founded on, and responsive to, those sensations of undefined awe and terror that haunt little children, and which are treated-as what no doubt they are―ahnungen, as the Germans would call them of great realities.

The verses follow the thoughts or rather the impressions of a child, and seem as though they might be recollections of the poet's own musings in infancy. Here is the dread of lightning and storm quelled by the recollection of the rainbow sign; and again that strange horror that most persons can remember to have experienced in early childhood, 'of forms of giant mould,' or of wild beasts, supposed by imagination to haunt the darkness, or it may be of the actual aspect of fierce animals-is relieved by the thought of the text selected as the motto, 'No lion shall be found there, nor any ravening beast go up thereon.'

Then, from childish terrors, the meditation proceeds. As the rainbow is the pledge of safety from the deluge, as fierce bulls can be daunted by the steadfast gaze of even a child, asserting man's dominion over the animals; so in the invisible tumults and dangers that beset us, Faith can feel secure the promise of the Saviour, the Rainbow of Mercy that crowns His head (Rev. x. 1.) and encircles the Throne; so His Cross keeps at a distance the powers of hell, the roaring lion who walketh about seeking whom he may devour.

Our actual safety from the flood, and our conquest over evil beasts, thus are shewn to typify our state of safety from God's vengeance on the world, and our victory over evil spirits; but we are bidden to take heed, and observe. The promise is only to the inmates of His Ark.' It is those who abide in Him, and keep the seal His Holy Spirit made,' who have a right to the promise that they shall be preserved from the flood of God's wrath, or rescued from the roaring lion.

FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT.

THE lessons of renouncing the world and sacrificing the dearest, which so fitly open Lent, furnish the subjects of this day's poetical meditations.

We are made to stand, as it were, overlooking the lovely valley, where five wealthy cities stood on the fertile banks of the Jordan and the fair lake that received it. We hear the shouts of impure revelry and scornful blasphemy and defiance of God, that rise louder and louder; we see God's Angel, hovering over it, with the vial of wrath ready to be poured out on it. We marvel wherefore he delays, when justice so clearly calls for vengeance, and then we perceive how he is waiting until God's merciful purpose be accomplished, and the one righteous man and his family guided out of reach of the danger. Mercy is patient with them, frail and reluctant though they be, unwilling to trust themselves to their heavenly guides, mourning what they leave behind, and hanging back for last looks, so that they would be lost, were they not constantly urged on by their angel guardians.

But we find that it is ourselves that we are contemplating under the guise of Lot. We are, like him, called to come out of and escape from the ruin of the sinful world; but even as he found a near refuge for the time in the little city of Zoar, which was spared at his entreaty, so there are homes and resting places, little tainted by the sins of the world, and not coming under its peculiar curses. Such a resting place is the Church on earth—in the midst of the world, yet not of it; and here is our home of shelter, even though we know by the example of Ephesus or Laodicea that when the spirit of the world has thoroughly corrupted a branch of the Church, it is cut off. There remains no place for mercy. If then we think we have come out of Sodom merely by our outward allegiance to the Church, we are unsafe. Neither the visible Church, nor the sweetest, most innocent home, is beyond the reach of temptation, corruption, and punishment; there is no safety but in continually reaching beyond these and what they give us, and having our treasure laid up in Heaven. Till we have ourselves gained those everlasting Hills, and are there delivered from all evil,

Who rest, presume;
Who turn to look, are lost.'

Solemn, grand, and beautiful, is the poem in the Lyra. It might be called 'On the hidden depths of Suffering.' The poet places himself with the young men left to wait beneath the mount of sacrifice, where the patriarch and his son disappeared from their sight. As little as they could can we follow the real feelings of either, though grave and solemn hints are given in the narrative—just as lookers on, in the hours of agonizing affliction, cannot fathom the feelings or the conduct of those on whom the bereavement falls; there are hidden depths both of suffering and consolation we cannot penetrate. So we know of, but cannot fully understand, the awful moment when Abraham took the knife to slay his son; nor can we tell all that meek Isaac meant by his question, 'Where is the Lamb?' nor how much of conscious hope and prophecy was in Abraham's reply, The LORD will provide Himself a Lamb.' Whatever he meant thereby, even if he knew who should be the Lamb presented on that very spot, it was not perfect knowledge. Like Abraham, the saint may hope and trust in that Lamb in faith; but the 'Cross he holds by towers beyond his sight.' We can believe in and be thankful for the suffering endured on that Cross, but no accumulation of the agonies of mind and body, of which we have some perception, can enable us to estimate that which purchased our Redemption. Most dimly do we 'behold the Lamb;' but, at least, we know His Blood flowed for us.

Dull cold hearts and eyes they are that see so little way up the mount of sacrifice; but let us not turn away, but pray on, feeble and insufficient as are our prayers. For Christ allowed one who suffered the just punishment of his own crime to hang beside Him on a cross like His,

and accepted the penitence with which he submitted to what he deserved, as if it had been a free sacrifice. He blends all suffering willingly offered with His own height of woe, and listens to the faintest supplication.

SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT.

AGAIN the two poems relate in some degree to the same subject, but the earlier one is on Remorse, the later on Repentance. Esau's forfeit' is the sternest and most awful of all the Christian Year, speaking as it does of the despair of ruined spirits. Be it remembered that although the latter poem strikes a tenderer key than the former one, yet it is only because of the difference of the subject. There was no one who held to the last a more deep and awful sense of the eternity of the doom of sin, or of the cruelty of trying to soften away the denunciations of God Himself, than did this true shepherd, stern in his sweetness.

