o'clock in the morning, and did not let him go until six o'clock in the evening; holding him there, "not with his glit tering eye,' the visitor writes me, "but by his bold and brilliant tongue." On another occasion Brownson read aloud to this same caller Emerson's noble and affecting Threnody on the death of his little son Waldo; and as he read, "his face became wet with tears, which he took no pains to conceal. The incident was a revelation to me. I had heard Dr. Brownson described as a rude, rough man, apparently without feeling. The more I saw of him, the more I saw that behind that somewhat rude manner was beating a warm, kind, tender heart." This, too, is a fitting and corrective pendant to that savage characterization of Emerson as a writer of "hymns to the devil," which I have quoted. 66 an My correspondent declares that Brownson was as intense an American as Washington, Jackson, or Lincoln," assertion the truth of which no one will dispute who has studied his writings and his career. Of his attempts at fiction, which were purely didactic, Charles Elwood and The Spirit - Rapper, it is not necessary to speak here; my object being to present only some points of suggestion respecting his force as a philosopher and teacher, a comprehensive student of religious history and government, a potent essayist on many subjects; a man of conscience, whose convictions as Lowell wrote of Dante 66 so intimate that they were not only intellectual conclusions, but parts of his moral nature;" and withal as ardent an American patriot as he was a Catholic. were Some of his most able contemporaries in the Catholic world of letters and intellect, among them the brilliant Dr. Ward of the Dublin Review (whom Tennyson greeted as "most generous of ultramontanes, Ward"), although giving to his unusual powers a hearty recognition, abated somewhat from their praise because of his strong advocacy of onto logical views, as opposed to the scholastic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Leo XIII. has reinstated Aquinas, or at least renewed his influence. But whatever criticisms of Brownson have been made upon this score, it may be doubted whether any writer of English in this century has given the world so encyclopædic a presentation of Catholic doctrine and thought as he, or one so intelligible to all classes of minds and likely to benefit them all. To whatever cause it be owing, Brownson is omitted from our manuals and histories of literature, or figures but slightly in them. Professor Richardson even affirms that the Catholic Church in the United States has "depended on foreign authorities in this line,” — meaning the literature of religion and morals; ignoring the fact that it has found here one of the most virile and accomplished exponents it possesses in any part of the world. In Stedman and Hutchinson's Library of American Literature only one extract from Brownson is given; and that one, relating to practical democracy, hints at but a single and least significant phase of the author's activity. Yet he was highly regarded and very prominent among his literary contemporaries, until the main current of his production flowed into Catholic channels. It seems to me that he merits a clearer and more grateful recognition, to-day, than he commonly receives. The large, Websterian cast of his mind, the cleancut massiveness of his thinking and his style, make him an interesting object of study. The very fact that in himself he formed so close a link between the Transcendental or other phases of American thought and those embodied in the Catholic Church adds to his significance; and he may well be commended to all serious, fair-minded readers of the present and the rising generation as illustrating with strength and brilliancy the Catholic mind in the United States, and its relation to our national life. George Parsons Lathrop. THE OUBLIETTE. FERTÉ-MILON was a surprise in more ways than one. The gentle planner of railway itinerary from Montmirail to Mezy, from Mezy to Château-Thierry, and from Château-Thierry by way of Ferté-Milon and Soissons to Compiègne, had not foreseen, in consulting the guide, that there would be a delay of four hours in Ferté-Milon. I was in haste, and heard this decree of railway fate with impatience. The Maid of Orleans and the army gathered to Charles VII. on his coronation at Rheims had passed through Ferté-Milon, but no trace of her presence was left. Baedeker mentions the place as "a small town on the slopes of a hill rising from the banks of the Ourcq, which was the birthplace of Racine, the dramatist, to whom a statue by David d'Angers has been erected here. The hill is crowned by the ruins of a castle of the twelfth century, including one entire side with four large towers. Some remains of the town walls, dating from the thirteenth century, are also preserved." After the first quick annoyance at being held back from Compiègne, I left the busy little gare for Ferté's upsloping street; and it was full of enticement, the castle showing white as lime rock on a summit to which approaches seemed hard to find. Racine stood on his pedestal, crowding the narrow sidewalk, his works listed on a tablet for inattentive passers. The clean Hôtel de la Sauvage showed within its court preparations for a goodly dinner, the cook being visible cleaning delicious white beans of the north, and grapes and pears were stacked for the dessert. I could see the ruins and dine, having no margin of heavy time. The town was swarming with soldiers, ordinary good-humored fellows undergoing their period of military service; with here and there an officer showing himself on a spirited horse. They seemed to be merely passing. Relaxed from drill they loitered about, eating sweets or carving arm-long loaves with their pocket-knives. So involved and steep was the way to the castle that I was misled on a street below, above which one enormous white wall stood as in the clouds; but inquiry led to a winding lane like so many Old World ascents to feudal fortresses. On the way was a church, locked. A wo man with a child in her arms ran to fetch the key. And when we had rested in a light interior, containing little except the brightness of hilltops to impress on