The subject, whatever way considered, is one that requires all the comfort we can get. Not only the sweet, dumb voices of nature, but also the living voices of those who teach us, from experience they themselves have come through, how to guide our thoughts into the regions of hope; voices of saints, of sages, of poets.

"Believe the muse!" pleads Thomson, with wistful insistence, as if he longed to impart to others his own clear perception of the world beyond. And this thirst for the infinite, this hunger for eternity—innate proof, as Victor Hugo and so many others have considered it, of a future life-is met with amongst the choicer spirits of all times and lands. The intense desire to tear down the portals of the past, to recover one's treasures from the grave, bears its own fruit of hope in those even who have nothing but their own high instinct to teach them.

Belief, says Romanes, following on Bacon, requires a far higher effort of the mind than unbelief.1 "God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear"; and, apart from Divine revelation, those who are denied the innate assurance of immortality with which some of the rarer souls are gifted, might take heart from the confidence of those others,

"It is an assured truth, and a conclusion of experience, that a little or superficial knowledge of philosophy may incline the mind of man to atheism, but a farther proceeding therein doth bring the mind back again to religion."-" The Advancement of Learning."

II

THE TESTIMONY OF GENIUS

"All the help I can offer, in my poor degree, is the assurance that I see ever more reason to hold by the same hopeand that by no means in ignorance of what has been advanced to the contrary; and for your sake I would wish it to be true that I had so much of 'genius' as to permit the testimony of an especially privileged insight to come in aid of the ordinary argument. For I know I myself have been aware of the communication of something more subtle than a ratiocinative process, when the convictions of 'genius' have thrilled my soul to its depths."

So Browning wrote (in 1876) to an invalid lady who had thanked him in a letter for the help his poems had afforded her, through the unfaltering expression they contain of his belief in a life beyond the grave. Quoting Napoleon's tribute, and then that of Charles Lamb (probably the only time those names have ever been coupled together), to the Founder of our Faith,

These two instances are thus recalled by Browning: -as when Napoleon, shutting up the New Testament, said of Christ, 'Do you know that I am an understander of men? -Well, He was no man!' ('Savez-vous que je me connais en hommes. Eh bien, celui-là ne fut pas un homme.') Or as when Charles Lamb, in a gay fancy with some friends as to how he and they would feel if the greatest of the dead were to appear suddenly in flesh and blood once more, on the final

he goes on, "Or, not to multiply instances, as when Dante wrote what I will transcribe from my wife's testament, wherein I recorded it fourteen years ago:

"Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is; and that from this life I shall pass to another better, there, where that Lady lives, of whom my soul was enamoured.'"

Browning might have added Shakespeare's testimony, in his Last Will and Testament, which, though of a more formal character, is no less emphatic: "I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour to be made partaker of life everlasting.'

Rudolph Lehmann, in "An Artist's Reminiscences," reports Browning as saying, toward the end of his life, "I have doubted and denied it [the future life] and I fear have even printed my doubts. But now I am as deeply convinced that there is something after death. you ask me what, I no more know it than my dog knows who and what I am. He knows I am there, and that is enough for him.”

If

In the same spirit Keats wrote to his brother and sister, George and Georgiana Keats: "I will not

suggestion, 'And if Christ entered this room?' changed his manner at once, and stuttered out, as his manner was when moved, 'You see—if Shakespeare entered, we should all rise; if He appeared, we must kneel.'" Lamb's words were even stronger (it is Hazlitt who relates the incident in his essay, "Persons one would wish to have seen"): "If Shakespeare was to come into the room we should all rise up to meet him; but if that Person was to come into it we should all fall down and try to kiss the hem of His garment!"

enter into any parsonic comments on death, yet the common observations of the commonest people on death are as true as their proverbs. I have scarce a doubt of immortality of some kind or other."

With an expression of faith equal to Dante's, Petrarch, in whose poems the image of Laura in heaven shines with such lustre, wrote on her death in sober prose upon the margin of a Latin manuscript: "Her body, so beautiful, so pure, was deposited on the day of her death, after vespers, in the church of the Cordeliers. Her soul, as Seneca has said of Africanus, I am confident, returned to heaven, from whence it came."

It was of such moments as these under the impulse of which the two Italian poets uttered their expressions of belief, when the foundations of one's earth are shaken and the heavens rent, that Richter, that great Apostle of Immortality, wrote: "A man may for twenty years believe the immortality of the soul; in the one-and-twentieth, in some great moment, he for the first time discovers with amazement the rich meaning of this belief, the warmth of this naphthawell." I

At even such a moment it was, on the occasion of his wife's funeral, that Sir Walter Scott wrote in his diary (May, 1826): “ But it is not my Charlotte; it is not the bride of my youth, the mother of my children that will be laid among the ruins of Dryburgh, which we have so often visited in gaiety and pastime. No! no! She is sentient and conscious of my emotions somewhere, somehow: where we cannot tell; how we Carlyle: "Miscellanies."

I

cannot tell; yet would I not at this moment renounce the mysterious yet certain hope that I shall see her in a better world for all that this world can give me.” And it was not, as we all know, that the Laird of Abbotsford was indifferent to what this world can give. A year or so later, in a letter to Lockhart, Scott seals, as it were, his faith with the declaration, the strongest a man could utter: "I would, if called upon, die a martyr for the Christian religion."

It is with a yearning akin to Lamb's for the old familiar faces (Lamb who, Coleridge said, would have been a Christian had he never heard of Christ), that Cicero expresses his longing after his departed friends, his "dear Cato" in particular. And it is curious that it should be the heathen writer who looks forward with the more confident hope to seeing them again— a hope evidently sincere in the utterance of it, both in the following passage and others, however his faith have fallen short at times :

may

"O glorious day," he exclaims, "when I shall depart to that divine company and assemblage of spirits, and quit this troubled and polluted scene. For I shall go not only to those great men of whom I have spoken before, but also to my dear Cato . . . whose body was burned by me, whereas, on the contrary, it was fitting that mine should be burned by him. But his soul not deserting me, but oft looking back, no doubt departed to those regions whither it saw that I myself was destined to come."

Shelley who, for all his idealism, had less hold on the belief in a hereafter than many who drew