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"Great Tom" amid academic walks. Shakespeare left London as soon as he could buy a farm; Spenser wrote the "Faërie Queene" in an Irish castle; Sidney discoursed of poesy quaintly at Pembroke; Gray loved the country church-yard and rural solitudes no less than "the still air of delightful studies"; Burns loved the moss-grown traditions and venerated simplicity of "Auld Scotia"; Goethe and Schiller, in their little Weimar, were quite shut up from the world, but only to delight and charm it with their genius; Richter is the very apostle of homelife and rural enjoyments; our Swedish Fredrika Bremer, has woven into nearly all her fictions the peasant-life of her native land; and the most popular poets of our own language live in picturesque solitudes, or seek, like Browning, (alas! for his loss and ours,) the mouldering beauty of another age, or wander, as did our Percival, up and down this beautiful world of ours, loving even the tenderest flower that blows, but with unspeakably sad hearts.

There is also something very attractive in the country-seat of an author, especially if he be a genial man, and his writings teem with rich quaint humor. We wish to localize him; to indulge sweet imaginings of his looks, his habits, and all the little actions which make up character; and if he lives away from the multitude and cultivates a few idiosyncrasies; if he gains a local reputation among the simple folk, his neighbors, on quite other grounds than literary, we feel that he is a truer man for all that; and the strong attachment to our favorites (and who is more so than an endeared author?) is pleasantly surprised. In the country he is not in the crowd. He owns so much land; he lives in a house which stands alone; he has peculiar tastes, also mannerisms; you can invent some excuse for calling on him and be sure of a gentlemanly welcome, and when he is gone you can make a Mecca of his home the shrine of literary faith. Ah! how many tender thoughts have gone out to Sunnyside and Idlewild. But Willis yet lives, and long may he live to gladden us with his graceful, gentle waifs. And we treasure up carefully now all our memories of Sunnyside. Compare these homes with Grub-Street, or a "den" in New York! And will you believe now that circumstances have nothing to do with making men?

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Enough has perhaps been said to show that the influences of country life cannot be lost without a diminution of personal power. One thing I cannot omit to mention, the influence of Nature upon the soul. This has been so thoroughly infused into the earlier poetry of this century that one can hardly be pardoned for ignorance of the fact. It has made our poetry very rich in thought; it has removed it perhaps in some instances too far from common feelings. I am no pantheist; but I think that if Christian teachers would only make more of Nature and of God as seen in his works, as speaking to us in the dew-drop, the leaf, and the thunder-storm, as teaching us by countless analogies that truths are revealed in the shape of a leaf as well as in the Eternal Word, Christianity would gain. power over the mind and heart far greater than at present. Nature, thus taken home to our hearts, would refine and elevate the soul by quickening its sympathy with the Infinite mind. The literary man who has no ear for the ten thousand harmonies of Nature shows himself without quick sympathy and detective imagination which, as among the beautiful and grand in Nature, so in the finer and better part of human nature, gives insight into hidden things. He has not learned the first axiom of authorship that he must have a heart for all that interests mankind. But when the spirit delights in a forest solitude, and gladly drinks in the songs of birds, and makes the whole world populous with living thoughts and these thoughts reach down to what is inmost in man; when the dewy eve and sad twilight start "thoughts that wander through eternity," and the stars raying out into the solemn night bring intelligence of countless other worlds perhaps inhabited like our own; when birth and death in Nature not less than in human life confound us with their mute mystery, and reveal to the soul something of its strange destiny, and we think of shutting our eyes upon the objects in Nature which have stood to us as the symbols of certain truths; when we find one who can thus make Nature familiar and instructive — then we can fully appreciate how such intercourse will subdue the passions, enlarge the heart, vitalize the mind, and give interest and significance even to those objects apparently farthest removed from our sympathy. Not every one will find so much in Nature,

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but all will feel that she calms the troubled spirit and helps to restore our feelings to primitive quietude and joyousness; and a very few in this calm ecstasy of soul will send out profound and grand thoughts to elevate the world. The few who can do this are the master-spirits in literature.

ARTICLE III.

BOSSUET.

