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For in that poem he has borne the soul onward, as Frederick Myers has said, " on 'such a tide as moving seems asleep,' into the infinity which men call death."

It was at about the same age that Mrs. Barbauld wrote her poem, "Life," the envy and admiration of Wordsworth, but of which the concluding lines only have won their way to the popular heart :

"Life! we've been long together,

Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear—
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;

Then steal away, give little warning,

Choose thine own time;

Say not 'Good-night,' but in some brighter clime
Bid me 'Good morning.'

Many, indeed, of the sweetest, of the happiest strains have been sung in age; and the crown of a man's life's work is often not accomplished till he has passed the Psalmist's limit of threescore years and ten.

It is when the day's regular task-work has been fulfilled that the spirit falls back upon a wiser, gentler mood, and is open to those gracious passing influences which once it had no time to regard. The garden which had been wont to grow the serviceable fruits of daily life, left fallow at last, puts forth flowers, the seeds of which-seeds dropped from heaven— had been overborne before by the hardier crops.

How often it happens that age restores the placidity and faith of childhood; when a soul has wandered far into devious tracks and lost the clue whereby it might return, when it has no longer in itself the power of resurrection from the mire and clay, that God employs the simple means of leading it back by insensible degrees to that

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'age of mysteries which he Must live twice that would God's face see." I

From the old we catch (as from young infants) mysterious hints and echoes of something hidden from us, suggestions of the spirit-world to which they seem half to belong.

Victor Hugo felt this affinity between infancy and age, both so near the gates of life, between his own spent earthly day, and the faint frail dawn of his baby grandchild, his little Jeanne, whom he fancied to be pining for the light of her native heaven. And he says to her

"If I the thread of our two lives must see

Thus blent to human view . .

If like a little soul you seem to me

That fain would fly away

I'll deem that to this world, where oft are blent
The pall and swaddling-band,

You came but to depart-an angel sent

To bear me from the land." 2

In watching infants one cannot but sigh to think, as Heine did when he blessed the flower-like innocence of one, that it is doomed to take on the stains of earth and time.

"Eternal youth has no such fears,

But freshening still with seasons past,
The old man clogs our earlier years,
But simple childhood comes at last."

This thought underlies Swedenborg's saying, that "in heaven the angels are advancing continually to the springtime of their youth, so that the oldest angel appears the youngest."

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XIV

THE BORDERING LAND

"The souls of the happy dead repair

From their bowers of light, to that bordering land,
And walk in the fainter glory there

With the souls of the living hand in hand."

W. C. Bryant: "The Land of Dreams."

THE only ground where we can hope to meet our dead, till we have followed after them through the gate that opens into eternity, is this shadowland of dreams.

"Oh, what land is the land of dreams?”

asks a little boy in Blake's poem of the same title as Bryant's

"What are its mountains and what are its streams?
Oh, father, I saw my mother there,

Among the lilies, by waters fair.

Among the lambs clothed in white,

She walked with her Thomas in sweet delight.

I wept for joy, like a dove I mourn—

Oh, when shall I again return?"

The father answers

"Dear child! I also by pleasant streams

Have wandered all night in the land of dreams!
But though calm and warm the waters wide,
I could not get to the other side."

Slight and easy of crossing to heaven's little ones is the boundary between the material and the spiritual, and the boy pleads

"Father, O father! what do we here,

In this land of unbelief and fear?

The land of dreams is better far,

Above the light of the morning star."

But to others besides children the slumber of the body, as Sir Thomas Browne puts it, is often but the waking of the soul. "There is surely," he declares, "a nearer apprehension of anything that delights us in our dreams than in our waked 'senses." And he is as content, he says, “to enjoy a happiness in a fancy, as others in a more apparent truth and reality." Without his dream she were unhappy, " for my awaked judgment discontents me, ever whispering unto me that I am from my friend, but my friendly dreams in the night requite me, and make me think I am within his arms. I thank God for my happy dreams as I do for my good rest." And this though to the gentle philosopher such dreams were but dreams within a dream, seeing that he looked forward to a final waking from what appeared to him the whole phantasmal dream of this existence into the true life. of eternity.

Apart from the idea of any actual intercourse between the living and the dead in dreams, the poet Campbell finds ground of hope for our eventual reunion with those passed from earth in such visionary meetings

with them now, interpreting their thoughts who have taken comfort unawares from these encounters, as well as from their waking memories—

"If in that frame no deathless spirit dwell,
If that faint murmur be the last farewell,
If fate unite the faithful but to part,
Why is their memory sacred to the heart?
Why does the brother of my childhood seem
Restored a while in every pleasing dream?”

"I dreamt about her," says Flaminia of a departed friend, in Hans Andersen's story, "The Improvisatore." "When I fancied that there lay thousands of miles between us, she was at my side, and you also!"

"Thus will death assemble us!” returns Antonio. Have we not, most of us, at times turned to dreamland for our comfort? When the forms of those we love no longer cast their shadows in the sun, when the sound of their voices, their once familiar footfall can never more gladden our ears; then, when the craving to meet somewhere, somehow, has become almost intolerable, have we not prayed, with Christina Rossetti,

"Come to me in the silence of the night;

Come in the speaking silence of a dream!"

And by what more natural way could they reach us than this, when our senses are closed, even as theirs are, to the impressions of earth, and our inward ear is open to their whisper, our inward eye to the vision of them.

"For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee."

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