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He displayed a piety that would have seemed excessive in an anti-clerical minister, if the Republic had not recognised that religion was of great maritime utility. Acting on the instruction of his spiritual director, the Reverend Father Douillard, the worthy Admiral had dedicated his fleet to St. Orberosia and directed canticles in honour of the Alcan Virgin to be composed by Christian bards.
Listening, one thought how often the same service, these same chants and canticles, had awakened the sylvan echoes in like solitudes on the St. Lawrence and Mississippi in the old days of exploration and trade, and of missionary zeal and suffering. It recalled, too, the thought of man's evanescence and the apparent fixedness of his institutions.
Terror had destroyed her mind; and it was a mercy, so charmed did she appear with the beauty of the morning. I let her hasten, not understanding, shaking my head tenderly. When she considered herself ready to go, she sang one of her canticles in her clear crystalline voice. But, interrupting herself, she cried, as if responding to someone who had called her: "I am coming, I am coming!"
Nor was I sated in those days with the wondrous sweetness of considering the depth of Thy counsels concerning the salvation of mankind. How did I weep, in Thy Hymns and Canticles, touched to the quick by the voices of Thy sweet-attuned Church!
They belong to the essence of the Hebrew strophic system. There have, on the other side, been many, especially among older critics, who have contended that Theocritus owed his inspiration to Canticles. These have not been disturbed by the consideration, that, if he borrowed at all, he must assuredly have borrowed more than the most generous of them assert that he did.
A companion to the graceful evening service or setting of the appointed Canticles in F major, which be it observed, is the most popular, and from a purely suitable point of view, most successful of modern evening services, it marks a phase of expression, at once ethereal and predilectious.
The line occurs in the noble panegyric of love cited before, with which Canticles ends, and in which the whole drama culminates. There is no room in this eulogy for Graetz's rendering, "Her arrows are fiery arrows," nor can the Hebrew easily mean it. "The flashes thereof are flashes of fire," is the best translation possible of the Hebrew line.
Another hour went by, two more canticles had just been sung, and the stations of Toury and Les Aubrais had been left behind, when, at Beaugency, they at last ceased their chat, on hearing Sister Hyacinthe clap her hands and intonate in her fresh, sonorous voice: "/Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo/."
I see, indeed, from an interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly for September 1889, entitled "The Black Madonna of Loreto," that black Madonnas were so frequent in ancient Christian art that "some of the early writers of the Church felt obliged to account for it by explaining that the Virgin was of a very dark complexion, as might be proved by the verse of Canticles which says, 'I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem. Others maintained that she became black during her sojourn in Egypt. . . . Priests, of to-day, say that extreme age and exposure to the smoke of countless altar-candles have caused that change in complexion which the more naive fathers of the Church attributed to the power of an Egyptian sun"; but the writer ruthlessly disposes of this supposition by pointing out that in nearly all the instances of black Madonnas it is the flesh alone that is entirely black, the crimson of the lips, the white of the eyes, and the draperies having preserved their original colour.
So the poet chose the luxurious reign of Solomon as the background for his exquisite "melodrama." Both Ruth and Canticles are home-products, and ancient Greek literature has no real parallel to either.
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