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Once more she sits in her imperial chair,

And kings and Cæsars kneel before her feet,

And clouds of incense fill the heavy air,

And shouts of homage echo thro’ the street.

Or yet, again, she stretches forth the hand,

And men are done to death at her desire;

The smoke of burning cities dims the land,

And limbs are torn or shrivelled in the fire.

Once more the scene is shifted, and the gleam

Of eastern suns about her brow is curled;

Once more she roams a maiden by the stream,

Despised of men, the Magdalen of the world.

So scene on scene floats lightly, as a haze

That comes and goes with sudden gust and lull:

Limned with the sunset hues of other days,

They are but dreams; yet dreams are beautiful.

Archibald Henry Sayce (Academy, Dec. 5, 1885).

As in the two preceding quotations, the subject is the supposed conflict of religion and science. Haeckel (born 1834, recently dead) was the most ruthless of all the biologists in accounting for evolution and all progress by a struggle for existence. Renan (1823-1892), the French writer, whose love of Christianity survived his belief in it, speaks of the passing away of the old faith as “the golden glory of the dying day,” and says that in its death it will be more beautiful than in its life, when it led to passion, persecution and war. The penultimate verse refers to the time when temporal power was removed from the church, and she reverted to the humility, and also the beauty, of primitive Christianity when it came in its morning glory from the East.