ST. ANDREW'S LITERARY INSTITUTE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2363, 8 June 1899, Page 21

ST. ANDREW'S LITERARY INSTITUTE.

There was a good attendance at St. Andrew's Church Hall on Monday night, when. Dr Rutherford Waddell delivered the third of a series of lectures on Christina Rossetti. Ho spoke of the poetess as a seer, and pointed out that at bottom singer, seer, poet, and prophet were the same. He also submitted that the age whioh produced no poet was & dull, mechanical, materialistic age; while the age that, did was a bright, progressive, enterprising age. Proceeding to refer to the value of the visions of poets, prophets, and seers, he said we owed to them whatever of highest truth, and whatever of trustiest guidance we had received. The seers of Israel understood a thousand times better than the politicians the law of life for the people. They underclood the great fundamental verities which, iio at the basis of life, and as a result they were the moral and spiritual governors nou only of their own age, but of many succeeding ones as well. The modern poeta\ had pnticipated the great scientific discoveries of <»ur own" age. The law of evolution was indicated in the works of Browning, Shelley, and Tennyson before the appearance of Darwin's " Origin of Species." The leoturer went on to speak of Christina Rossetti as a seer, and said love was the keynote of all hey poetry. Everything she had written grouped itself round that as critical and supreme. He rontraeted her poetry with that of whafc Robert Buchanan described as the " fleshly school of poetry," pointing put chat in the writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, and Morris, love was rarely far removed from sexual passion, while Christina Rossetti's love was not love unless it issued from the spirit, and returned with spirit to the spirit. He, also drew a contrast between her poetry and that of Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Olough, pointing out that while uhe had in oommon with them the same simplicity of diction, and the same sympathy with Nature and purity of thought and sentiment, she had not their agnosticism, but aocopted Christian revelation, and believed in Christ as the supremest manifestation of love. In conclusion, the lecturer said Christina Rossetti was the singer of love as the meaning of life'ri mystery; love in its origin in God; in its manifestation in Christ; in its conflict; with sin ; in its transformation of death ; and of its final coronation as Lord of all. Her music was not the music of to-day, but it was for our peace to learn it, for it would be that of to-morrow.