by his struggle, he grew hopeless, and began to think of confessing his troubles to Father Beppi. One evening, after a day of great mental struggle, Brother Filippo came into the monastery yard with a herd of cattle. Worn out and weary, he was hurrying to give his herd their evening meal, that as soon as possible he might go to his cell for prayer. To get the needed hay he was forced to go up into the loft of the stable. The place was dark except for a little light which came in from a window facing east. As Brother Filippo pitched the hay carelessly to the lowing herd below, his eye caught the glint of a beam of light upon something which he had uncovered. With a weary movement he pushed aside the hay which rested upon it a large piece of marble, discolored and stained was revealed. The monk, filled with wonder, dragged it to the window. The faint light showed him the massive head of a statue. It was covered with earth and stained by the exudations of the soil, but its great beauty was plain to the practised eye of the monk. His heart gave a strange bound of joy and happiness. Here indeed was a prize! Where could it have come from? What head was it? All the artistic training of the past exerted its power. Brother Filippo forgot everything, cattle, his supper, the vesper service. Seizing a wisp of hay, he began with feverish haste to brush the dirt from the head. He was not very successful in his efforts, but enough so to show him the value of his prize. The thick wavy locks his fell evenly away from the broad forehead of the statue. The beard was thick and heavy. The features were fine and regular; the eyes large and wide-open. There was, too, an imperial touch in the position of the head upon the strong, sinewy neck. The charm of the bust, however, was the subtle blending in the face of different feelings. The expression was grand, majestic, and at the same time sweet, tender, good. Brother Filippo knew the moment he saw clearly the cleansed head that he was gazing on the face of Jupiter; that before him lay a fragment of what must have been a masterpiece of ancient art. Long the monk looked at the head, lost in a delightful revery. A strange content was in his soul; at the first sight of the beautiful face all his troubling doubts and fears had fled away. Dreaming still, he roamed about the loft, looking for traces of another piece of the statue, but he found none. Blissfully happy, unmindful of the growing darkness, he sat down again before the head. He did not seem to think; a joy far too great for words held him spellbound. Blacker and blacker grew the shadows in the loft, until the head became invisible, but still Brother Filippo sat unheeding the change around him. Suddenly the vesper bell began to toll. With a long sigh of content too deep for utterance, Brother Filippo came back to himself. Hastily he pushed the head into its corner, covering it with hay. Throwing some more fodder to his herd, he gave a last look towards the head, and then passed lightly down to the floor below. [To be concluded.] NEW ENGLAND. By Celia Parker Woolley. I. A DOUBLE heritage we owe to thee, The prize of beauty and the gift of thought. What spell of sweet enchantment must have wrought Thy beauteous framework of rock, wood, and sea, With stately rivers flowing peacefully Past old ancestral farms, where men once fought With blood an honored nation's liberty: Quickens the pulse-beat and the stirring pace II. Oh, be thou then forever grandly true And let not waiting wrong and weakness sue In lasting strength, thy streams and rippling rills Of a fair land that owns the signal word That warns and speaks the coming of the Lord. THE ANSWER. By Frances Albert Doughty. I. I LOOKED through rainbows in the dew at morn, With eager heart I said to those I loved, How could I leave you and this world so fair? II. Now 'tis high noon, Illusion lost in glare, And loved ones many lie beneath the sod; An awful fear creeps in, that I might stay III. Nay; for Humanity encircles thee, O longing soul! thou canst not be alone; If all should leave thee who were dear on earth, Reach out thine arms and find there still thine own. RECENT CHURCH ARCHITECTURE T is a pretty sight, coming out through West Street or Temple Place, just after a winter sunset, to look off to the west across the Common. The bare limbs of the trees form a network against the glowing evening sky, and behind this network rise in the distant background the towers and spires of the Back Bay churches. These towers and spires are all the more beautiful in the glimpse had of them from this point, or as one walks along the path on the Common toward the old elm enclosure, be cause they are pierced with openThe silhouette is not merely of the outer outline. The arches of the belfry space let through the same yellow light; and so sharp is the contrast between the dark stones and the luminous atmosphere behind, that every feature of the design which can enter into the profile is marked out with great distinctness. Farthest toward the Charles River rises the spire of the First Church. A little distance toward the south comes the mediæval, square-topped tower of the First Baptist, with its low-pitched, pyramidal roof; and then still to the southward the graceful pinnacled shaft of the Central Church, and the Italian campanile of the New Old South. A mile away, Trinity retreats a little behind the Arlington Street steeple, but detaches itself as one moves. Greatest of all, in some respects, it still does not contribute so much to this evening glimpse westward as the higher and more open towers and spires. All of these churches, and others which are almost or quite as recent, stand for a great advance artistically in many ways over the church-building of the last century in Boston. Even the Arlington Street Church, which is so wholly an echo of the past that I do not regard it as belonging to the present topic, represents the artistic style of this past, worked out with an elaborateness and with a careful minuteness of detail which signifies a great advance, not simply in the wealth, but in the artistic perception of the community which produced it. The transition between the two periods,-between the days when an artistic form came to be first considered as in with his designs for other purposes. It needs to be so studied because his "church" style was not anything which he developed apart from his secular style, but, in the majority of Boston instances, simply an application to church fronts of the same principles of design which he applied to all buildings. Other intermediate forms between the old and the new are wholly comprehensible in themselves, so far as they are comprehensible at all. They seem to fall into two groups, the forms which were preparing the way for the intelligent Gothic of these later days, it is at least permissible to call it intelligent in comparison with what came before, and the nondescript forms which were not at all Gothic as we now understand it, and to which we are not inclined at the present day, with our wider knowledge of the past, to assign the merit of having really belonged to any genuine historical style. It was Bulfinch himself who created the first or one of the first examples of Gothic in Boston, in building the spire of his Federal Street Church of 1809, diverging in so doing from his uniform. The Union Congregational Church. ginning of the century, possesses an interest of its own. But the Bulfinch manner of church-building, in order to be understood, needs to be studied in connection practice in designing. But it is difficult to see any traces of the influence of this particular model on some of the Gothic buildings, or buildings purporting to be Doorway, New Old South Church. Gothic, which followed. Such examples as now exist of one phase of the Gothic movement are ponderous fronts of unhammered stone, without spires. So much more closely do they resemble some of the London churches built under the influence of the Gothic revival there, before the English public had opened its eyes to its own incomparable medieval examples, as to suggest a direct influence from that quarter. There are three of these heavy fronts which the curiously inclined may go and look up any day one in Bowdoin Street, one in Temple Street and one in Bowdoin Square. Another, that of Old Trinity, is made familiar by photographs, and is also well remembered, so recently did it disappear. Trinity was built in 1829, and so was the old est of these four. The church on Bowdoin Street was originally Dr. Lyman Beecher's. A new Congregational society had gathered in 1825, making itself first at home in a church on Hanover Street, which was soon burned. Upon the question of a new house being taken up for discussion, a migration to Bowdoin Street was decided upon, and the Gothic church with its rough stone front, pointed windows, and battlements was finished and dedicated in 1830, during Dr. Beecher's pastorate. The society called itself after the change the "Bowdoin Street Congregational Church," and continued to exist until 1861, though Dr. Beecher left it in 1832 to go to Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. Since the extinction of the Congregational society the building has been occupied by the Church of the Advent, and latterly by the Mission Church of St. John the Evangelist. The church on Temple Street, built in 1835, is now occupied by the First Methodist Society, and the church referred to on Bowdoin Square is the Bowdoin A Corner of Trinity Cloisters. |