, and to collect specimens of natural history. His studies in nature have no value to the scientist. He was a good surveyor and liked animals. He wrote some indifferent poetry. He described some gorgeous sunsets. He delivered an oration on John Brown, and he managed to let the world know that he built and lived in a hut at Walden. Voilà tout. He flippantly criticised our Lord Jesus Christ, ridiculed all Christian beliefs, preferred the company of a mouse to that of a man, of an Indian to a white man, and died without a single throb of supernatural faith, hope, or charity. This was a man, too, who had Catholic blood in his veins, but who could not bear to hear the chime of church-bells without some contemptuous remarks, and who professed himself a Buddhist without the Indic veneration, and a worshipper of Pan without knowing or believing that the great Pan had died for his salvation.

Two biographies are before us, one by William Ellery Channing, who was Thoreau’s friend and companion, 298the other by H. A. Page, who appears to be a biographer-in-general or by profession. Channing’s, as might be expected, is a sort of prose In Memoriam; and Page’s is made ridiculous by an attempted comparison between Thoreau and St. Francis of Assisi, based on the saint’s love of, and miraculous power over, animals, and the Concord man’s ability to bring a mouse out of its hole or tickle a trout. Strange as it sounds, this comparison is carried on through one-third of the volume. Page must be a member of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, for Thoreau’s kindness to brutes he evidently regards as his finest trait. Such stuff as “the animals are brethren of ours and undeveloped men,” and the slops of evolution in general, are poured out in vast quantity, and the impression forced upon the reader is that Mr. Page, who speaks of himself as an Englishman, has no conception of Thoreau’s character, nor, indeed, of any adventurous or sport-loving nature such as freely develops on our wide plains and high mountains.

Thoreau graduated at Harvard, but without distinction. He and his brother taught school for a while at Concord, where the sage lives who gave such cheering voice to Carlyle. There was a wildness in him which nothing could subdue, yet it took no cruel or brutal form. He appears to have had that passionate love of external nature which is so sublime as a reality, so detestable as an affectation. He was made of the stuff of pioneers and Indian scouts, but with rarer feeling and poetic temperament. A water-lily was more than a water-lily to him. He had no social theory to advocate—a delusion about him into which Page falls—but he took to the woods as an Indian to a trail. There is nothing Transcendental about his life, and yet he is the chief and crown of Transcendentalists. He had a brave, high life in him, which is perfectly intelligible and realizable, quite as much in the parlor as in the swamp. Heroism need not leave New York for the steppes of Russia. A naturally timid priest who anoints a small-poxed patient is as brave in his way as Alexander or Charles XII. of Sweden. A thousand hermits have lived before Thoreau, and made no palaver over their social discomforts, which are, indeed, inseparable from their way of life. There is an unpleasant soupçon of Yankeeism when, in Walden, Thoreau lectures us on economy. The Transcendental aurora vanishes before the prosaic hearth-fire.

We remember having read A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers and The Maine Woods during a summer vacation which we spent between Mount Desert and Nantucket, and the sweet naturalness of those two beautiful books sank into our heart, touched, perhaps, by the glorious yet sombre scenery in which we moved. The jar and discord of Thoreau’s theological opinions melted away in the harmony of the great music which he made us hear among the hills and scenes which he loved so well, and of which he seemed a part. Hawthorne’s keen eye, sharpened, we will not say purified, by high æsthetic cultivation, detected in Thoreau the latent qualities of the Faun whose existence, by an anomaly, he has thrown into modern Italy, and even intimates as wrought on by the church. We love to think of Thoreau, not as idealized 299by Emerson, Channing, or Page, nor shallowly criticised as by Lowell, but as bright and winsome, afar from the sensuous creation of Hawthorne, and full of that boyish love of flood and field which has made us all at one time Robinson Crusoes. This is a most undignified descent from that ideal type of character which Thoreau is supposed to represent; but we submit to any reader of his books, if he did not skip his foolish theories about religion, friendship, society, ethics, and other such themes on which Emerson expatiates, and about which dear old Thoreau never knew anything at all practical, and leap with him into the stream, follow the trails he knew so well, learn the mysteries of angling and hunting, and tramp with him through the forests, read with him his dearly-loved Homer, and, in spite of our half-concealed laughter, listen to his wonderful explanations of the Beghavat-Gheeva.

