opening before one. I think the greatest mistake I have ever made was that of fancying that an honest man was sufficient society to himself, and that the growth and vigour of the intellect was compatible with loneliness. I remember well the first practical check that this feeling received. It was at Otago; I had made up my mind to go on foot a journey of three or four days into the unknown ïnterior. I could get no one to accompany me, and I did not care for any one. On the evening of the first day I reached a narrow mountain valley, partly clothed with wood, partly with high fern and flax and rushes. I camped by

the side of the clear stream, and made my fire out of the drift-wood that lay on its banks and had probably never been before disturbed by the hand of man. I boiled my tea, baked a` cake of flour in the ashes, and after the meal spread my plaid on the soft long grass by the waterside, and tried to go to sleep. I had nearly succeeded, when I felt the plash of raindrops on my face. It came on harder and harder, till I was quite wet through and cold. I got up and stamped about in a little circle, to keep up the circulation. The rain at last ceased, and I lay down again, but could not sleep for the cold. The morning came, and the sun rose gloriously, but I was chilled through, and faint from hunger. I saw, too, that my provisions would not hold out for more than another day, and I resolved to return. I could not light a fire,-everything was too wet, and I could not eat flour; so I started

without any breakfast. As I struggled back over the mountains, almost sick with hunger, I could not help remarking within myself a longing to get back to the settlement and the haunts of men equal to the desire which I had felt a day or two before to penetrate deep into the silence and solitude of the bush. "No," I said to myself, as I leaned on a great boulder at a spot whence the eye commanded a farstretching plain, on which not the faintest curling smoke told of the presence of man, "thou wast not made to be alone!" A sort of horror fell upon me, the might of Nature seemed to rise up,-irresistible, all-pervading, -and to press down upon my single life. From the hour that I reached the settlement I became, I think, a wiser man.

Deliverance, however, was near. One day in 1849 he came home from his school-work to find a letter from Sir William Denison, then governor of Tasmania, offering him an educational appointment in Tasmania which involved the organization of the young colony's educational system. The governor wrote in kind and flattering terms, as one glad to do Arnold's son a good turn. The young man felt as

The confidence in the firmness of the exist

ing social order which events had forced upon him, logically implied a different conception of that religion under the auspices of which that social order had been elaborated, out of the chaos consequent upon the destruction of the Roman Empire. If the one had infinitely more vitality than he had supposed, the same might be true of the other. When such was the tendency of his mind, it needed but some

slight impulse from without to turn the balance irrevocably in favour of belief.

While this inward dialectic was going on, he married in Tasmania, and became a father. He was devoted to wife and children, but none the less the claims of the spirit were inexorable, and drove him and them once more into the wilderness. Newman's books reached him-the " Essay on Development" and the "Lectures on the Idea of a University." They sank deep into his mind. One day he was on his inspecting rounds in a rural district of Tasmania. In a little wayside inn he found a stray volume of Alban Butler's "Lives" containing the life of St. Bridget of Sweden. As he read it, the long "subliminal" process burst its way to the light, the great change accomplished itself within him. "Philip" the Radical, who had left England a disciple of George Sand, declaiming against kings and priests, who had lived side by side with Newman at Oxford and felt none of the great Tractarian's compelling power, was now reached

at the other side of the globe by the same force which had laid hands on Newman. Then and there he resolved to write to Newman, to lay open his heart and ask advice.

Here is his letter. Newman must have received many such, but few can have been more interesting to him.

