attention is held but for a moment; the light hum is not easily conquered by mere brilliancy. But let it be a simple song of home, of love, of religion, and a hush falls on the frivolous throng, a new atmosphere enters, a wave of feeling audible almost as a sigh, touches them all, a tenderness lingers even after the song is done. It has found the human side, and nothing can float the company back to the same, artificial tone as before.

Not to dwell on the countless trivialities in which this community of interest and experience can be traced, these few noblest sentiments are enough to show it at its deepest and best. It might be supposed that a man's most interior life, being the most individual part of him, would be most unlike that of his fellows. On the contrary it is just here that experiences are most identical. When is it that we say, "After all, we are all alike,”—“human nature is the same thing," but when secret springs of action, soul-histories, noble or ignoble, are revealed? The same deep instincts move us all. For instance, the family tie, from its institution in Eden to the present hour, how it interprets itself to the understanding, civilized or savage, the world over. No community of language is needed to explain a mother's love; it is as fitly as beautifully called the shrine to the Madonna, reared in all the earth. Home - it is the talisman to which no heart fails to respond, the magician of sweet memories, and, alas, of unspeakable sorrows. Patriotism is but its broader expression, the larger circle, with common country for its hearthstone. And in a sense religion is only a still larger embodiment, transfigured in the glory of the common Fatherhood divine.

Or restrict this sentiment of love to that more intimate and dual growth on which the family rests, and it is still a common possession. The love-story of the world is one; and told once in Paradise, it was essentially told for all time. Conditions vary, and in any one's limited acquaintance truth reads stranger than fiction; but one reads, after all, but variations of the same old, old melody; not a strain that is not haunted clearly or faintly with the familiar

reminiscence. In song and story and poem of the ages, each reads his own history between the lines. And it is to this parallel history that poet and novelist write. It is a doctrine of correspondences more intimate than church dogmas know. "As face answereth to face in the water, so doth the heart of man to man."

And when by sad destiny love is transmuted into suffering, the same universality holds. An Indian legend relates that a mother, heart-broken for the death of her first-born, appealed to Brahma, and was told that by a certain potion her sorrow should be healed; but it must be made of herbs gathered from the garden of a household into which death had never entered. The mother departed, hopeful of such easy errand, but after long search returned sorrowful. "Alas!" she said, "there is no household where death has not been, and I have no herbs for the potion." "Nevertheless is thy sorrow consoled,” replied the god; for since there is no mother with happier fate than thine, what reason hast thou to mourn more than others?" Divine wisdom has found a better consolation than this of paganism, but the wide fellowship of all suffering it touchingly suggests. We come far short of the meaning, even yet, of that mystic Christian beatitude, Blessed are they that mourn; but it is, at least, a world-wide benediction.

Scarcely less tender than the appeal of mutual human love to the universal heart is that of outward nature. With what confidence does all literature assume this sympathy, and address it, as if all mankind had but a single sensibility, and that the poet's. The song of a primrose by the river's brim floats the world over, like a winged seed, and takes root wherever it falls. How much the picture takes for granted in every gazer! No pretense of self-commendation, no reasons why. Serene, assured, it meets your eye, in simple naturalness of green foliage and purple mountains and warm sky and expanse of waters, in mystery of haze and tenderness of shade and light. For all "effect" it trusts implicitly to you. It assumes the delicate appreciation, the sympathy with nature, the memory of other days, the imagination, that will

transmute these suggestions of the canvas into a dream of refreshment and joy. Beauty its own excuse? nay, its excuse is all in your perception. What sublime confidence did the Creator manifest in the perception of his human intelligences when he made day unto day utter his speech, and night unto night show his knowledge !

But more profoundly than any other, the religious sentiment reveals our common nature, as if the race drew more closely into its divine unity in drawing near to God. Is your friend religious? you know not. A hundred times you may have met, and discussed the light topics that belong to the skirmish field of friendship. You have found common ground in pleasures, in art, in business, in the great themes of the day; but a mutual reticence protects each personality in its more sacred domain. Finally the opportunity makes itself: some lingering twilight discussion, some drift of after-church talk following the current of the service. One after another you touch the great problems round which have gathered the thoughts of so many years, the relations of faith and life, the great distinctions of doctrine, the mysteries of matter and spirit, the philosophies of fate and freewill, the immortality of the soul, the sense of spiritual need,—and it is all a common experience.

