idea of the alba, or morning song, of the Troubadours than is contained in the passage beginning with the lines: Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day; It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear. In this scene the reluctance of the lovers to believe the evidences of their senses which tell them that the day has come, the clinging of Juliet, and the willingness of Romeo to stay in spite of danger are all entirely in the spirit of the Troubadours. Of course this is not the place to discuss at length this interesting question as to the traces of conventional ideas in English poetry, and I have only time to touch upon it here and there. The conceits of Herrick, Lovelace, Waller, and others are often like what we find in Provençal. And as Cervantes satirizes the romances of chivalry in Don Quixote, so we find in the well-known poem of Sir John Suckling a parody of the supposed effects of love, alluded to almost universally by the Troubadours: Why so pale and wan, fond lover? Pr'y thee, why so pale? Will, when looking well can't win her, Pr'y thee, why so pale? When the Troubadour Peyral sings, Nor king nor emperor would I be, If I no more must think of thee, and Gaucelm Faidit, The realm of France I would decline, we have the same thought contained in the lines of Pope's "Abelard and Heloisa," Though at my feet the world's great master fall The strange paradoxes of love, its mingling of joy and sorrow, so frequently referred to by the Troubadours, reap pear in modern literature in many forms. Thus Samuel Daniel sings: Love is a sickness full of woes All remedies refusing, A plant that most with cutting grows, Why so? The more we enjoy it, more it dies; Heighho! While the same ideas have never been expressed so tenderly as in the pathetic song of Clärchen in Goethe's "Egmont :" Joyful and sorrowful, And care-ful to be, To heaven above; Happy alone Is the soul that can love. The very common custom of the Troubadours to contrast the joy and beauty of nature, the blooming of flowers, the singing of birds, with the sadness caused by unhappy love finds frequent repetition in the poetry of the nineteenth century, as for instance, in that song of Burns, known and loved by every English-speaking person, Ye banks and braes o' bonny Doon, How can ye bloom so fresh and fair, When I so weary, fu' o' care? Nay, even in a great many hymns which we sing to-day, we find the same conventional treatment of these themes; as, for instance, the well-known hymn of John Newton, How tedious and tasteless the hours When Jesus no longer I see! Sweet prospects, sweet birds, and sweet flowers, Have all lost their sweetness to me; The midsummer sun shines but dim, The fields strive in vain to look gay; But when I am happy in him, December's as pleasant as May. Of course, I do not mean that in all these examples Shakespeare or Pope, or still less Burns, imitated consciously or unconsciously the Troubadours; what I do mean to say is simply that the ideas of these old court poets, in regard to love, passed into the very lifeblood of mediæval lyric poetry, and so came down to the present time, changed in many ways, yet revealing their origin to the eyes of the student of comparative literature. What is true of lyrical poetry is true of all literature of the past; the classic drama and epic of Greece and Rome, the Chanson de Gestes, and courtly romances and fables of medieval Europe. The great body of literature to-day is no simple phenomenon, but the result of innumerable influences exerted throughout the ages that are gone. Nation has acted upon nation, age upon age, man upon man, and even book upon book. If, then, we would obtain a clear conception of any one poet, we must know something about the literature of other times and other lands. Nor is it of small value for the lover of literature to-day to turn, from time to time, aside from the present and follow back the great stream of literature to its sources, the clear fountains of Greece, the smooth-running waters of Rome, and all the tributary streams that flow down from the icy North, from the wooded heights of the German uplands, or over the sunny plains of Provence. And perhaps, becoming thus acquainted with the literature of a simpler and less complex age than ours, the student will recognize more clearly how turbid is the stream of literature in this our own age of realistic description of vice and commonplaceness. For This tract, which the river of time Now flows through with us, is the plain. Bordered by cities, and hoarse With a thousand cries, is its stream. And we, on its breast, our minds Are confused as the cries which we hear, Changing and short as the sights which we see. And yet, perchance, such flights into the literature of the past may not merely render us discontented with the present, but may give us a hope in regard to the literature of the future. As we see the many vicissitudes through which literature has passed, how a period of especial glory has been followed by a period of barrenness and sterility, and vice versa, we may hope that the present morbid and conflicting and often degrading tendencies of literature may, in the century on the threshold of which we now stand, be transformed to higher and nobler forms. Haply the river of time, As it grows, as the towns on its marge On a wider, statelier stream, Of its earlier, mountainous shore, And the width of the waters, the hush Of the gray expanse where he floats, Freshening its current and spotted with foam, As it draws to the ocean, may strike Peace to the soul of the man on its breast; As the pale waste widens around him, As the banks fade dimmer away, As the stars come out, and the night wind Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea. L. Oscar Kuhns. ART. III.-THE BAPTISMAL FORMULA OF THE APOSTOLIC AGE. As an historical fact, capable of clearest proof, the Christian Church has believed from the beginning that, in the use of the Trinitarian formula in the administration of baptism, she was obeying to the letter the definite, authentic command of her divine Founder. The sifting, critical spirit of our time, however, with whose honest efforts to ascertain real truth the Church that has any respect for universally accepted scientific principles must ever be in helpful sympathy, seriously questions the grounds for this ancient belief, and not only endeavors to show that there is no scriptural authority, the genuineness of which may be implicitly relied upon, to support such belief, but also attempts to turn against the use of the formula in the early Church the New Testament itself, and the seeming dead silence of the apostolic fathers. Thus, "after the third century," writes Professor Allen,* "the formula of baptism was in the name of the Trinity, and baptism otherwise performed was declared invalid; but in the early Church, as also in the apostolic age, there is evidence that the baptismal formula of the name of Jesus only was not unusual." This is a conservative statement, but Professor McGiffert† goes beyond this and says of this Trinitarian formula: "It is difficult to suppose that it was employed in the early days with which we are concerned; for it involves a conception of the nature of the rite which was entirely foreign to the thought of these primitive Christians, and, indeed, no less foreign to the thought of Paul. When and how the formula arose we do not know." In a note he adds that it is difficult to suppose that Jesus uttered the words, "Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," which are quoted in Matt. xxviii, 19; and to relieve the difficulty he suggests it as probable that the words *Christian Institutions, p. 403. †The Apostolic Age, p. 61. |