book, and Jesus Christ will be made both the antidote and corrective of that most poisonous of all influences, the unlicensed literature of a worldly and unclean generation. The public recitation of these chapters from the writings of infinite wisdom, and more than angelic eloquence, if made a feature of school life, will establish in the memory of the child a standard of truth and of nobility of expression as high above our literary masterpieces as heaven is above earth.

We are pleased that the compiler has found use in this work of his heart's love, for the version of the New Testament of the late Dominican, Father Spencer, which we believe to be a valuable help to the right use and understanding of the Scripture-a help by no means adequately appreciated.

MINOR WORKS OF ST. TERESA-CONCEPTIONS OF THE LOVE OF GOD, EXCLAMATIONS, MAXIMS, AND POEMS. Translated from the Spanish by the Benedictine Nuns of Stanbrook. Edited, with an Introduction, by Rev. Benedict Zimmerman, O.C.D., with a short account of the Saint's death and canonization. New York: Benziger Brothers.

These are called minor works from the little space they occupy; but as a revelation of the grandeur of St. Teresa's soul they are major in value, for the volume is second to none of her works, not even to the Autobiography. The poems, thirty-six in number, will probably come as a surprise to the reader, for none but two or three poetical pieces have been commonly known to devout readers, even to her devoted clients. The others have been found, after diligent and really age-long research, by generations of St. Teresa's editors, not the least eminent among whom are Father Zimmerman and the Stanbrook Nuns. These poems of the great Saint sprang without preparation from her soul, and in every case are the expression of the joyful pain of a spirit wounded by the fiery dart of the Spouse's love. None of them is long, some are very brief, but all are contagious of that same quality of love, the divine sadness of a soul longing for heavenly union with God. The translator has endeavored-not without great and patient labor and with eminent success-to give in English the fullness of meaning without injury to the exquisite poetical sentiment of the original. For mostfor nearly all of these pieces she is the pioneer English translator. And where she is not, she holds her own very well indeed, even if we compare her version of St. Teresa's Song to Death to that of

the late Father Caswall. One and all the poems are an exceedingly lofty and tender expression of loyalty to the divine Spouse, and aspirations towards eternal union with Him. Never did St. Paul's yearning words receive so adequate an amplification: "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain" (Phil. i. 21). For instance, the Compact:

Now am I wholly yielded up, foregone,

And this the pact I made,

That the Beloved should be all mine own,

I His alone!

Struck by the gentle Hunter

And overthrown

Within the arms of love

My soul lay prone.

Raised to new life at last

This contract 'tween us passed,

That the Beloved should be all mine own,
I His alone!

With lance embarbed with love

He took His aim―

One with its Maker hence

My soul became.

No love but His I crave

Since self to Him I gave,

For the Beloved is mine own,

I His alone!

The poetical tone is heard and felt in the prose portions of this volume, destined to take its place with the other works of St. Teresa on a footing of equality-the Conceptions and Exclamations and Maxims. Better prayerful reading, apart from Holy Scripture, can hardly be found, especially before and after Holy Communion. The account of the Saint's death is a mosaic of all the various narratives of the consummation of that heroic soul's longings for eternal union with God.

The feeling of life in death and death in life voiced in all these singularly powerful poems, is also expressed in Chapter XXXVIII. of the Life, section eight:

As our Lord has been pleased to reveal heaven in some degree, my soul dwells upon it in thought; and it happens occasionally that they who are about me, and with whom I find

consolation, are those whom I know to be living in heaven, and that I look upon them as the only ones who are really alive; while those who are on earth are so dead, that the whole world seems unable to furnish me with companions, particularly when these impetuosities of love are upon me. Everything seems a dream, and what I see with the bodily eyes an illusion. What I have seen with the eyes of the soul is that which my soul desires; and as it finds itself far away from those thingsthat is death.

See also Chapter XXXIX., section ten. And in many other parts of the Saint's writings, notably in Relations I., 3, she attributes her longing for death to the general influence of the new and extraordinary intercourse of her soul with heaven. She says that ever since she "became subject to these supernatural visitations ......she has had a great desire to be poor and lonely, and to depart out of this land of exile in order to see God" (Relations VII., 20).

THE LIFE OF BLESSED HENRY SUSO. By Himself. Translated by Thomas Francis Knox, Priest of the Oratory, with an Introduction by W. R. Inge, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's. London: Methuen & Co. $1.00.

