that his son Hallam writes: "My father often now longed for the quiet Hereafter where all would be made clear." To the aged the world seems to have grown cold; they crave the reviving beams of Paradise. George MacDonald's "canty granny" is but a type of many when she looks forward to being young and beautiful again in the land of eternal youth and beauty.

Death often serves as the magnet that compels our restless, wavering spirits away from earth towards the borders of their future home. With every attraction to the unseen world, whether through the passing thither of a friend, or through our own fancied approach to its mysterious shores, we acquire a new interest in it, until at last our hopes and aspirations begin to centre there. The invisible drawbridge has been let down, and we fancy the forms of familiar, or of shining presences upon it. We feel with

Whittier :

"Another hand is beckoning us,

Another call is given;

And glows once more with angel-steps
The path which reaches heaven."

Dante experienced something of this rending asunder of the dividing veil on the passing hence of Beatrice-of this vision of ascending and descending angels betwixt earth and heaven. So also does Mrs. Browning touch on this strange transporting effect of the death of a beloved one on the survivors:

"We catch up wild at parting saints,

And feel Thy heaven too distant.

The wind that swept them out of sin

Has ruffled all our vesture;

On the shut door that let them in
We beat with frantic gesture.

To us, us also,-open straight!
The outer life is chilly."

Surely," says the old German divine, Bengel, "when the door of Paradise is opened to let in any of our departed friends, delicious breezes blow through it from that abode of blessedness."

Sometimes, again, it is not until one lies oneself on one's death-bed that these heavenly longings are stirred. It was Heine who, under the influence of wasting disease, wrote (in the preface to his "Romancero," 1851): "When one lies on one's death-bed one gets very sensitive and impressionable, and wants to make peace with God and the world. Yes, I have returned to God, like the prodigal son, after tending swine with the Hegelians. Heavenly homesickness came over me, and drove me forth through woods and ravines and over the dizziest paths of dialectics.” And the profession was accompanied by deeds which proved it to be genuine, such as the destroying of certain of his writings whose tendency he deemed injurious to religion.

Schiller's sensitive spirit shrank from the cold dark river of death which would have to be crossed before the heavenly heights of his vision were reached. To other's, the beauty of those heavenly hills overflows even into the valley of the shadow of death. It may be partly from their glorious heights that the shadow is cast, and on the dark waters that have to be gone

through is reflected a glimmer of radiance from the city of light. The flash of angel faces lights the gloom, snatches of celestial music break the stillness, so that the dying ear turns from all of earth to listen for them, the dying eye fixes its solemn unchanging gaze on the vision which at last, after its days and nights of longing, is rising before it.

The Germans have added a beatitude to those pronounced by our Saviour on the mountain: "Blessed are the homesick, for they shall be brought home."

XXV

UPON THE THRESHOLD

"The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd, Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made; Stronger by weakness wiser men become,

As they draw near to their eternal home;

Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view
That stand upon the threshold of the new."

Edmund Waller.

A SPECIAL interest attaches to sayings uttered in the very prospect of death by those who stand indeed. upon the Borderland, one foot on earth and one in heaven.

"O, but they say the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony:

Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain ;
For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain,"

In his "Specimens from Fuller's Writings," Charles Lamb gives the following quaintly touching passage on Saint Monica :

"Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts as harbingers to heaven, and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness through the chinks of her sickness-broken body.”

Lamb quotes in a footnote the kindred passage from Waller's perfect little poem. To Fuller belongs the priority of claim in the image, he having died in 1661, and Waller in 1687, at the age of eighty-two, at which age it was that he wrote the poem, standing himself upon the threshold of the new world.

writes Shakespeare. Yet it is not always of pain that these words breathe, but instead often of some strange bliss hidden from the onlookers. Besides those more sustained utterances which, like Lyte's swan-song, "Abide with Me," or Michael Angelo's noble sonnet, "On the Brink of Death," have become enshrined in literature, many such "last words" are on record (how many more are on record only in loving hearts!), as the rapt "Hush-Heaven!" of Bishop Villiers; or the more homely "Now I go hence into Paradise" of the German mystic Boehm ; Samuel Rutherford's ecstatic "Glory-Glory dwelleth in Immanuel's Land!"; George Herbert's sweet rhapsodies of anticipation-of which, recording some of them, his biographer, Izaac Walton, says, "These, and the like expressions, which he uttered often, may be said to be his enjoyment of heaven before he enjoyed it." Of Bishop Jewel the same pleasant chronicler relates that his "happy change" was attended with such blessed utterances "that it became a religious question, 'whether his last ejaculations, or his soul, did first enter into heaven."

"It is a wonderful retrospect upon this world and this life from above. Now first one begins to perceive what a dark existence it is that we have here passed through. Upwards! upwards! Heavenwards! Not darkness—no, it is becoming ever more and more light around me!"

This, no saint's or poet's rapture as it might be deemed, but spoken from the standpoint of actual experience, was one of the dying utterances of Baron Bunsen.