It is encouraging to notice how bravely he shakes off half the nonsense of Transcendentalism, though bound by the wiles of Merlin, who lived only two miles from Walden. Transcendentalism gave no religion. It was even hollower than Rousseau’s Contrat Social and Émile, in which writings the wicked old Voltaire said that Jean Jacques was so earnest in converting us back to nature that he almost persuaded us to go upon all fours. Even Emerson confesses to the failure of Thoreau’s life. “Pounding beans,” says that wise old man, with the air of a Persian sage—a character which he frequently adopts, especially when he recommends some thousand-dollar Persian book to us as infinitely superior to the New Testament,—“Pounding beans,” says he, referring to poor Thoreau’s attempt to carry out his Transcendentalism, “may lead to pounding thrones; but what if a man spends all his life pounding beans?”

And so, in the style of the tellers of fairy stories, we say that poor Thoreau continued all his life pounding beans, but without caring very much for the bearing of beans upon the eternities, splendors, and thrones, and that he lived a cheerful and wholesome, natural life, though rather an uncomfortable one, in his woods and among his beasts and flowers; that he was kind and gentle to beasts, but not to God or to man, of whom he seemed to be afraid, which was a mistake; and after he was dead he was made out to be a great philosopher, a golden poet, a great social theorist, and a Transcendental saint, which is another mistake.

With Thoreau died the Transcendental hermit, and, so far as human nature and a happy combination of character and circumstance could permit, the only truly ideal man that Transcendentalism has produced. Yet how far he falls below the most commonplace monk in spiritual range and power and aim! No great spiritual fire burns in his bosom; nor will any Montalembert be attracted to his memory. There was not the light of Christian faith or love upon his life, which is distinguished from the savage’s only by its superior mental civilization and its relation to that civilization which he so humorously yet contradictorily despised. With Emerson, who has now convinced himself of the absurdity of immortality, its greatest writer will die. The Kulturkampf of Germany, which New England introduced into America, cannot survive the literary changes which take place every half-century. Emerson 300will fade into oblivion, and even now he is no longer listened to. But there is that in Thoreau’s books which gives vitality to old Walton’s Angler, and the traveller on the Concord and through Maine will recall the memory of Thoreau, no longer, we hope, to be associated with the eclipse of his false philosophy, but seen bright and vivid in that sunshine and beauty he loved so well.

THE FOUNTAIN’S SONG.

Into the narrow basin

Falleth the ceaseless rain,

Echo of sweet-voiced river

Singing through mountain glen,

Breaking amid the footfalls

Filling the city square,

Mingling with childhood’s clamor

Piercing the heavy air:

Shrill-sounding, childish voices

Gathered from dust-grimed street,

Pale little wondering faces,

Swift little shoeless feet;

Coral-stained cheeks of olive,

Lips where all roses melt,

Eyes like the heavens’ zenith—

Latin, Teuton, and Celt

Crowding with eager glances

Where the wide bowl lies spread,

Watching the gold-fish glimmer,

Giving the turtles bread:

Eyes that of mountain streamlet

Never the light have known,

Ears that of mountain music

Know not a single tone,

Feet that have never clambered

Clinging to mossy stone,

Hands that the palest harebell

Never have called their own.

Glittering in the sunshine

Droppeth the fountain’s rain;

Glistening in the moonlight,

Singing its mountain strain.

301Twittering round the basins

Sparrows sit in a line,

Dip in the ruffled water,

Scatter its jewels fine.

Rests in the earth-bound basin

Depth of the starlit sky,

Shadows of noon and twilight

Soft on the waters lie.

Fresh on the clover circle

Falleth the wind-driven spray,

Keeping an April greenness

All through the August day.

Meet that St. Mary’s gable,

Bearing the cross, should crown

This little glimpse of freshness

Set in the sun-parched town;

Meet that St. Mary’s altar

Rise with its Sacrifice

Here where the city’s poor ones

Seek pure breath from the skies.

E’er in the dropping water

Filling the pool below

Voices I hear that never

Pure mountain-stream can know:

Singeth the city fountain

Songs that are all its own,

Though for its needs it borrow

Music the hills have known:

Sings it of sin forgiven,

Sorrow-tossed heart at rest,

Wearisome load soft lifted,

Soul of all bliss possessed.

Chanteth the silver murmur

Notes of the vesper hymn;

Gleams in the moonlit showers

Twinkle of taper dim

Burning before God’s altar

Faithful through day and night,

In its unbroken service

Token of holier light.