one, she volunteered to guide me to the ruin, declaring there were pits about it which were dangerous. Half a dozen other thin women and dirty children looked down from a high terrace by which the road was walled at this place; and as a guide in the hand is a protection against many guides in the bush, she was retained, and led me up the stony way. A wide expanse of summit gave site to the castle. It was a breezy place like a field, with few trees, though some old and huge ones clustered near the hollow side of the ruin. As we approached, we saw some bold soldiers walking on the top of the lofty wall betwixt towers; and they looked more than ever like little boys. Another cautious fellow was slowly trying to scale steps left by falling masonry, up to their dizzy height, and all of them were taken up with their own exploits. The woman's pale little child sat on her arm, and, perhaps made indifferent by custom, leaned over the six or eight horrible-looking holes which she showed me within the castle court. Some were so deep we could not see the bottom, and a drainlike odor came up. One showed wet clay, and into others the earth had caved. Ladders were set in two which had ancient stone curbing, as had all the mouths of underground storehouses in the Middle Ages. "There is correspondence between them, madame," remarked my guide; and I thought of the subterranean cellars in Chinon. A bold person like one of those soldiers could descend, indifferent to the stale odor of a long-gone life, and feel his way from one rock chamber to another. Old rotting boards covered some of the pits. We moved silently, the distant insect-like voices of the climbers making the only noise about this spot. We heard the wind, indeed, rasping mournfully across jagged battlements. When we departed through the gateless entrance of the courtyard, the guide, fee in hand and child at shoulder, went her way, and I sauntered on a road leading by the castle's best preserved side and winding with many turns down to the rear of Ferté-Milon. The imposing façade had tablets set in its side, an immense one showing over the entrance. So high were they reared in the dazzling afternoon that the limbs of creatures carven in relief were not easily distinguished, though it appeared to be a show of some royal progress. The soldiers had either found footing on a lower wall or were hidden by towers. It was not easy to leave such an evident nest of tradition, about which I really knew nothing. Had Racine celebrated this ancient landmark of his birth? Ferté-Milon itself, narrow and crowded and sloping uphill, a small stony town of the Middle Ages, had a modern tang, caught from its railway trains, its passing soldiers. But this nameless castle, shining white and vast directly under the sky, belonged, with all its secrets, to a century before Froissart chronicled the battles of England, France, and Spain. suburban trees and cottages to spread below, I looked at my watch and saw it was not yet four o'clock. What was to prevent my going back and descending one of those ladders to discover what lay at the foot? The ladders were a guaranty of safety. And as for that rank odor from the covered pits, the unclean dwellers on the terrace had doubtless thrown refuse down them; and I had no desire to look into them, anyhow. The "correspondence" need not be followed through all its burrowings. There was really preparation for such a venture in my light marching equipment: jacket and skirt of dark rough wool serge, with the shirt waist, close traveling-hat, strong low-cut shoes, and dogskin gloves, which are so easily renewed from one's baggage. Yet I was loath to be seen stealing back, and to have my movements watched with the furtive interest all provincial dwellers show in the astounding American woman. Therefore it was with care and swiftness that I reëntered the court, crossed the parapet of the nearest pit, and got down the ladder without being seen even by a soldier. Having ventured so far, a recoil sent me up two or three rounds. So hanging, I looked down to accustom unwonted eyes to the decaying pit. The bottom was moist clay, perhaps mixed by rain. It had been walled by rock or picked in the rock base of the castle, and the ancient surface was seamed and weatherworn. This pit would not crumble before the washing of storms, like those boardcovered gaps where the soil was deeper. There was an earthy odor mingled with the indescribable smell of age. But the hardihood that ventured into it might readily go farther. I stood on the bottom of the shaft, which was quite seven feet in diameter, and eyed a dark tunnel to which it gave entrance. Very likely the townspeople had run about here many a Sunday. They love to tramp through their old As a rising bank began to hide it, and feudal strongholds. I saw two girls, once, dancing in Chinon beside the stone coping of just such a pit as this. Courage, when it is not sudden and executive in woman, must pioneer a little before it can coax her on. The floor of the gallery descended, but having correspondence with other pits and possible chambers, it could only descend to their level. Like a cautious skater on brittle ice, I moved step by step down this grade, with hand outstretched ready to brace my progress by the wall. Stones underfoot were heaved up unevenly; and it seemed incredible that a spot so high as this castle rock could ooze such dankness. From the comparative day of the pit behind me I went into night; and of all experimental blindnesses that underground is most appalling. Gray dawn and then the open skylight of another pit encouraged me. Judging by the direction I had come, this was the pit at the castle base. Here several paths branched off, but no large storehouse or other chamber seemed promised by any of them. They were smaller tunnels than the one I followed. I had no intention of exploring all these underground byroads. It was in the second pit that I thought I heard voices, and, so strange were the acoustics of that hole, they sounded underneath me, muffled, struggling against some deadening medium. A small breastwork had been formed here by the partial sinking in of one side. It was a warning to turn back, for I had to climb over it to