"The same old baffling questions,"

--

but it takes something from the mystery and loneliness to know that each man feels them alike. In a little spiritual poem entitled "The Inner Light," this feeling finds touching expression.

"does each of you, Dear friends,' (I think) ' a little light have, too?' And then I tremble for my words, and sigh, And it will be my secret till I die." But it is an open secret. This vast and intimate experience, that it seems as if none other could ever have felt as we do, is not simply our soul's history, but the history of the soul of humanity, forever longing after God. Open the oldest scriptures, and read how men cried out for this refuge in the Eternal; listen to Socrates speculating of his own immortality; and it is the same

story with his who shows you his heart today.

There is something of strange and touching interest in the coming up of each young life into this great life of the world. The life of youth seems so sharply individual at first, its experience so peculiar and alone. Never was sorrow like its sorrow, never the happenings of fate so romantic or tragic. Who else knows the secret of this inward life, so isolated, and so contradictory of the outward? How foreign to the ordinary experience, and how unappreciated must be these restless yearnings and aspirations, this intensity of spiritual life Do we seem to strike above the pitch of ordinary youth? no life is ever ordinary to itself. And if we have proved any measure of this experience, we may rest in what it took the wise man his life-time to learn, that "one thing happens unto all." Youth learns it at last; but in the meantime how much of this spiritual loneliness might be averted if the common experience found freer expression in the time of its need. What does this unity mean if it does not point to mutual helpfulness? And the helpfulness is so mutual, and life so interesting in all its revelations, that the finding of the common ground between souls becomes a privilege as well as a duty.

How often have we desired to say to the high priests of friendship, and the spiritual teachers, do not distrust the common ground between your own best life and that of others. Do not be chary of your own personality. Know that hearts are as eager, questioning, receptive as ever, veiled from you only because you veil yourself from them. Your boldest grasp of truth, your deepest insight of life, will be sure to meet as honest a seeking and as deep a need. Go back to the Apostle's Creed, "I believe in the communion of saints." Consider that your life is peculiar only in its chance circumstances, not in its springs of action, or results of experience. If you are set to help the world, it is out of yourself and the divine life you have first appropriated; you have no other fountain. So have all great souls helped the life of the world, simply by pouring their own

life into it. "I read," said our essayist of last month, "chiefly to find my own thoughts full-grown." Give your most intimate experience to other souls, and it is nothing new or strange to them; you have but given them their own. Your help in the matter is that you have vivified it anew, and so have possibly deepened and greatened its impression.

The method of the Gospel is simply this, the inflowing of life to life. Christ

was

"manifested;" and the world feeds upon him and lives. Theology has made him give his death for the world; he tells us that he gave his life. His oneness with humanity is his prophecy of its redemption. Not simply because he was sinless, but because he was tempted in all points like as we are, and yet sinless, has he shown the possibility of an entire humanity raised to a sinless life. He required only what he had proved in his own life. And this method he perpetuated: "Whatever ye shall receive that speak," "Comfort others with the same comfort wherewith ye are comforted of God," are the spirit of his instructions. If he through his own personality only, could interpret humanity to itself, shall we succeed by any less intimate method?

I asked with wistful tone, "If any fate should set our ways at strife, Bereft of me and hopelessly alone,

What would you do with life?"

I asked it long ago:

I'd keep life as I could, Of work and friends and interests unshorn;

In duty and in trust that God is good,
I would try not to mourn."

Knew you what strange, sad chill Struck through my heart,-what pang of jealousy?

You could live on, with heart unbroken still,

Live on, and not for me!

O wiser, stronger soul !

Who instant knew what years to me make plain,

That love is greatest in its own control,
And conquering its own pain!

'Twas my heart's bitter task To bear the stroke of that dissevering knife;

'Twas mine in grief's bewilderment to ask

What I should do with life.

Behold me here to-day,— With cares and plans and labors overborne ;

Keeping in life what heart and hope I may, And trying not to mourn!