Bells rung at Benediction

Mingle their sacred chime

Clear in the solemn rhythm

Wherewith the fountain keeps time.

Gifts of our Blessed Mother,

Lady of God’s dear Grace,

Fall with the falling waters—

Heavenly dew of peace.

302Wind-swept spray of the fountain

Keeping the clover green,

Telleth the grace of sorrow

Clothing a soul serene;

Bubbles breaking in sunshine—

Heaven-reflecting spheres—

Shine like joy-freighted eyelids:

Heart finding speech in tears.

Quarrelsome little sparrows

Wear the white wings of dove,

Brooding o’er mystical waters,

Fusing the waves with love.

So doth the fountain whisper

Thoughts of all sorrow and joy,

Sparkle like blessèd water

Cleansing from sin’s alloy:

Voices of mountain and altar

Blend in its ceaseless rain,

Holding my soul that listens

Bound in a subtle chain.

HERMITAGES IN THE PYRÉNÉES ORIENTALES.

I.

“Let man return to God the same way in which he turned from him; and as the love of created beauty made him lose sight of the Creator, so let the beauty of the creature lead him back to the beauty of the Creator.”—St. Isidore of Seville.

Let others who visit the magnificent range of the Pyrenees tell of the grandeur of the scenery and the beneficence of the mineral waters; let them recount the days of border warfare, when Christian and Saracen fought in the narrow passes, and Charlemagne, and Roland, and all the mighty peers awoke the echoes of the mountains; we will seek out the traces of those unlaurelled and, for the most part, nameless heroes who overcame the world and ended their days in the lonely caves and cells that are to be found all along the chain from the Mediterranean Sea to the Bay of Biscay. Many towns and villages of southwestern France owe their origin to some such cell. The hermit at first only built one large enough for himself, in which he set up a cross and rude statue of the Virgin. Other souls, longing for solitude, came to knock at his door. The cell was enlarged. An oratory was erected. People came to pray therein and bring their offerings. The oratory grew into a chapel. The hermitage became a monastery, around which families gradually took shelter, and the hamlet thus formed sometimes grew into a town. Lombez, St. Papoul, St. Sever, and many other places owe their origin to some poor hermit. 303The names of a few of these holy anchorites are still glorious in these mountains, like those of St. Orens, St. Savin, and St. Aventin, but most of them are hidden as their lives were, and as they desired them to be. Many of the chapels connected with their cells have acquired a local celebrity and are frequented by the people of the neighboring villages. This is a natural tribute to the memory of the saintly men to whom their fathers used to come when in need of prayer or spiritual counsel. The influence of such men on the rural population around was incalculable, with their lessons of the lowly virtues enforced by constant example. Sometimes not only the peasant but the neighboring lord would come with his Dic mihi verbum, and go away with new views of life and its great aims. King Perceforest, in his lessons to his knights, said: “I have graven on my memory what a hermit a long time ago said to me by way of admonition—that should I possess as much of the earth as Alexander, as much wisdom as Solomon, and as much valor as the brave Hector of Troy, pride alone, if it reigned in my bosom, would outweigh all these advantages.”

Many of these hermitages and oratories are

“Umbrageous grots and caves

Of cool recess”

that have been consecrated to religious purposes from the first introduction of Christianity. In the valley of the Neste is one of these grottoes, to which you ascend by steps hewn in the cliff. The opening is to the west, and the altar, cut out of the live rock, is turned duly to the east, where the perpetual Oblation was first offered. The sacred stone of sacrifice has been carefully preserved. There is a similar cave near Argelés also with its altar to the east.

Whether cave or cell, these hermitages are nearly all remarkable not only for their solitude but for the beauty of their situation. Sometimes they are in a fertile valley amid whispering leaves and wild flowers that give out sweet thoughts with their odors; sometimes ’mid the deep umbrage of the green hillside, vocal with birds, perchance the nightingale that

“Shuns the noise of folly,

Most musical, most melancholy”;

or on the border of a mountain stream with no noise there

“But that of falling water, friend to thought”;

or some secluded tarn whose tideless waters, like the soul stilled to all human passions, give back an undisturbed image of the sky; but oftener on some lofty crag, gray and melancholy, with scarce a spray for bird to light on, where amid heat of summer and winter frosts the hermit grew “content in heavenward musings,” like him, sung by Dante, on that stony ridge of Catria

“Sacred to the lonely Eremite,

For worship set apart and holy things.”

