Oh for some spirit, some magnetic spark, That used nor word, nor rhyme, nor balanced pause Of doubtful phrase, which so supinely draws My barren verse, and blurs love's shining mark With misty fancies!--Oh! to burst the dark Of smothered feeling with some new-found laws, Hidden in nature, that might bridge the flaws Between two beings, end this endless cark, And make hearts know what lips have never said! Oh! for some spell, by which one soul might move With echoes from another, and dispread Contagious music through its chords, above The touch of mimic art: that thou might'st tread Beneath thy feet this wordy show of love! Here let the motions of the world be still!-- Here let Time's fleet and tireless pinions stay Their endless flight!--or to the present day Bind my Love's life and mine. I have my fill Of earthly bliss: to move is to meet ill. Though lavish fortune in my path might lay Fame, power, and wealth,--the toys that make the play Of earth's grown children,--I would rather till The stubborn furrows of an arid land, Toil with the brute, bear famine and disease, Drink bitter bondage to the very lees, Than break our union by love's tender band, Or drop its glittering shackles from my hand, To grasp at empty glories such as these. SAINT BONAVENTURA (1221-1274) BY THOMAS DAVIDSON Saint Bonaventura, whose original name was Giovanni di Fidenza, was born at Bagnaréa in Tuscany in 1221. At the age of four he was attacked by a severe illness, during which his mother appealed to St. Francis for his prayers, promising that if the child recovered, he should be devoted to God and become one of Francis's followers. When the child did recover, the saint, seeing him, exclaimed "O bona ventura!" a name which clung to the boy ever afterwards, and under which he entered religion and the order of St. Francis in 1243. Soon after, he went to the then world-renowned university of Paris, where he had for his teacher an Englishman, Alexander of Hales, the first of the schoolmen who studied the whole of Aristotle's works, and attempted to construct a Christian theology on the basis of them. Even at this time the young Italian's life was so saintly that his master (so it is reported) said of him that he seemed to have been born without the taint of original sin. He graduated in the same year as Thomas Aquinas, and immediately afterward began his career as a public teacher under the auspices of the Franciscan order, while Thomas did the same under those of the Dominican. These two men, the greatest of the schoolmen, and the sweetest and sanest of the mystics, were bosom friends; and one can hardly imagine a loftier friendship.