- It amuses the inland visitor to hear Bostonians talk about going away to the seashore. But really, three streets back from the water, and out of the season of East winds, it is hard to believe that we live almost on an island. For whatever be the present geography of Boston, with its wonderfully swelled neck, our conception.

ear,

Wild protests of an unimagined woe

In knightly speech to hear.

A sudden uncontent

drawing days, when only a slender stem, that looked as if it might break with the weight of the peninsula, connected it with the parent land, while all about spread the white spaces of the sea. "Boston Bay,"

extreme;

So would I test the utmost that it meant, And prove its sway supreme.

"What would I do?" you said, Thoughtful and calm the quiet answer

came:

Mine could but do the same.

to see the town on account of the houses,

we find ourselves cheated by the very docks and wharves and crowding seaport business, of all benefit of our proximity to the sea. The seashore is a matter of the Capes and coast of Maine; Boston harbor, with its smack of warehouses and commerce, is quite a different thing.

-

But let the summer solstice reign, and the Capes be out of the question, and New Hampton, and Mt. Desert be to us like the blessing desired by prophets and kings, in that we shall die without the sight, and Boston Bay presents new charms. The proverb about Mahomet and the mountain bears reversal in this case: if we cannot go to the sea, we discover that the sea comes to us. Go down to these same deprecated wharves on a hot summer morning, and prove it. What procession of steamers all alongside, — gala-barges never seen at other time of year, their canvas-covered decks swarming with the pleasure-seekers of a day. Behold it, and rejoice that while the season belongs of first choice to the fashionable world, something is left over for God's toilers and his poor. For it is a working crowd that goes down the harbor: business men, snatching a day with their families; clerks, off duty for a day, or half that time; mothers, with pale babies, on the search for a breath of life-giving air; bluff and noisy laborers, jubilant over an off-day; and children everywhere: children in such numbers that you feel enheartened to know there are so many.

Off moorings we go, and ere we have found the shady side and fought the fight over a camp-stool, the wharves are far behind, and we are out in a clean, cool world of rippling water, sparkling like ten thousand diamonds. Cigar smoke and chatter and crying babies lose some measure of their annoyance as the stiff breeze sweeps through. Our next neighbor, swelling with Boston pride, and the distinction of "knowing, you know," pointing out to his provincial friends the sights along the shores, and naming the forts and islands one by one, becomes rather agreeable than otherwise. We profit by his learned discourse of casemates and barracks and ordnance, and follow the proud sweep of the hand that illustrates how the forts "commarnd

the sea." This proprietorship in our country is no mean feeling, after all! But we are claiming a wider proprietorship at the same moment, in this entire world of green islands and blue sea and sky.

Governor's Island, Long Island, Deer Island, with its imposing hospital-front rising out of the sea, a dozen islands nameless to us, lie along our path. Why are no more of them appropriated, we wonder, for summer homes? One round billow of an isle, tree-crowned to its summit, and blush with verdure, seems the perfection of a site for summer villas: but it has not even a Crusoe or man Friday. On another a few cattle and goats are grazing, doubtless domestic belongings of the officers at the Fort; the problem how they came on this noman's land, calls to mind the beautiful engraving of the boat-full of sheep crossing the Scotch lake at nightfall, the huddling, fleecy load sinking the boat to the water's edge. Sinuous among the islands lies the channel, marked by floating buoys of red and black. Not to suffer for want of a legend, in our path lies Nix's Mate, a rocky shoal covered at high tide, with a high black beacon, like a monument, built thereon. Nix's mate is said to have perished here ignominiously, on the gallows, for the murder of his captain in a piratical mutiny at sea. Justly enough, it is the murdered captain who has the recompense of immortality, if indeed his name was Nix; what the mate's name was, nobody remembers.

The forts Winthrop and Independent and Warren ask no salute of us as we float by. They make brave show of brick walls and earth-works and mounted guns, and a solitary flag floats over each; but never a soldier is seen. Virtually they went to sleep when the war closed, and have not waked up since. Now and then they doubtless rouse themselves sleepily, like a a cat on a rug, and do a bit of rubbing to keep themselves clean; their neatness is immaculate. But what a lazy, dolce far niente life these garrisons must have through the long summer. One feels vastly more like saluting the lighthouses, true guardians of the sea, the harbor light perched low and strong on its rocky base, and Minot's Ledge, with its recall of tragic