Every one in his hours of deepest feeling, whether of love, or grief, or devotion, has longed for some such retreat where he might nurse it in solitude. To every soul of any sensibility that has lived and suffered—and is it not all one?—it appeals with a force proportioned to the deep solitude he has already passed through, and his sense of that solitude he knows must one day be encountered. There is something healing and sustaining in this contact with nature, but it is only experienced by him who has that “inward eye 304which,” says Cowley, “is the bliss of solitude.”

“The common air, the earth, the skies,

To him are opening Paradise.”

“But solitude, when created by God,” says Lacordaire, “has a companion from whom it is never separated: it is Poverty. To be solitary and poor is the secret of the heroic in soul. To live on a little, and with few associates; to maintain the integrity of the conscience by limiting the wants of the body, and giving unlimited satisfaction to the soul, is the means of developing every manly virtue, and that which in pagan antiquity was a rare and noble exception has become under the law of Christ an example given by multitudes.”

The cells of these mountain hermits are therefore invariably of extreme simplicity. “Prayer all their business, all their pleasure praise,” the mere necessities of the body only were yielded to.

“The moss his bed, the cave his humble cell,

His food the fruits, his drink the crystal well.”

There were once more than a thousand hermitages on both sides of the Pyrenees, most of which have been swept away in the different revolutions. Several of them, however, have been restored, and a great number of the chapels connected with them have become popular places of devotion. This is especially the case in the Pyrénées Orientales. M. Just, who was our guide to so many of them, and on whom we draw freely in our narration, gives nearly forty of ancient origin that still exist in Roussillon, the chapels of which are open to the public and greatly frequented, at least on certain festivals of the year. The people love the altars where erst their fathers prayed, and have restored most of those which fell into ruin at the Revolution. One feels, in going from one of these holy places to another, as if in the true garden of the Lord filled with flowers of aromatic sweetness. The “balm-breathing Orient” has nothing to surpass them. Let us pass several of them in review, and catch, if possible, the secrets of their spicy nests.

There is the hermitage of Notre Dame de Peña—Our Lady of the Peak—on a barren mountain, bristling with needles, not far from the source of the Aude. Nothing grows on these rocky cliffs, except here and there, in the crevices and hollows, tufts of fragrant lavender, thyme, and rosemary, and the box, the odor of which, as Holmes says, suggests eternity. A rough ascent, cut in the rock, leads up to the hermitage, with a little oratory here and there by the wayside, and a saint in the niche, reminding the visitor to prepare his heart to draw near the altar of the Mother of God. There is a narrow terrace before the chapel, from which you look down on the wild Agly rushing along at the foot of the mountain over its rough bed of schist. On the farther shore is the little village of Cases-de-Peña, surrounded by hills that in spite of the aridness of the soil are covered with vines, almond-trees, and the olive. In the distance is Cape Leucate, where the low range of the Corbières shoots forward into the very sea. The hermitage is in a most picturesque spot, and there is a stern severity about the bare gray cliffs not without its charm. An unbroken silence reigns here, except on certain festivals of the Virgin. Directly behind, a sharp needle springs up, called the Salt de la Donzella, with ruins on the summit, 305of which no history remains.^[73] These cliffs can be seen far out at sea, and the mariner, when he comes into the basin of St. Laurent, looks up to invoke Our Lady of the Peak:

“Beloved is the Virgin of us. Every day we pray to her at the sound of the Angelus bell. Her image is the sail that impels our bark toward the flowery shore. O the Virgin! the Virgin! We need her now; we need her everywhere, and at all times!”^[74]

Notre Dame de Peña is one of those Madonnas, so numerous in the Pyrenees, that were hidden in the time of the Moors or Huguenots, and, being forgotten, were brought to light in some marvellous manner. In this pastoral region it was almost always by means of the flocks or herds, whereas in Spain such images were generally found surrounded by light, music, and odors. In this case the lowing of cattle around a cliff of perilous height led to the discovery of the statue in a cave. When this took place, or when the chapel was built to receive the holy image, is not known. But the date on the cistern hollowed in the rock shows that it was already here at the beginning of the fifteenth century: “In the year 1414 this cistern was made by Bn. Angles, a mason of Perpignan, by the alms of charitable people.” The chapel formerly had no doors; consequently, any one could enter, day or night. The peasants used to say of the Madonna: “No quiere estar cerrada esta imagen”—This image is not willing to be shut up. But later, in order to keep animals out, a wall was built around it, with a gate that any one could unfasten. In old times there were many ex-votos in the chapel, and silver reliquaries, one of which contained a fragment of the tomb at which Christ wept, and another of the pillar to which he was bound. And the Virgin had thirteen veils broidered with silk and garnished with silver, and a still greater number of robes, it being the custom here, as in Spain, to clothe the sacred statues out of respect. The chapel and hermit’s cell fell to decay at the Revolution, and the Madonna was carried to a neighboring parish church. But the people continued to come here to pray amid the ruins. When better days arrived it was restored through the zeal of M. Ferrer-Maurell, of the neighboring village of Espira-de-l’Agly. The statues of St. Vincent and St. Catharine in the chapel are said to be the likenesses of his children of these names, who both entered the order of La Trappe and died in the odor of sanctity. They are generally known, their lives having been published, as Père Marie Ephrem and his sister.