PROFESSOR RANKÉ, in his History of the Popes, has described with artistic power the great movement of the Roman Catholic Church, towards a sounder faith and purer morals, in the 17th and 18th centuries. This counter reformation is the most impressive feature of the ecclesiastical condition of Europe, after the enthusiasm of the early reformers in questions of religious faith, was succeeded by political agitations. The reaction among Protestants, wearied with discussions and demoralized by wars, after the treaty of Westphalia, in Germany, and the return of the Stuarts in England, gave a signal advantage to Rome in her renewed attempts to impose her despotic yoke. Doubtless the humiliations and disasters which they had suffered turned the attention of the better portion of the Roman Catholic Church to that great question, "What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" The Popes, for the first time for centuries, were devout and earnest, though narrow and bigoted. The Jesuits arose, and won universal admiration for their learning, piety, and zeal. The most fearless efforts were put forth by bishops and missionaries to regain the empire which was lost, not by wars and massacres, not by inquisitions and Smithfield fires, but by arguments, severe morality, and enthusiastic zeal. The Catholics vied with Protestants in learning, self-denial, and a high religious life. The triumph of Catholicism was well earned, and there was a character in it such as has not appeared before or since. It secured the respect of the world, and furnished martyrs and

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saints. Their labors and sacrifices veiled, as it were, the radical evils of their system. Their light shined gloriously in cottage and palace, and sanctified their convents, their schools and their missions. The great spiritual certitudes of Christianity were illustrated and taught and accredited in those cities and communities which had been the high seats of infidelity and frivolity. It even became the fashion in courts and salons to discuss the doctrines of grace and free-will, and Augustine and Anselm became the oracles of social réunions, even as they had reigned as despots in the schools of the Middle Ages.

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It was in this inquiring, religious, and earnest epoch in the Roman Catholic Church that Bossuet was born, at Dijon, 1627, about the time when Puritanism was most earnest and revolutionary, and about one hundred years after the great struggle had been made by Luther to emancipate his countrymen from the thraldom of Rome. He belonged to a respectable family, without the prestige, however, of rank or wealth. In very early life he was destined for the ecclesiastical profession, and all the influences to which he was subjected had reference to this end. His position and birth enabled him to aspire to the honors, though not to the highest preferments of the Church. To be trained and educated, he was sent to a Jesuit school, where he learned Greek and Latin, and laid the foundation of high classical attainments. The Jesuits then controlled the education of Catholic Europe, and their schools were models of discipline and severe study. They were unfavorable to intellectual expansion, and the encouragement of those impulses which lead to subsequent greatness. The Jesuit school-master was a pedant, he could teach the difference between ac and et, he could enforce rules, he could subdue the spirit of a boy; but he had no sympathy with boldness or originality, and was the slave of precedents, authorities, and conventional proprieties. Poetry, enthusiasm, and philosophical enlargement, were crushed amid the petty competitions and pedantic technicalities of the system very good for turbulent or stupid boys, but hostile to the highest aspirations of genius. It made plodding and industrious scholars, but not thinkers and enthusiasts. At the age of fourteen the young Bossuet could converse fluently in the language of ancient Rome, and could repeat Homer by

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heart a prodigy even in a Jesuit school for his linguistic

powers.

The father of Bossuetan enlightened and learned member of the magistracy-not wishing to make his son a Jesuit, or impelled by motives of ambition, or seeking a higher and broader culture than what could be acquired in a provincial school, secured the admission of his promising and precocious boy in the College of Navarre, at Paris, an aristocratic institution, presided over by Nicholas Cornet, a doctor celebrated for his piety and attainments. And he arrived at the capitalthen as now the centre of intellectual life in France- the delight of scholars, wits, philosophers, and men of fashion and pleasure "the hub of the universe," the very day that

Cardinal de Richelieu, then a feeble, exhausted, dying man, entered the city in triumph, borne, in his splendid litter, on the shoulders of twenty-four men fresh from the execution of Cinq Mars and De Thou- the proud minister of vengeance and power. His imposing procession made a profound impression on the mind of the young candidate for orders, for he beheld the monarch of France secondary and obedient to his minister, — and that minister a priest, wielding the weapons of both spiritual and temporal authority - a secular Churchman reviving the days of Dunstan and Becket. Yet Richelieu was not so much the medieval priest — reigning over weak princes by appealing to their superstitious fears, and controlling the people by a stern and dismal dogmatism, as he was the worldly statesman adopting the policy of enlightened absolutism, and, in the guise of a bishop, ruling by the fears of bayonets, and the terror of his spies—a cold, hard, inflexible, crafty, indefatigable architect of an absolute throne.

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At college, Bossuet was even more distinguished than he was at school was the oracle and pride of his classmates, who regarded him with more profound admiration than they did even their teachers themselves, for there is no enthusiasm more sincere and hearty than that with which young men at college regard their acknowledged superiors in genius among their equals in age. He was also a pet in aristocratic circles, and was carried as a wonder to the Hotel de Rambouillet, that famous centre of wit and fashion in the 17th century. Here

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