So, as the echo of Esau's loud and bitter cry comes down these forty centuries to us, he asks, 'Is there in God's world a place so dreary that the cry for mercy, and the voice of self-reproach, are vain as showers upon violets plucked?'

Alas! yes, threats unheeded accumulate against the day of reckoning; and consequences roll on regardless of regrets. The tempest, into which the mariner has recklessly ventured, does not cease its fury because he laments his foolhardiness; the diseases incident on intemperance are not removed by the tardy repentance of the drunkard; the weapon once launched by the murderer is not averted by even his instant remorse. Did not consequence wait upon crime, the 'unbodied soul' would have nothing to fear, however deeply stained, nor would the unready virgin be left lamenting without the door.

Yet if it were so, what would be the comfort of the contrite? His hope is in God's own word; but there, eternity of woe is as distinctly threatened as eternity of joy is promised, and if the one is doubted the other must likewise be doubted, the weakening the force of the one must weaken the force of the other; the fear and the hope are inseparable, while both rest on the same authority.

And that such is ever the course of God's dispensations, we may see by turning to the days of the patriarchs, where the profane act of faithlessly bartering the prime right to God's great promise, was requited by deprivation of it, when its value began to dawn on the reckless eyes. No tears would win back the blessing thrown away and disowned in a moment's impatient craving for food; the right to the unseen, sacrificed in longing for the tangible things present, could never be regained.

Such is our temptation to barter life for pottage.' 'Wealth or power, pleasure or renown,' are the present feast that invites us to throw aside our heavenly birth-right; and there may be a time when, like those of the rich man in torment, our eyes will be opened to the madness of such

a bargain, but opened in vain. Too late! the crown which might have been ours will have been given to him who knew how to prize it, and justice will be satisfied. God would not suffer Isaac's partial love to guide him to bestow the prophetic blessing on the unworthy, nor will He permit the faithless and profane to share the joys that they refused when they were on trial for them. 'Meek true-hearted Love' alone wins that blessing, as surely as

'Israel's fond blessing may not fall on scorn;

Nor Balaam's curse on love, which God hath blest.'

This is a stern Lenten poem, grave, grey, and bracing as the keen still east wind that keeps the earth as it were iron-bound in its severity; but turn to the other book, and we are in the midst of the soft sweet whisperings of a spring night, rustling and tinkling through the very measure of the verse :

'How welcome in the sweet still hour
Falls on the weary heart,

Listening apart,

The mimic rain on poplar leaves,

The mist drops from the o'erloaded eaves,
Sighs that the herd half dreaming heaves,

Or owlet chanting his dim part,

Or trickling of imprisoned rill,

Heard faintly down some pastoral hill;

His pledge who rules the froward will

With more than kingly power, with more than wizard art.'

Even as the ear is refreshed by these faint sounds at night, so the angels love to gather the repentant sighs of sinners, who, after their hot encounter, have time to perceive their errors. And as it is sweet to watch the shadows of light clouds on the gentle waves of the summer sea, so the saints around the glory Throne, hopefully mark the faint sighs and yearnings of the contrite. A child's repentance above all is beautiful, so deep and true for a sin of so much less deep a dye. When a child voluntarily deprives itself of pleasure, in penitence for its error, surely it is highly blessed in that the great lesson is so early learnt, and repentance won without previous deep stain. And well it is also with elder penitents, hiding deep contrition beneath outward activity, or even splendour, like the sackcloth under robes of state, the sharp-edged cross beneath the jewels, who day by day, and year by year, look back on their past with deepening fear, as their hatred of sin and sense of its foulness increases, and yet ever look forward more hopefully, with greater faith in the eternal Pardon.

Good Joshua Watson was wont to say, that in his youth the fervent expressions of contrition and self-abasement he found in books of devotion appeared to him unreal in his own mouth, since he had never been guilty of heinous sins; but as life advanced, his abhorrence of evil in

himself and his loathing for it so increased, that in his latter days these confessions became the sincere voice of his heart.

'The world cannot understand the penitence of the saints;' and therefore, many will never know how the holier a man became, the deeper became his spirit of repentance: no bitter cry, like Esau's; but a sweet fragrance of intense love, longing for perfection, and tenderness at all that transgressed the law of One so beloved.

Such penitence is indeed, in the sight of Heaven,

'Fresher than steam of dewy grove,
When April showers are twinkling nigh.'

THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT.

THIS is one of the grandest and most finished compositions in the whole Christian Year; but it is one, the scope of which can hardly be understood except by a somewhat scholarly mind.

The text is the parable of the strong man armed, and the Stronger than he, who taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils. The application is to the victory over Satan, and the consecration of those treasures of the yearning classic world which once belonged to the kingdom of the prince of this world; but now are the enjoyment of the Christian. Before the Gospel was proclaimed, poets and philosophers were struggling towards the truth, and the words and forms of beauty that expressed these yearnings, are, now that Satan's dominion is overthrown, replete with bright and holy thoughts to the believer. So even his own region of heathen fable has been won from Satan, and become our spoil. *

Perhaps the first draft of this poem expressed the idea with greater distinctness, and it went more into details, though as a whole it was less finished. It was in four-line stanzas, without the two longer lines that now conclude them. It opened in the same manner with the fall of Lucifer; but it was without that simile, carried through three exquisite descriptive verses, of the Israelites obtaining the spoil of Canaan. In lieu of this, the now consecrated but once heathen symbols are enumerated in lines we would not willingly lose.

Such books as Anstice's Greek Choric Poems, Isaac Williams's Christian Scholar,

and Gladstone's Homer, bear ample witness to this.