gone thither before you," say the Shining Ones to Bunyan's pilgrims, when these had safely got over the river, and their talk is about the beauty and the glory of heaven toward which they are ascending ; "and there you shall with joy receive even every one that follows into the holy place after you."

XXIV

HEAVENLY HOMESICKNESS

My life nor death I winna crave,
Nor fret, nor yet despond;
But a' my hope is in the grave,
And the dear hame beyond."

Fames Hogg.

THERE are some souls, and those not only of poets or mystics, to whom their stay in this world is always more or less of an exile, who eat its bread and mount its stairs with something of banished Dante's feeling of bitterness and strangeness, and whose whole life is a longing for the signal of release to more congenial climes. They will mingle, and often kindly, with their fellows, and honestly perform their share of the world's work, but always more or less with a sense of aloofness from it all, as if they had fallen into this existence by mistake, and were ill at ease in it-like the strayed angel of Mr. Wells's ingenious story.

This air of strangeness to the scene about them is more especially to be remarked in young children, and has been made by many (as by Wordsworth) a text on which to hang their theories of a pre-natal

existence. Some outgrow it; to others it clings through all their worldly way.

It is not always that they despise earth's beauty, or regard her pleasures in a churlish mood. The strangers' land may be lovely, her people all that is amiable, but the exile's heart is sick for his own kinsfolk and for home. Any other abode is a prison to him.

George MacDonald, lover of his fellows though he is, has well expressed the feeling, and expressed it over and over again: "I fancy, when they die, many will find themselves more at home than ever they were in this world." And, with a more personal note: "I knew that my soul had ever yet felt the discomfort of strangeness, more or less, in the midst of its greatest blessedness. I knew that as the thought of water to the thirsty soul. . . such is the thought of home to the wanderer in a strange country."

Through all the trials and depressions of life such spirits never lose the sharp edge of their desire after the Heavenly Country. Their longing remains fresh and eager to the last. And just as in a strange land whatever speaks to one of home-a flower, the song of a bird-brings a rush of longing to the heart, so also by these waters of sorrow, when the spirit seems to catch some token from the land she looks to as her own, her longings are stirred within her. "Know'st thou the Land?" she seems to ask of all around, piecing together in her memory, like Goethe's Mignon, stray glimpses and recollections of her early home. "'Tis there-'tis there that I would go!"

This wistful spirit shines through the hymn of St.

Bride, the sixth-century Irish saint, of which Froude translates the opening stanzas from chronicles:

"Bride, the queen, she loved not the world;

She floated on the waves of the world

As the sea-bird floats upon the billow:

Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps
In the far land of her captivity
Mourning for her child at home."

the old

"What a picture is there," exclaims Froude, "of the strangeness and yearning of the poor human soul in this earthly pilgrimage!"

It is under the symbol of a sunflower languishing for the light that Blake addresses the longing soul: Ah, Sunflower, weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the traveller's journey is done.”

George Herbert images himself as a flower drooping in the alternate chills and heats of an uncertain clime, and pining for his proper garden:

"O that I once past changing were

Fast in Thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!" 1

With a kindred fancy Andrew Marvell compares the soul to a drop of dew, "shed from the bosom of the morn," which, careless of its new abode, though it be the rose's heart, reflects within its tiny globe the heaven it came from:

"How it the purple flower does slight,

Scarce touching where it lies ;

But gazing upon the skies
Shines with a mournful light."

Spenser cannot keep his longings within bounds. He is of those he himself speaks of who, admitted to the vision of "Heavenly Beauty," enjoy such pleasure thereof

"that it doth bereave

Their soul of sense, through infinite delight,

And them transport from flesh into the spright."

In which state they see and hear such heavenly things as to make all earth's glories appear to them “but feigned shadows":

"So full their eyes are of that glorious sight,
That in naught else on earth they can delight,
But in th' aspect of that felicity

Which they have written in their inward eye."

Yet Spenser was a worshipper of earthly beauty too. Some refuse even to see any charm in this world, so absorbed are they in contemplation of the next. It is in an access of this nostalgia of the soul that Schiller cries, in his "Sehnsucht":

"From this valley darkened over

With cold mists that blot the sky,
Could I but the way discover,

O how blest, how fain were I !"

Till, from the very intensity of his longing, is evolved a definite vision of the land of his desire, on whose sights and sounds his raptured spirit broods.

The same note of repulsion from earth, of the exile's thirst for native springs, runs through much of the Ettrick Shepherd's verse, strange mixture of mysticism and earthliness that he was:

"Farewell, ye homes of living men!

I have no relish for your pleasures-
In the human face I nothing ken

That with my spirit's yearning measures: