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Show burcft Universal I CHURCH CALENDAR. SS6V,S;.-SeVent!Pnth after Pentecost.-sinneS. Pentecost.-sinneS. " XXU' 34-6-3.7.214 for S. Cosmas and Damian. '-s 3-.000 for the intemperate. ) spVituS favors WenCeslas -948'001 W PcSl Mteha.T for tern- r-uH' Th- St- Jerome- 2.596.664 for spe- i ciai, various. 4 1 Am S Sad, O God! 1 am so sad, O God: Thou hast before me Spread a bright rainbow in the western west-ern skies, But hast quenched in darkness cold and stormy The brighter skies fliat rise; Clear grows the heaven 'neath Thy transforming- rod, Still I am sad, O God: Like empty ears of grain with heads erected. Have I delighted stood amid the crowd, My face the while to stranger eyes reflected, re-flected, The calm of summer's cloud: But Thou dost know the wavs that I have trod. And why I grieve, O God: , I am like to a weary infant fretting whene'er its mother leaves it for a while. And grieving watch the sun, whose light in setting. Throws back a parting smile: Though it will bathe anew the morning sod, j Still I am sad. O God: Today o'er the wide waste of ocean I sweeping Hundreds of miles away from shore r rock, 1 saw. the cranes fly on, together keeping keep-ing ; In one unbroken flock; Their feet with soil from Poland's hills were shod, t , And I was sad, O God: f Often by stranger's tomb I've lingered w-ary. t Since grown a stranger to my native j ways. I I walk a pilgrim throught a desert ! dreary. r i Lit but by lightning's blaze. Knowing not where shall fall the burial clod Upon my bier, O God: i v Sometime hereafter will my bones be whitened. Somewhere on stranger's soil, I know not where: I envy those whose dying hours are lightened. Fanned by their native air: Cut flowers of some strange land will spring and nod Above my grave, O God! "When but a guileless child at home they bade me To pray each day for home restored, I found My bark was steering how the thought dismayed me The whole wide world around! Those prayers unanswered, wearily I plod Through rugged ways, O God: Upon the rainbow, whose resplendent rafter Thy angels rear above us in the sky, Others will look a hundred years hereafter. here-after. And pass away as I: Exiled and hopeless 'neath Thy chastening chas-tening rod. And sad as I, O God: Saved From the Earthquake. One if the many beautiful works of art in the Cathedral of Messina was the magnificent "Madonna of the Rosary," by Antonello. When the cathedral fell in ruins several months ago as the result re-sult of the earthquake that decimated Sicily, the handsome painting was counted as lost. The clouds of smoke and dust had scarcely cleared away from trembling Messina when Prof. Salinas, curator of the art museum at Palermo, hurried to the spot to try to recover such fragments frag-ments of art as the earthquake might have spared. This famous Antonello was what he hoped for most earnestly. 4f It was difficult even to find what had been the museum, and was still more difficult to penetrate that vast heap of V stone and plaster which covered its site, i But Prof. Salinas and his assistants went to work with pickaxes and spades, i and at last, through a crevice between two fallen wall?, they caught sight of . the spot where the masterpiece had hung. A mass of fallen walls covered it. But they dug on until they had penetrated pene-trated the gallery itself, and there, to their immense joy, they found that a wall in falling toward the Antonello had struck: the wall above it and re-v- mained intact, thus forming a great pro- tective screen, behind which hung the f treasure undamaged. ' It required careful work to remove this screen of shaking masonry, but the task was accomplished, and the picture was taken down, packed and shipped to a safer place. "The Madonna, of the Rosary" is a triptych, and the panels on either side sre occupied by the figures of St. Gregory Gre-gory and St. Benedict, and above these are two smaller panels, half figures of the Annunciation and an angel. The central upper panel has been "missing for many years. This painting of Antonello's is interesting inter-esting from a technical as well as from an artistic standpoint, for Antonello disputes with Van Kyck the honor of discovering the art of painting in oils, and this is believed to have been the last picture he painted in tempers that is, with liquid colors directly upon plaster. The best belief of critics is that Antonello learned the art of oil painting from Van Eyck. Our Debt to the Monks. . Everv scholar knows that it was the 1 monks 'who saved ancient literature, but L - not often ns this work in preserving so f effectively portrayed as it is in an ar- tkle which Mr. Ernest Gushing Richardson, Rich-ardson, Ph. D., Librarian of Princeton i Universitv, contributed some time tgo f to Harper's Magazine. Mr. Richardson ' points to the church and monastic ili- braries of the middle ages as. by virtue of their number, quality, permanence Tind especially of their dominating influence influ-ence on library architecture and method, the true tvpes of the period and the actual ancestors of the libraries of today. to-day. He then transports the reader to the thirteenth century, and examines with him a great monastery having all the elements of the library practice of the time. He describes the library, the I eonving of manuscripts in the writing room and the practical interest in books displaved throughout the whole of the nrecincts. In summing up he observes: To the monk is due the most part of what we know of ancient literature. They kept and copied when no one else did. When Vandals and Vikings drove them from their monasteries they left ervthing else, but loaded themselves down with their books. In later -d ay. it was not the monks' neglect, but the t " ' vandalism of their persecutors which destroyed. At the English Reformation those iconoclasts cut out the illuminations, illumina-tions, tore off the bindings for their gold clasps and basses and used the books themselves as fuel." |