The Madonna now in the chapel is commonly called the Mara de Deü Espagnola. The place was once owned by the Knights Templars, but now belongs to the chapter of Notre Dame de la Réal at Perpignan, and on certain festivals the youngest canon comes here with other priests to hear confessions and say votive Masses. At such times a great crowd ascends the mountain. The pavement of the chapel—of the solid rock—is worn smooth by the pilgrims of so many ages. At the foot of the 306mountain is a road leading to the Valley of the Aude.

The hermitage of Notre Dame de Força Réal is on a mountain of that name, so called from the royal hold that once stood on the summit, fifteen hundred feet above the level of the sea. When the clouds gather around it the people in the plain below pray to the Madonna veiled in the mist to be protected from hail, so often disastrous to the crops in this region. As the chapel is on the culminating point of the mountain, it is visible for miles around, and seems to the sailor afar off on the treacherous waves like a true pharos of hope. M. Méchain, the noted astronomer, established himself here when measuring the arc of the meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona. All the villages around have stated days in the year to come here in procession. The people of Corneille come on Trinity Sunday; Millas, on Whitmonday, and so on. It is very picturesque to see them winding up the mountain-side with their crosses and gay banners, singing as they go. On the way they stop to pray at the little oratory of Notre Dame de Naudi, or Snow. Mass is sung in the chapel of Força Réal, and they all receive the Holy Eucharist. The chapel is dedicated to Notre Dame de Pitié, and over the altar is that group, always so affecting, of Marie éplorée at the foot of the cross receiving the body of her crucified Son. Two doors behind facilitate the approach of pilgrims to kiss the holy image. To see these pious mountaineers gathered around the dead Christ and his mourning Mother, singing the wild Goigs, so expressive of grief, in the native idiom, is very pathetic. Before the chapel is a large portico that also leads to the hermitage, and beyond is a small patch of land for cultivation. From the terrace before the chapel is a fine view over the sun-bathed plains of Riversal, and in the distance is the blue sea which washes the shores of that Eastern land where the angelic greeting was first uttered, but is now echoed for ever among these mountains consecrated to Mary. Not far off is an isolated peak, on which are the ruins of an old military post that had its origin in the time of the Romans. Roussillon, it must be remembered, has been successively occupied by the Romans, Visigoths, Saracens, Spaniards, and French. Separated from France by the Corbières, and from Spain by the Pyrenees, it was a border-land of perpetual warfare for centuries, and this post was noted in the contests, particularly in the war between Don Pedro of Aragon and King Jaime of Majorca, and was the last place to hold out against Don Pedro. Louis IX. had resigned all claim on Roussillon to Don Jaime el Conquistador, who, on his part, withdrew his pretensions to a portion of Languedoc. After the death of Don Jaime the province fell under the rule of the kings of Majorca, till the bloody wars of the fourteenth century gave Don Pedro possession of it. He made it the apanage of the crown prince of Aragon. Louis XIII. took Perpignan, and the treaty of the Pyrenees confirmed France in the possession of the whole province.