The autobiography of Blessed Henry Suso, a Dominican Friar (1300-1365), is one of the best known, as well as one of the most beautiful works of mediæval mysticism. The Servitor of Divine Wisdom, as he calls himself, describes the extreme austerities he practised in order to overcome his temperament "full of fire and life." It should be noticed, however, that these macerations of the flesh were but a phase in the evolution of his soul towards the Truth, and that they were carried out under the impelling force of a burning devotion, and by the divine aid. God led the Servitor by an exceptional path. His vocation and apostolate demanded that his body first, and then his soul, should pass through the crucible of suffering, so that he might win the Wisdom he longed for so ardently, and be able to direct others through his own experience along the path which leads to perfection. In fact, it is not difficult to trace the gradual ascent of Blessed Henry Suso's soul towards the Light through the various degrees of suffering which he endured; his unflinching faith kept him patient and steady through trials which it would seem no human existence could bear. He was afflicted with bodily ills, mental distresses, and darkness of soul;

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he was attacked with more than human wickedness by those to whom he had done good, and threatened with the vengeance of murder by men to whom he had done no harm; he was encompassed on every side by anguish and distress and utter desolation; and yet the Servitor remained steadfastly confiding in God, knowing that "he to whom God wishes well can be harmed by no one."

The tenderness of his heart for every living thing, his sensitiveness to the beauties of nature, and his ardent poetic imagination, should be remembered when interpreting the maxims which form one of the later chapters. Intellectually and theologically the teaching of the Servitor proceeds from that of Eckhart and Tauler, while in the higher flight of metaphysical argument he bases his conclusions on quotations from St. Thomas Aquinas and Dionysius the Areopagite. The translator's preface, published originally with Messrs. Burns & Oates' edition in 1865, has been retained, and an introduction by Dr. Inge, in which a survey is made of the times in which Blessed Henry Suso lived. The sympathies of Dr. Inge lie on the historical and philosophical side of the subject, rather than on the purely mystical. His open antagonism to the Church, which alone produces and cherishes saints of the type of Blessed Henry Suso, seems curiously illogical to those who study mysticism both experimentally and theoretically from within the fold of the true Church.

THE FRANCISCAN POETS IN ITALY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. By Frederick Ozanam. Translated by A. E. Nellen and N. C. Craig. London: David Nutt. $1.50. Though appearing only in the first weeks of 1914, no better memorial of Frederick Ozanam could have been devised for his centenary as far, at least, as English-speaking nations are concerned, than the issuing of a translation of his enchanting volume on Les Poètes Franciscains. It is indeed remarkable that with the extensive output during the last quarter of a century-to be precise, ever since the publication of M. Sabatier's epoch-making Life -of books dealing with the Franciscan legend, no attempt should have been made until now to translate into English a work which in France and Italy has enjoyed a high reputation both for sound scholarship and for a singularly refined appreciation of artistic values. Written years before the "cult" for things Franciscan had become a fashion in Europe, and when not a few essential sources of information were still unavailable, Ozanam's book re

mains one of the most valuable introductions we possess to a study of the Franciscan period. Indeed, in the face of these brilliant pages we can no longer flatter ourselves that it has been reserved for our own day to estimate the artistic significance of the Franciscan movement in its bearings on European history.

The translators, in their brief preface, very truly say: "No other book reproduces so sincerely and truly the spirit of the Franciscan movement, with all the glow of its religious ecstasy and all the charm of its innocent simplicity; no other book expounds so clearly the gradual evolution of that spirit, or testifies so convincingly to its influence on all aspects of human life and art." It is amazing to reflect that work so mellow, so impregnated with understanding not only of art and of history, but also of mystical theology, should have been the outcome of a few brief Italian holidays, necessitated by ill-health, which formed the only breaks in an exceptionally arduous professorial career at the Sorbonne. In Ozanam's case it was no doubt Dante who led him to the feet of St. Francis, for we know that his French thesis for his doctorate of literature treated of the Divine Comedy, and that his public defence of his thesis was so brilliant as to win him instant renown. And when we remember that the great work in defence of Catholic truth to which in his youth Ozanam aspired to devote the best years of his life, was destined never to be written-Ozanam, it will be remembered died in his forty-first year-we are all the more grateful for this brilliant fragment, which almost alone preserves for us the literary and artistic gifts which in the founder of the St. Vincent de Paul Conference might easily have been overlooked. Even as it is, in the centenary sketch, contributed by Mrs. Maxwell Scott to the Dublin Review (January, 1914), by some strange oversight no mention is made of Les Poètes Franciscains.

After an introductory chapter tracing the development of popular religious poetry from the mural inscriptions with which the early Christians loved to decorate the interior of their churches, Ozanam points out how "the poetry of the early Franciscans was produced at that instructive and fascinating moment when art begins to seize popular inspiration." In point of fact it was not long before the birth of Francis Bernadone that the idiom of the common people first took on itself sufficient form to emerge as a spoken and written language. Songs, religious, romantic, and patriotic, were the common possession of the Italian people, and if the love-songs of the troubadours came to them from across the Alps, it was Umbria