REVD AND DEAR SIR: I entreat you to forgive the freedom which I take in addressing you, though an utter stranger to you. The name I bear is doubtless familiar to you, and were it necessary that you should know any particulars about myself personally, there are several Oxford men to whom I could refer you. Ward and Faber I know among others, the latter rather well. My excuse for writing to you and seeking counsel from you is that your writings have exercised the greatest influence over my mind. I will try to make this intelligible in as few words as possible. My Protestantism, which was always of the Liberal sort and disavowed the principle of authority, developed itself during my residence at Oxford into a state of absolute doubt and uncertainty about the very facts of Christianity. After leaving Oxford I went up to London, and there, to my deep shame be it spoken, finding a state of doubt intolerable, I plunged into the abyss of unbelief. You know the nature of the illusions which lead a man on to this fearful state far better than I can tell you; there is a page in your lectures on the University system where you describe the fancied illumination and enlargement of mind which a man experiences after abandoning himself to unbelief, which when I read, it seemed as if you had looked into my very heart and given in clear outline feelings and thoughts which I had had in my mind but never thoroughly mastered. . . . At last, by God's mercy, a meditation into which I fell on my unhappy and degenerate state was made the means—a text from St. Peter suddenly suggesting itself to my memory, through the violent contrast which I found to exist between the teaching of the Apostle and the state of my own soul-of leading me to inquire again, to pray again, and to receive again, most unworthy as I was, the precious gift of faith in Christ. This, however, is not all. You, who have said that a man who has once comprehended and admitted the theological definition of God cannot logically rest until he has admitted the whole system of Catholicism, will not wonder if, after having admitted Christianity to be an assemblage of real indubitable historical facts, I gradually came to see that the foundation of the One Catholic Church was one of those facts, and that she is the only safe and sufficient witness, across time and space, to the

reality of those facts and to the mode of their occurrence. These convictions the meditations of each day only tend to strengthen, and I ardently long for the hour for making my formal submission to the Catholic Church. It is here, however, that my perplexities begin; and it is to you, who can understand and enter into all such, and to whose writings I feel most deeply indebted, that I venture to write for a resolution of them. Sincerely yours,

T. Arnold.

The perplexities of which he speaks were indeed many. His conversion to Catholicism meant the giving up of his appointment in the colony, and the plunging of himself, his wife and young children into an utterly uncertain future. It meant also the bitter pain and disapproval of all those who loved him.

Newman's answer, of which I give the essential parts only, seems to me extremely creditable to his heart, the quality of which has been sometimes doubted by those who were most ready to pay compliments to his head. Anything like ungenerous exultation over his old opponent, whose son was thus submitting to him, is of course wholly absent from it.

Dublin, October 25, 1856. MY DEAR ARNOLD: Will you allow me to call you so? How strange it seems! What a world this is! I knew your father a little, and

I really think I never had an unkind feeling towards him. I saw him at Oriel on the Purification before (I think) his death and was glad to meet him. If I said ever a harsh thing against him, I am very sorry for it. In seeing you, I shall have a sort of pledge that he at the moment of his death made it all up with me. Excuse me-I came here last night, and it is so marvellous to have your letter this morning. . .

I write in great haste, as I have much to do to-day. May all blessings come upon you. Yours most sincerely in Christ,

John H. Newman.

I do not follow my father's story further. Those who care to do so will find material in the "Passages from a Wandering Life," which he published shortly before his death. After his return to England, he wrestled much with poverty and untoward circumstances, with depressions within and without, of which there is much touching record in his journals. But in hard work for history and letters, in family affection, above all in religion, he found his

consolation. He died doing the congenial work of a Catholic fellow of the Royal University of Ireland. I do not think he was an unhappy man, though a muchhampered one. At the same time I imagine that he rightly judged the past and foretold the future when, a meditative child of eight, he told his father that he believed those first eight years would prove the happiest of his life. Perhaps, indeed, the men and women are few of whom as much could not be said. But the child's power of self-detachment and self-criticism is un

usual, and the father's answer is not only affecting from its undertone of grave and apprehensive tenderness: it also strikes the key-note of the child's life, as he was to live it, and of his death. The poem, written in Dr. Arnold's handwriting, from which I take these verses was found among my father's papers.

[I think that the eight years I have now lived will be the happiest of my life. T. A. Junr. on his Birthday, Nov. 30th 1831.]

Is it that aught prophetic stirred
Thy Spirit to that ominous Word?
Foredating in thy Infant Mind
The Fortune of thy Life's Career,
That Naught of brighter bliss shall cheer
What still remains behind?

Or is thy Life so full of Bliss
That, come what may, more blest than this
Thou canst not be again?