The hermitage of Notre Dame de Juegas is pleasantly situated in the plain of Salanca beside the river Agly, whence it derives its name—a corruption of Juxta aquas, near the water. Here once stood a temple to the false gods. It is a quiet peaceful spot, a little from the 307highway to St. Laurent, the centre of the maritime business on this coast, and the traveller often turns aside to say a prayer in the ever-open chapel. The sailors themselves come here, and there is a constant succession of votive Masses all the year for safe voyages and happy ventures. It is especially frequented in the summer. The neighboring parish of Torreilles comes here in procession four times a year, one of which is on the festival of St. Eloi to perpetuate a thanksgiving service at his altar for the cessation of a pestilence that raged ages ago in this vicinity. How few of us, who perhaps consider ourselves certain degrees higher in the intellectual scale than these good peasants, ever return to give thanks for our own mercies, much less for those of our forefathers! On Good Friday a great number come here from the surrounding parishes to make the Way of the Cross and pray at the altar of the Christ. There is a large garden walled in around the hermitage, and adjoining is a field belonging to it. Before the cell is a wide porch and a court shaded by trees, where the birds keep up their sweet responses from one leafy cell to another. Here the pilgrims assemble to eat the lunch they bring with them. The chapel is known to have existed in the thirteenth century by a document of 1245, by which Delmau de Castelnou transferred all his possessions in the territory of Sancta Maria de Juseguis to Don Jaime, the Infante of Majorca. It contains a statue of Our Lady between St. Ferréol and St. Lucy. Not far from the chapel is the mound where tradition says the Madonna was found. Out of respect it has never been cultivated.

About a mile from the little village of Corneilla-del-Vercol is the hermitage of Notre Dame du Paradis—in Latin, Regina Cœli. A fifteen minutes’ walk across the sunny plain brings you to it. It is in a retired spot well calculated to diffuse peace in the soul, and you pass out of the air tremulous with heat into the cool, solitary chapel with a delightful feeling of repose. The hermit, varying his duties by cultivating the land adjoining, may well find a calm happiness at the feet of Our Lady of Paradise. The very name brings joy to the gloomiest soul. The word Paradise, as the Père Bouhours says, “implies the cessation of every ill, and the fruition of all good.” Fra Egidio, one of the early Franciscans, used to fall into ecstasy at the very name of Paradise; for such holy souls kindle into a glow at the least spark, above all at the thought of the eternal bliss that awaits the end of their penitential life.

This chapel has recently been restored by the villagers and very prettily ornamented. One of the side chapels is dedicated to St. Acisclo, whom, with Santa Victoria, we found honored on Montserrat in Spain. Prudentius has consecrated a hymn to these two martyrs, who suffered at Cordova in the reign of Diocletian. The chapel is very ancient. In an old will of 1215 Dame Ermessende Raffarda bequeathed it half an aymine of barley, and not long after one Pons Martin, of Perpignan, wishing to be buried here, left it a whole load. High Mass is celebrated here on the Assumption, and there are frequent votive Masses throughout the year.

On the way from Caudies to Fénouillet is the hermitage of Notre Dame de la Vall, on a peak surrounded by a great number of old 308graves that are shaded by sad cypresses and olives. Mention is made of it in a privilege accorded by Pope Sergius IV. in 1011 to the monastery of St. Pierre de Fénouillet. Near the mount is the Ruisseau des Morts—the Stream of the Dead—to which the priest in his sable stole used to come down to receive those brought here for burial. About a mile from Caudies you come to the oratory of St. Ann, recently restored, with an inscription in the Catalan tongue stating that it was erected in 1483—that is, when the country was under the rule of Aragon. It then belonged to the domains of the counts of Fénouillet. Just beyond this oratory is a large cross at the foot of a long ramp leading up to the hermitage. The Madonna in the chapel is held in great veneration, as shown by the number of ex-votos on every side. She stands in a curious retablo of terra-cotta. In one of the compartments the demon is represented beneath the bier of the Virgin, seemingly half crushed by the weight, perhaps significant of her power over the Prince of Darkness. There is a kind of belvedere, to which you ascend by a flight of seventy-three steps, where you have a fine view over the valley of Caudies and the stern, barren mountains that surround it. On one of these rocky heights are to be seen the ruins of Castel Sizel, and on another those of the old château of Fénouillet, which take quite a poetic tinge up in that sunlit air. A great festival is held at Notre Dame de la Vall at the Assumption, when the mountain is clothed with joy and its summit crowned with light. At other times it wears a solemn aspect. To see it at night, especially, with its chapel on the top among lone graves and funereal cypresses, with the Stream of the Dead winding along at the foot, is something gloomy to behold. The monotonous flow of the sullen stream, the black shadows, the sighing of the night winds, as of suffering souls, strike a kind of terror into the heart.

