"The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren."
But the wren is as sweet as the nightingale when heard in a faraway land, and no nightingale of professional art can equal the melody of the home bird, heard on a foreign shore.
So, also, these ministerial letters are full of refreshment. Why is it that ministers so seldom correspond? There is a world of richness in the mutual unbosoming of their souls. How passionate for Christ are these outgushings! How uplifting these aspirations and dedications! How the world melts, and three thousand miles is a cipher to the burning pulsings of electric souls! Write to your brother in Christ warmly, frankly, naively, wholly. The best letters are clerical. "Forty Years' Correspondence with Dr. Alexander" is the only American book of letters worthy to stand with Cowper's and Lamb's.
There is not much to see in San Luis. Its sixty thousand people are as monotonous as six. The cathedral is an improvement on the one in Mexico, in putting its choir behind its altar. It gives breadth and effect to the height and arches. Other churches many it has, some costly, and heavily laden with gilded altars. Chief among these is the church dedicated to Mary at the end of the paseo, or calzarda, a broad tree-lined walk of over a mile. This church has only ascriptions to Mary on its walls. "Madre del Creador," "Madre de la Divina Gracia," "Madre del Salvador," "Madre del Jesu Cristo," and many others. Some of these are on the high road to blasphemy, if they have not reached it. The Mother of the Divine Grace, the Mother of the Creator, are two vast strides in that direction. They are like those on the cathedral of Leon, though these fall short of the suggestive divine assumptions that Leon ascribes to her nature and power.
This city still maintains its bull-fights, and the amphitheatre is preserved, and used every Sunday night, except in Lent. The priest has to be busy then, said a good Mexican Christian, in absolving the bull-fighters. Near this favorite resort is the alameda,
