The Pilgrim travels onward through Mechlin, Liège, Aix, and Cologne. She witnesses festivals in honour of various patron saints, and calls to mind that when England celebrated such, she was less assiduous than now in the service of Plutus, and that the working man had not only more time for relaxation, but also more "leisure to be wise." She meets, however, scandals as well as edification. Myrtles and oranges in a church, and the terrible announcement of " indulgence plenary" startle her a little; but she has the grace to think that her ignorance, as well as her coldness, are as likely to be at fault as the judgment of the Church. At Aix-la-Chapelle a fair is going on, and the booths are allowed to lean irreverently for support against the cathedral of Charlemagne. A precious relic is held up; yet it excites the reverence only of those who stand near. The Pilgrim, however, has not yet learned to be "plus catholique que le Pape," and is not touchy on the subject. At Cologne she sees the giant minster, after ages of sleep, lifting on high its cliff-like walls and forest of pinnacles, according to the original plan lately discovered; and she thinks of the permanence and perpetual advance of that one Institute which sleeps but to wake, like a giant refreshed from sleep.

The Pilgrim pursues her way toward the Alps, taking the Rhine for her guide; and the cliffs, old towers, and minsterspires which lean above that "father of streams" are vividly and faithfully mirrored in her song. She turns from the old feudal keeps to read a page more plain than any antiquarian lore :

"Half hid in foliage, the huge Crucifix,

The emblems of the Passion, and the wounds
Familiar to the peasant."

She passes the Drachenfels, and is not sufficiently enlightened to approve of the metamorphosis of the "desecrated Nonnenvert.' The impregnable Ehrenbretzstein has less attractions for her than the old cathedral of Mayence, the statues of the prince-bishops ranged along the nave, and especially that

"Of Boniface, who erst from England went,
Moved by the mighty love of souls, to gain
The natives of these woods; 'Alas!' she cried,
'If such his love for strangers, what if now
He doth behold his country!'

She passes the old minsters of Spires and Worms, the mountain boundaries of the azure Vosges, and the forest heights of Odenwald, and visits Heidelberg with its lordly ruins; but she does not derive much comfort from Protestantism on

its native soil, where, unadorned by the spoil of old Catholic usages, it has been allowed to run its course, and now

"Sits within the naked walls, beneath

A meagre pulpit in an empty nave:

Most chilling comfort to a heart bereaved!"

The touch of reality chilled the Pilgrim, because she was not used to it. When the ascetics of the sixteenth century went to feast with kings, but commanded their church to fast from chant and ritual, the most conservative and the most respectable of the separated bodies accommodated herself to the exigencies of a time in which, though the nobles liked Church plunder, the people for the most part loved the ancient faith. It carried off, therefore, many Catholic usages under a fence of apologetic rubrics and a strong guard of protesting articles. By a transubstantiation sad and strange, the external appearances were allowed to maintain themselves with little change, while the substance of Church and ritual alike was metamorphosed from the ecclesiastical to the national, from the transmitted to the discovered, from the divine to the human; thus putting on mortality and clothing itself with corruption. The throne, not the see of Peter, became the visible centre of the Church; and the congregational principle, not the unbloody sacrifice, became the centre of united worship. Equivocal phrases, however, remained, as though equivocation were comprehension;" and the Pilgrim was one of those whose devout imagination had supplied a quasi centre for the pageantry of a worship, formal indeed in the absence of that centre. German Protestantism, on the other hand, had never pursued her whose prophetic mission she disallowed with the cry, "I will run after her and take somewhat of her." She was sincerely and unmixedly Protestant. No sacred bond continued to unite her to the past. In her the revolt had been in the main an enthusiasm of destruction, a Mænad frenzy raging along the hills of the Church, a false ideal hardening into fanaticism. It had ascended from the populace to the rulers, not descended from the latter to the former. Like the first French revolution, the loudest of its many echoes which still shake Europe, the storm did its work completely; and in that work lies bare the history of Protestantism, which may be said to have had its day; the revolt of the nineteenth century being in Germany against the Bible, as that of the sixteenth was against the Church. It is not unnatural that in Germany, where the Pilgrim discovered the true character of Protestantism, she should also have learned by contrast to appreciate the Catholic worship. In no radiant cathedral of Italy, "a moun

tain of gold turned into a mountain of marble," but in a German village chapel "smothered in the woods," she attends a low Mass without music, thurible, or incense-cloud, and its spirit enters into her heart.

"She whisper'd as the priest put on the alb,
'It was the garb of heavenly innocence,
Girt by the rugged cord of Purity;

The stole the yoke of Christ upon his neck.
See on his shoulders how he bears the Cross;
He offers in the person of his Lord
The sacrifice adorable,-the Mass.
Now bending at the altar's foot, he owns
Before his God and all the saints in heaven,
And before man, his own surpassing guilt.'

*

The silver bell resounded yet again:

It was not loud, and yet it thrill'd the heart,
And her brow touch'd the pavement as she bent
While there was silence. Breathless was the pause,

For on the altar now the Victim lies;

And, raised as on the Cross by human hands,

The Sacrifice of Calvary is made.

What are the words that break the silence? His:

The Pater Noster taught by lips divine:

And then a pause, the Lord is present still;
And with a cry as of the perishing,

The Agnus Dei sounds."

The Pilgrim journeys on.

