from his consciousness, and only thought left waking? Or yet again "Worn with weariness, shall we sleep until, Our life restored by long and dreamless rest, And wake his little ones peaceful and blest?" But why trouble oneself with anxious thought for that which is properly His care who brought us into being; and all these minor issues close on the note of filial trust: "I nothing know, and nothing need to know. Whittier brightens the vision of awe and strangeness with the smile of familiar faces, the welcome of loving hands. Even as Newman does, in that hymn, "Lead, kindly Light," which, with the human tenderness of its closing lines, "And with the morn those angel faces smile, Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile," has softened the grim aspect of death for so many. In the hour of our mortal need, when the shadows darken and the narrow gorge of death seems to hem us in on every side, then, prays Whittier "when our feet draw near The river dark with mortal fear, And the night cometh chill with dew, So let the hills of doubt divide, So let the eyes that fail on earth On Thy eternal hills look forth; And in Thy beckoning angels know The dear ones whom we loved below! I Most beautiful perhaps of all utterances wherewith man has faced the Unseen is Tennyson's prospectpoem, "Crossing the Bar," said to have been suggested-though the story has been contradicted or, at least, modified-by the same view of sweet green fields across the Thames that inspired Watts with the motive of his hymn. The trust of a little child and the imagination of a great poet are blent in the late Laureate's lines as they have seldom been before. The poem brings the tide up with it. Enshrined though the few stanzas are in every heart, may it be permitted one to brighten this page with them? On the supreme hope they express the Prospect may well close: "Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me; And may there be no moaning of the bar But such a tide as, moving, seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark; And may there be no sadness of farewell When I embark. For, tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar." "The River Path." XX THE GREAT BIRTHDAY "For a short time thy sun is overcast ; But thou shalt once resee't more bright than ever, Joshua Sylvester. THE comparison of death with birth has ever been a favourite one among poets, and always with a balance of praise in favour of the sterner-seeming function. "If death be like as birth, and birth as death, The first was fair-more fair should be the last," reflects Swinburne. A saying paralleled by the practical-minded Benjamin Franklin: “Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life. A man is not completely born until he has passed through death." Charles Wesley thus forcibly presents the idea: “When from flesh the spirit freed Mortals cry, A man is dead, Angels sing, A child is born.” Death, says the Swedish poet, Bishop Tegnér (as translated by Longfellow), takes the soul, rocks and kisses it to sleep, and then "places the ransomed child, new-born, 'fore the face of its Father." What a sweet fancy is Rossetti's of the Virgin Mother, Mary, and her handmaidens sitting together in Paradise, "Into the fine cloth, white like flame, To fashion the birth-robes for them When death is thus considered, merely as the birth into a larger life, the event of its arrival should have in it nothing fearful. And though, generally speaking, we have no more choice in the date of our "birthday to eternity," to use Ben Jonson's phrase, than in that of our entrance upon this mortal scene, yet the period on which they personally would choose it to fall has been made by many a matter of pleasing speculation. It is through the lips of the Hermit of his "Chronicles of Clovernook" that Douglas Jerrold exclaims of a sunset hour in spring Evenings such as this . . . seem to me the very holiday time of death; an hour in which the slayer, throned in glory, smiles benevolently down on man. Here, on earth, he gets hard names among us for the unseemliness of his looks, and the cruelty of his doings; but in an hour like this, death seems to me loving and radiant-a great bounty, spreading an immortal feast, and showing the glad dwelling-place he leads men to. . . . So considered, death is indeed a solemn beneficence-a smiling liberator, turning a dungeon door upon immortal day." To Coleridge death in summer appeared in the same alluring guise. To give out one's spirit" amidst flowers, and the sight of meadowy fields, and the chant of birds" seemed to him a fate so desirable that it would be a "reward for life." He died in July. With something of the same longing for spiritcommunion with the summer the New England poet, Bryant, in a well-known poem, set his choice on June for the time of his death. And flowery June saw the fulfilment of his wish. It was in the balmy days of spring that Keble longed to change his mortal to divine. Of these days, too, did Mrs. Hemans say that if she could choose her time to die, it should be then. The pensive poetess was another of those whose fancies in this matter were realised. In was in May that, as one of her biographers writes, "she passed quietly away to the Better Land of which she had so touchingly written." May not this sigh for death in spring, or in sweet summer days, come from the consciousness that all the glory of renewed life around us, all the new-born loveliness of nature, is doomed to decay, and from the passionate craving that it might be eternal, and oneself eternal with it? Some such suggestion is in George MacDonald's lines OF ONE WHO DIED IN SPRING. "Loosener of Springs, he died by thee! Thomas Overbury tells of his "fair and happy |