advance to a haughty throne; the brows you dislaurel of a just respect, he will bind with baleful splendours; the stone which you builders reject, he will make his head of the corner.  May she not prophesy in the temple? then there is ready for her the tripod of Delphi.  Eye her not askance if she seldom sing directly of religion:  the bird gives glory to God though it sings only of its innocent loves.  Suspicion creates its own cause; distrust begets reason for distrust.  This beautiful, wild, feline Poetry, wild because left to range the wilds, restore to the hearth of your charity, shelter under the rafter of your Faith; discipline her to the sweet restraints of your household, feed her with the meat from your table, soften her with the amity of your children; tame her, fondle her, cherish her—­you will no longer then need to flee her.  Suffer her to wanton, suffer her to play, so she play round the foot of the Cross!

There is a change of late years:  the Wanderer is being called to her Father’s house, but we would have the call yet louder, we would have the proffered welcome more unstinted.  There are still stray remnants of the old intolerant distrust.  It is still possible for even a French historian of the Church to enumerate among the articles cast upon Savonarola’s famous pile, poesies erotiques, tant des anciens que des modernes, livres impies ou corrupteurs, Ovide, Tibulle, Properce, pour ne nommer que les plus connus, Dante, Petrarque, Boccace, tous ces auteurs Italiens qui deja souillaient les ames et ruinaient les moeurs, en creant ou perfectionnant la langue. {2} Blameworthy carelessness at the least, which can class the Vita Nuova with the Ars Amandi and the Decameron!  And among many English Catholics the spirit of poetry is still often received with a restricted Puritanical greeting, rather than with the traditionally Catholic joyous openness.

We ask, therefore, for a larger interest, not in purely Catholic poetry, but in poetry generally, poetry in its widest sense.  With few exceptions, whatsoever in our best poets is great and good to the non-Catholic, is great and good also to the Catholic; and though Faber threw his edition of Shelley into the fire and never regretted the act; though, moreover, Shelley is so little read among us that we can still tolerate in our Churches the religious parody which Faber should have thrown after his three-volumed Shelley; {3}—­in spite of this, we are not disposed to number among such exceptions that straying spirit of light.

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