The hermitage of St. Catharine nestles in the bottom of a charming valley about a mile and a half from Baixas, among almond-trees and luxuriant vines, the more pleasant from the contrast with the barren cliffs that enclose it. Here the titular saint has been venerated from time immemorial, as well as SS. Abdon and Sennen, who are in special honor in this country. They all have statues in the sanctuary, and above them stands supreme Notre Dame de la Salud, which is the Catalan for health—Salus Infirmorum. On St. Catharine’s day, as well as the feast of Our Lady of Snow, the whole valley is swarming with pilgrims and resonant with their Goigs, as the hymns in the native tongue are called.

The valley of the Agly leads to the hermitage of St. Antoine de Galamus by a pleasant road along the left bank of the river, shaded by trees and shrubs that never lose their verdure. On the other side rise bold cliffs with astonishing abruptness. At length you come to an iron gate that opens into the Bois de St. Antoine, where, along the path bordered with odorous plants, are the stations of the Via Crucis, and beyond is a cave dedicated to St. Magdalen, with her statue over a rude altar. Soon after you come to the hermitage at the end of the valley, surrounded by a wall, with a small belfry rising above it. Here you are welcomed 309with cordial simplicity by a hermit of saintly mien. A grotto, seventy feet deep and twenty wide, serves as a chapel. Eight steps lead to the marble altar, on which is a statue of the patron saint with the mysterious Tau on his mantle, and beside him the animal symbolic of all uncleanness. Every one who has seen the picture of the Temptation of St. Anthony by Teniers—and who has not?—remembers under how many aspects the great adversary was allowed to tempt the saint, and how, according to the significant legend, the victorious St. Anthony forced the malign spirit to remain beside him under the most suitable of forms.

This chapel has always enjoyed great celebrity since the cessation of an epidemic in 1782, in consequence of a solemn procession here by the neighboring people. Several rooms are built into the side of the cliff to accommodate those who wish to spend some days in meditating on the contemptu mundi. In one room is a shelf in the rock that used to serve as a bed for the hermit—certainly one that would not tempt him to remain too long inert. Near by is a small cave where the statue of St. Anthony was found. Here is a little fountain fed by water that comes trickling down the side of the cave with a pleasant murmur.

The place reminds one of Sir Lancelot, who, “after riding all night, became ware of a hermitage and a chappel that stood between two cliffs, and then he herd a lytel bell rynge to Masse, and thyder he rode, and alyghted and tyed hys hors to the gate.” But he that said Mass in our case was not “the byshop of Caunterburye,” but a poor friar of the Order of St. Francis. In 1482 this hermitage was taken possession of by the Observantine fathers, who occupied it for more than a century. They were succeeded by lay hermits. For several years past members of different religious orders have succeeded each other here, and by their austere lives recalled the ancient solitaries of the desert. You seem to see St. Pachomius in the wilderness among the clefts of the rocks. In 1843 Père Marie, of saintly memory, was the hermit here, and might have been daily seen hollowing out his tomb in the rock. Beside the yawning mouth lay a death’s head with the scroll: “Soon you will be what I am, all of you who behold me. Pray for the dead, and work out your own salvation.” Sometimes the hermit would stop in his lugubrious employment to prolong the moral as with the voice of one risen from the dead. He was succeeded by others who were desirous of pausing in the midst of their apostolic career and refreshing their weary souls by spending a season in retirement and prayer among the caves of this lonely mountain. One of these caves is in the side of a steep cliff difficult of access. On the wall is rudely graven: “The voice of him who crieth in the wilderness.” The very stones here, indeed, seem to cry out. The cave recalls the Earl of Warwick who became a hermit and scooped out his own cell in a cliff, as he is made to say:

“With my hands I hewed a house

Out of the craggy rock of stone,

And lived like a palmer poore

Within that cave myself alone.”

The hermitage of St. Antoine is certainly a charming solitude. The cliffs are bare and stern, but the eye looks down on the verdure of trees and a meadow enamelled with 310flowers. The songs of the birds come up from their leafy nests, as if in response to the hermit’s psalm, and the sunny air is full of insects chirping in the bliss of their peaceful existence, only rivalled by his own.

Near the village of Pézilla de la Rivière is the ancient hermitage of St. Saturnin in a graveyard full of trees, and flowers, and crosses, showing the piety of the people towards their dead. Before burial their remains are taken into the chapel, where the Miserere is sung and absolution pronounced. Here are the statues of St. Saturnin, St. Blaise, St. Roch, and St. Sebastian, all popular saints in this region. On the wall is a tablet to the memory of a noble Béarnaise who became a canoness, and always used to attend High Mass here on St. Saturnin’s day. A legend tells how on one occasion, being overtaken by a hard rain, she was not wet in the least, while the servant who reluctantly accompanied her was drenched to the skin.