She sees

"Friburg's Domkirk, like a jewell'd cross,
Enchased in the Black Forest."

She passes the gorge of Hellenthal, and Bondorf's "blighted solitude," and finds herself beside the blue waters and laughing shores of Zurich. The city of Zwinglius is not able to detain her; and ere long she is in the mountain home of Catholicism-Lucerne. There she sails beside the shores which patriotism and heroism have consecrated from age to age, themselves consecrated by religion. On one side of that lake, which extends itself in the shape of a cross, like the crystal pavement of the Alpine temple, she treads the plain on which the Deliverers of the twelfth century repulsed the Austrian invader; on the other, that on which, seven hundred years later, the army of the French Revolution was for three successive days kept at bay by a small band of peasants, a large proportion of whom, including a hundred and twenty women, were found dead before the walls for which they had fought. The citadel of the faith is as faithfully defended there still. The Pilgrim visits the chapel of Tell, whose memory is so faithfully preserved from age to age without the aid of written records- one of the most singular instances of faithful

tradition. She visits Grutli and its three fountains, beside which the peasant-lords so lately refused to allow a monument to be erected by a munificent amateur; replying, that for centuries the Three Deliverers had found their monument in the heart of the Swiss people, and that they required no meaner shrine. She saw the

"Insuperable height

Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,”* and thought of her who daily "renews her strength like an eagle;" tracked the torrents, beneficent, though an accident of the elements may cause them to spread ruin over a dale; and the valleys above valleys, where every season at once reposes, though neglect may cause malaria to haunt the meadowborder of the fertilising stream. It was not a spot on which to be reconverted to the proprieties of the "golden mean.' An Anglican friend, however, undertakes the task, assuring her that though the Roman Catholic Church abroad is not exactly in schism, it includes, notwithstanding, many things which are far from primitive, and that in the early times the popes were not princes. The Pilgrim seems to have remembered that in the early times the laity also lived, not in the pride of place, but in persecution; and that in those days it would have been thought more strange that one of the successors of the Apostles should be a nobleman with fifteen thousand a year, the creature of a minister, than that he should be a prince or an exile. She evidently believed that the outward manifestations of the Church must change as the world changes; nay that, even as to the faith, articles are not likely to be carefully defined till they have been disputed, or privileges insisted on till the need for them has arisen. Permanence, the Pilgrim insists on it, is quite consistent with progression:

"The infant has the attributes of Heaven,—
Faith in his eyes, and truth upon his tongue;
His father's voice, his mother's hand to him
Is all in all he leaves his happy home;
The heavenly sweetness passes from his brow;
He meets the world, and, as a statesman wise,
He guards the precious treasure of his faith,
Or, as a soldier, soil'd with blood and dust,
He fights for duty; is he not the same?

True, thou hast loved the Church's youthful mien,
When she came forth from Egypt as a bride,

All radiant in espousals. Thou hast seen

Her portrait traced by saints who saw her face;
Thou seekst in vain the living counterpart.

No longer outcast in a heathen world,
She bears the queenly jewels of her state,
Mix'd with the bloody palms of martyrdom."
* Wordsworth.

Her friend replies by asking her whether she has "read all the old authors.' Her answer is more to the purpose:

"Where are the poor of Christ,

If only learned men can find the Church?"

We wish that we had room for the Pilgrim's beautiful description of the lake of the four Cantons, and the Benedictine monastery of Engelberg, the hill of angels. These, however, we must pass by, as well as her pilgrimage to Einsidlen, and advance with her into a warmer clime. She treads the marvellous Via Mala, and passes by Chiavenna. The following passage will give a pleasure equally cordial to those in whom it calls up Alpine recollections, and those whom it introduces for the first time to the scene it describes :

"The path

Winds with its waters down the awful vale,

Bestrewn with shatter'd rocks; yet chestnuts spring
E'en from the clefts of their chaotic fall,

And on each jutting crag or mountain ledge

Hangs, as in air, the whiten'd Campanile.

The sun shone brightly when the Pilgrim pass'd
The deep defile of San Giacomo,

Kindling the mountain-tops; and where the snow
Sprinkled their hoary ledges, there were hues,
Half rosy, half of gold; the curving shades
Wrapp'd the grey vale; amid the mighty rocks
The chestnut trunks look'd pallid in the gloom,

Yet autumn tinged their reddening boughs with gold;
And the stream whiten'd into many a fall,

Sparkling amid the verdure."

The Italian sunshine dispels, as she descends into the holy land of the new law, our Pilgrim's remaining chillness, and ripens all her braver and nobler impulses. At Milan she passes from the shrines of St. Augustin and St. Ambrose only to kneel before that of the great modern saint, Carlo Borromeo. She ascends to the aërial roofs of the mighty Duomo; and gazing from its marble pavement through an army of saints that seem to have dropped from heaven upon pinnacle and spire, the snowy ranges of the Alps stand 'between her and the far north. What wonder if the provincial popes of her native land lose something of those colossal proportions which propinquity and old associations bestow, and if she feels daily more that those who love and fear God are delivered from the fear of man? She passes Reggio, Modena, and Bologna; and Florence challenges her heart not less strongly by its arts than Lucerne had done by its mountain sanctuaries. Her heart has that warmth in the absence of which the imagination may be moved, but the soul receives with difficulty impressions deep enough to be permanent.