Malfy, in Webster's play. And she answers in the memorable words

"Who would be afraid on't,

Knowing to meet such excellent company

In the other world?"

This is the true thought, that we are going out into no solitary region, but to one peopled with familiar presences, nay, perhaps, with our dearest and nearest. This is the thought which so often makes death an object of longing rather than of fear. How many might exclaim with Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh, "I have far more dead friends than living."

"Why shouldst thou fear the beautiful angel, Death?"

asks Adelaide Procter

"He will give back what neither time, nor might,
Nor passionate prayers, nor longing hope restore,
(Dear as to long blind eyes recovered sight ;)

He will give back those who are gone before.

Thy treasures wait thee in the far-off skies,
And Death, thy friend, will give them all to thee."

So, too, Southey, in his "Roderick ":

"Death will make

All clear, and, joining us in better worlds,
Complete our union there!"

And Thomson, of "The Seasons" :

"Blest be the bark that wafts us to the shore

Where death-divided friends shall part no more."

XVIII

SWEET MERCY

"Consider this,

That in the course of justice none of us

Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy." Shakespeare: "The Merchant of Venice," Act iv. Scene 1.

THE thought contained in the above lines from Portia's famous speech in the Venetian Court of Justice was a favourite one with Shakespeare.

"Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all," exhorts the gentle king, Henry VI., when his uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, stretched to the last moment on the rack of a guilty conscience, "dies and makes no sign." And in "Measure for Measure," Isabella, pleading with Angelo for her brother Claudio's life, unaware of the judge's own failing virtue, reminds him :

'Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once,
And He that might the vantage best have took,
Found out the remedy: How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are?"

It is the poets that serve to man as interpreters of Heaven's ways. A true brother to Shakespeare in the respect of humility and kindly judgment may be

found in the austerer-seeming Wordsworth. An
affecting instance of this spirit in him is afforded by
his poems written within sight of Robert Burns's
grave, composed all three of them, as Aubrey de
Vere points out, as if in homage to Burns, in one of
his favourite metres; also, perhaps, because Words-
worth's mind was saturated at the moment with the
elder singer's verse. It was on quitting a place in
the Highlands where he had been hospitably enter-
tained that Burns addressed the following lines to
his host:-
:-

"When death's dark stream I ferry o'er,
A time that surely shall come,

In heaven itself I'll ask no more

Than just a Highland welcome!"

Wordsworth seems to take up his brother-poet's light words and weave them for him, in language more serious and no less impassioned than the frailer bard had ever perhaps employed on his own behalf, into a prayer :

"Sweet mercy! to the gates of heaven
This minstrel lead, his sins forgiven;
The rueful conflict, the heart riven
With vain endeavour,

And memory of earth's bitter leaven
Effaced for ever."

Then, as if Wordsworth shrank from attributing any special need for pardon to Burns, the poem continues:

"But why to him confine the prayer,

When kindred thoughts and yearnings bear
On the frail heart the purest share

With all that live ?—

The best of what we do and are,
Just God, forgive!"

Equally touching is Wordsworth's poem written the previous day at the grave itself, verse fraught with reverence for the genius and with tenderest compassion for the failings of his brother bard, so different as they were from his own, even though the "main fibres" of their heart and genius may have been, as he said, intertwined. The poem concludes with an almost passionate outpouring of sympathy : "And oh, for Thee, by pitying grace Checked ofttimes in a devious race, May He who halloweth the place Where man is laid

Receive thy Spirit in the embrace
For which it prayed !”

His very earnestness seems to enforce an answer to the prayer-an answer which descends in a dream of celestial music on the poet's heart:

But indeed Burns did plead his own cause, with God and with his fellows, and along with it that of his poor tempted brothers and sisters the world over; notably in the pathetic plea with which his address. "to the unco guid" terminates:

"Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us,

He knows each cord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias :
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it ;

What's done we partly may compute,

But ken na what's resisted."

A remarkable utterance of M. Thiers, as quoted in "Dean Stanley's Life," touches this problem of the divine mercy and judgment, as few would venture to touch it, on the reverse side. The best amongst us is fitter for pardon than for praise, is the burden of Shakespeare's and of Wordsworth's strains. The worst is not so wicked after all, is what Thiers seems to set forth. "I believe,” he declared, “in God, in a future existence, and in our reunion with those we have loved. As for the retribution to the bad-after all, nous ne sommes pas méchants-I leave that to the good God."

The somewhat flippant nature of the saying might shock those whom it did not cause to smile. But the old Frenchman, in face of his own death at the time, seems to redeem his lightness by classing himself amongst the méchants for whom the Divine mercy was required, yet who were not so méchants after all -just as Cowper, in his gloomier reflections, regarded himself (and not his neighbour) as destined to eternal wrath.

It was General Gordon who found in our very wickedness an irresistible claim on the Divine Good

ness.

"God is good!" The saying is proverbial in almost every language. It is humanity's unconscious appeal to its Maker. The monarch has no more to trust to when he lays aside crown and sceptre and goes forth unattended into the darkness. The poor man utters the words reverently as he stands bareheaded beside the body of his mate, cut off suddenly by some accident, without time for repentance in this