pursue my way. But I did want to see at least one subterranean room. Perhaps I should find a hook in a ceiling, or rocky substitute for a ceiling, - such a hook as may be seen under Chinon, where Louis XI. once hoisted the Duke d'Alençon in a cage. I Now, at that thought all the horrors of Loches began to crowd into mind. remembered the fierce barking of a cross dog within the donjon gate when I pulled the bell; the soldier who lets travelers into that awful inferno; the cages of oak bars studded with iron nails which once penned prisoners into narrow window embrasures, with a door just large enough to let their food in. I remembered the leg-chains, too heavy for any one to lift, still hanging from the walls, and the carvings those wretches had made above their stone benches, recorded prayers, cries of stone despair, names, and dates, slowly graven with ever renewed anguish. Worse than these open oaken pens where light cheered the eye, I remembered the tyrant's cachettes underground, down worn flight after worn flight of stairs, until the torch of the guide buried itself in endless night; but it lifted itself in a clean, spacious room of rock, and showed walls covered with pictures made by poor Ludovic Sforza; and farther down still, the deep cell of Cardinal Balue. I closed my eyes, and saw again the place where his altar had stood against the wall, and opposite it that hole into an air-shaft down which, once a day, at high noon, came a hint of light. I saw the hollows his hands and feet had worn in this wall, clambering to catch that one glimpse of day. And behind his cell was another containing an oubliette. Oh that oubliette! I had looked down its shaft, just large enough to let a human body pass lengthwise. How strange it now seems that nearly every royal castle and many which were not royal - had its little forgettery, its oubliette, into which monarch or feudal lord could drop any one who became irksome or dangerous to him, with certainty that the body would be safely washed from the bottom of the masonry pit by a sluice which carried it to the nearest river! I have seen very spacious oubliettes, and some were believed to have had innocent-looking floors, which fell beneath the feet of victims lured or pushed upon them. The eleventh Louis, having his prisons at heart as much as he had his prayers, was very nice indeed in such constructions, and intruded them no more in size than was necessary There is a deeper depth under the dungeon of Cardinal Balue, where one's feet seem to slide down the concave stone floor to a pit sunk in the centre, directly beneath the oubliette above. But of course none of these horrors belonged to Ferté-Milon. The network of underground tracery here included no oubliette, for that would be fiendishly hidden within the walls or surrounded by a tower. The worn path was rounded like a gutter to the foot. However, it was a short passage, though a winding one, from the second pit to a spacious enlargement. Here was nothing to suggest a greater weight of upper world overhead, yet I now felt sure of having arrived within the circumference of the castle. Air blew in from some place, carrying an ancient breath of decay, a dankness different from that of the pits. I could see that the room was low and wide, and at first I could see nothing else except a slight thinning of the darkness in one corner, and a black hollow directly under it in the pavement. When that change by which the eyes are adjusted was complete, I could discern a windrow of rotted timbers, and sinking in their slow fall oak joists and uprights, with interlacing cross-beams, like a broken partition which had once been built around the gray spot in the corner. In my next breath I knew an oubliette was indicated by that corner. The grayness was daylight coming down a long shaft, perhaps inclosed in a tower. The hollow in the pavement had been sunk hundreds of years ago, and completed by some canal of masonry which let into the Ourcq. There is a sturdy human stubbornness which will not be turned back or scared on provocation. place might be full of noisome things, The the Ferté-Milonese might be permitting it to continue so, as foreigners permit so many things which an American would change, but I wanted to look into it, and compare it with my other oubliettes. I even had a dread it might not prove what I wished. An uncanny slope of the floor toward that spot, like a one-sided funnel, betrayed footing on the slippery stones. I kept to the contour of the left-hand wall, thereby bracing myself as I shuffled cautiously down, and making use also of the largest break in the partition. Again voices were heard, but they came down the shaft. The soldiers were evidently at the top, talking through the hollow. They had found its open mouth above, and their words scattered, as shot might do, from side to side in a spray of echoes, yet with a muffled sound. Cautiously I bent forward and looked up, but my fellow-explorers and I were not able to see one another. So unconscious were they of a mortal at the base of the tube that they heaved a stone down its length. It whirred past my head like a bat, silent into the depths, and from far below a metallic answer rung so faintly it could not have been heard by the senders. Broken timbers lay across my side of the hole in the pavement, that vile bottom of the oubliette left open here in past centuries that monsters might look down and see if the descending body had sped well. How many metres was it to the sluice which once carried to the Ourcq? Perhaps the sluice had long been choked with what? A skeleton cramped with its skull in its ribs, rags of velvet or Flemish cloth, shoes moored by their own pointed toes, a sword stuck crossways in the masonry? Could anything now ride through that horrid canal? The fierce-beating American sun and the American mind would search out these mysteries on American soil. I felt glad to have them where they were. When you contemplate an oubliette, and remember how you and yours have escaped it, and how really out of date it is in this year of the world, you may be said to enjoy the full merit of the thing. Nobody, at the period when that oubli ette was in operation, could have realized |