And fear'st thou, standing on the shore,
What storms disturb with wild uproar
The Years of older Men?

At once to enjoy, at once to hope,-
This fills indeed the largest Scope

Of Good our Thoughts can reach.
Where can we learn so blest a Rule?
What wisest Sage, what happiest School
Art so divine can teach?

and it was also his son's. It troubled my "Only Christianity," is Arnold's answer;

father much that wife and children could not conscientiously follow him in the ways he chose; nor was his own mind wholly at peace for many years. But his later life was given unreservedly to the Catholicism which had captured his brilliant and rebellious youth. In the last weeks of his life, when he felt his strength failing him, he began to write a Life of St. Bridget" as a last labor of love and gratitude; the thought of Newman was with him on his death-bed; and in the beautiful little Dublin church which Newman built in the troublous days of the first Catholic university, his medallion and Newman's bust, alone together, will speak to a coming generation of the sufferings and heroisms and self-surrenders of an older and sterner day.

HE second section in the great scheme of decoration designed by John S. Sargent for the hall of the Special Libraries floor in the Boston Public Library has for its subject the dogma of the Redemption, and the foregoing words are a translation of the Latin inscription borne by the cornice that separates the frieze and the lunette in the design. This inscription was adapted by the artist from that which accompanies the colossal mosaic figure, "The Saviour in Benediction," in the beautiful cathedral of Cefalù in Sicily, the term judico, employed in the original, being replaced by redimo in the present instance.

Mr. Sargent's completed work will represent the development of the Christian faith. In the first part, as finished several years ago, we have the foundation of that faith in the growth of Judaism, as embodied in the books of the Old Testament, out of a chaos of pagan beliefs. The second part, at the opposite end of the hall, designed to fill a corresponding space, is intended to depict the formulation of Christian doctrines in dogmas and symbols. The chief portion of that section, with which we have at present to do, fills the space of the end wall. Joined thereto will be the part of this section yet to come, designed to occupy the frieze at the sides, together with the ceiling of the bay, with representations of the Madonna. Between these two sections the three panels of the long wall over the stairs from the floor below, together with the three corresponding lunettes, will represent the free spirit of Christianity with appropriate subjects,

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probably to be taken from the Sermon on the Mount. While the two sections at the ends are purely formal in character,—replete with symbology, and conventionally developed in fine consonance with their meanings,-in its design the third part will be as free as its spirit, purely an expression of the painter's art.

The decorations now in place give some idea of the intended aspect of the hall with the artist's designs wholly carried out. The architecture is that of the interior of one of the long barrel-arched churches included in many conventual structures of the Renaissance in southern Europe. With the decorations all in place, the resemblance to such a church will be complete, so far as the walls and ceiling are concerned, the end occupied by the "Redemption" corresponding to that devoted to the high altar. It will make one of the most impressive interiors in America, the feeling of decorative unity imparted by the work of one master mind giving harmonious expression to the spirit of the great faith that underlies modern civilization.

As a composition the "Redemption" balances completely the scheme of the opposite wall. While treated in a like spirit, the impression it makes is radically different, although held in continuity with the first part both subjectively and artistically. Like another chapter in a book, another movement in a symphony, it introduces new themes and arouses different emotions. In his first part the artist developed his subject conventionally, but freely in his own way, unhampered by

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The character of the design is Byzantine, the forms in which Christian art first found wide expression being particularly appropriate to a work the purpose of which is to symbolize the doctrinal development of that faith. The Byzantine style, however, is here not adhered to with academic insistence; certain features indicate that Gothic and Renaissance sources have also been availed of. But the effect is predominatingly Byzantine, and the beholder might well imagine himself transported into the presence of some famous master

spirit of the past, while subtly informed with the individuality of the artist-an interpretation conveyed by a master working with modern resources and addressing himself to his own day, very much as some master composer of the present age might transcribe an ancient choral and develop its sentiment, to be expressed by an orchestra of to-day.

The work carries its meaning plainly upon its face; the symbology of the Christian doctrines is so familiar in terms of art that there is little left for the beholder to elucidate out of depths of mystical ob