On the left bank of the Agly, about a mile and a half west of Claira, is the modest hermitage of St. Pierre del Vilar, surrounded by pale, trembling poplars, and tall reeds that rustle drearily in the wind, and orchards of olives—saddest, if most sacred, of trees. It wears an aspect of utter solitude. The chapel is so old that its origin is unknown. But there is a tombstone from a neighboring priory (now gone) to which the chapel gave its name, to the memory of Prior Berengarius, who died in 1193. There is an old statue of St. Peter here, carved out of wood, dressed in an alb, stole, and cope. This chapel was in such veneration that after the Revolution the people restored it, added a belfry, and on St. Peter’s day, as well as several other festivals, they come here in procession, and Mass is solemnly sung. At their departure they used to gather around the graves of the old hermits to chant the Requiem, but these graves are now covered by the cells built here in 1851 by some pious cenobites of the Order of St. Francis—refugees from Spain, who sought in prayer and solitude consolation for their exile.

The hermitage of St. Martin stands on one of the highest peaks around Camelas. It dates from a remote epoch, as appears by a bequest dated the twelfth of the Kalends of May, 1259. The seigneurie of Camelas belonged to the barony of Castelnou, and when Lady Anne de Fénouillet, the widow of one of the barons, took the veil “of her own free will,” as the account says, “de sa propria y mera voluntad, and not by force, or persuasion, or reward,” she gave all her rights over the domain of Camelas, including the hermitage of St. Martin, to the hospital of Ille, to which she had retired in order to serve the poor of Christ.

In the seventeenth century this venerable sanctuary, having fallen to partial ruin, was restored by the exertions of M. Curio, a priest of Camelas, who has left many details of its history in a manuscript of touching interest. He tells us how, when a mere escolanet dels rectors—a pupil of the curé—he used to walk in the processions of Rogation week, carrying the cross or the holy water; and when they came to St. Martin’s, and he saw its ruined condition, his young heart was deeply moved. The altar was poor. The old statues of St. George and St. Martin were defaced. The walls were crumbling to pieces, and there were holes in the vaulted roof; and the open 311doors allowed the goats and other animals to take shelter there. “Estas cosas,” says he, “eran pera mi de gran afflictio”—These things were to me a great affliction—and he longed to be able to repair the chapel. He finally became a priest and held a small benefice at Thuir, but he never lost sight of the chapel of St. Martin—a saint to whom he had special devotion—and he would have become a hermit here had it not been for the opposition of his superiors. On the 12th of January, 1637, during a visit at his brother’s in Camelas, while saying the rosary in the evening, he felt suddenly inspired to take immediate measures for the restoration of the chapel. But there were many obstacles. He was himself very poor, as he tells us, and the people around were equally so. He knew he should incur the reproaches of his brother as well as of the neighbors. And it would be expensive to transport brick, sand, and water to the mountain for the repairs. By a few sous from one, and a few francs from another, he was enabled to begin the work, but had to continue it at his own expense. Six years after the work was not completed. He now removed to Camelas to devote himself to it, bringing with him a pious old laborer to aid in the task, and a hermit to whom the bishop had given a license to collect alms within the circuit of two miles—a limitation made at the special request of the prudent M. Curio himself, lest, as he said, the hermit might have an excuse for “vagabondizing.” The zealous priest gave all his own income. He even made himself the organist of a church to add to his means. At length he had the happiness of seeing it completed, and, going to Perpignan, a painting of St. Martin was given him for the altar of his patron, and a retablo of sculptured wood for that of Notre Dame des Anges. The chapel was reopened September 25, 1644, and M. Curio figured as chief musician at the High Mass. His own inclination for the solitary life made him long to retire here himself, but he was again refused permission. At length, in the time of some pestilence, he made a vow to retire here for the space of a year, should he and his parish escape. He entered upon the fulfilment of his vow April 2, 1653.

The church consists of two aisles, each with its altar: one of St. Martin, with the old painting above it presented to M. Curio; and the other of Our Lady of the Angels with its ancient statue of coarse workmanship found in a neighboring cave still known as the Cova de la Mare de Deü.

In former times, after High Mass on St. Martin’s day, a small loaf, a cup of wine, and a morsel of cheese were given to all the people present; and the custom is still kept up, at least as to the bread.

312