'Yes, and John died at Archangel," the listener had said. "Jes' so,' said Miss Roxy . . . 'he died at Archangel the very day his mother died, and jist the hour, for the Cap'n had it down in his log-book.'” Shakespeare expresses something of this yearning for a familiar presence in the awful hour :— "My Cousin Suffolk, My soul shall thine keep company to Heaven; Again, old Talbot addresses his son John before the Come, side by side together live and die, And soul with soul from France to Heaven fly." And, later on, in death, his son lying slain before "Thou antic death, which laugh'st us here to scorn, Coupled in bonds of perpetuity, Two Talbots, winged through the lither air, Dryden has the same thought :- "Then (as I know thy spirit hovers nigh), "We shall see Coleridge, as the mists of death were gathering around him, was visited and haunted by visions of his youth. "Is it not strange," he wrote, only a few days before the close, and after the words, "I am dying,”—“ that very recently bygone images and scenes of early life have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope those two realities of this phantom world! I do not add Love; for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as one? I say realities. . . Yet, in a strict sense, reality is not predicable at all of aught below Heaven." Goethe, when earthly seasons were over for him, expressed delight in the anticipation of spring. Others besides Mrs. Hemans have been struck with surprise at the intense activity of the mind which often accompanies illness. "I could not help often wondering," she wrote, "if any of the thousand thoughts which swept like April lights and shadows over my spirit would accompany me into the world that is unseen." Some within immediate sight of death have taken as calm an outlook on the prospect as if it were a summer holiday awaiting them. "Death has no terrors, fears, nor pains From life to bar my way: I go as from Siberian plains To gardens of Cathay," wrote a young poet, James G. Burnett, on the very eve of death. The American scientist, Joseph Priestley, has left on record of his mother that a little before her death in the depth of a hard winter she dreamed she was in a delightful place, which she took to be heaven, and her last words were, "Let me go to that fine place!" Schiller, in view of the same great change, was seized with a strong desire to visit strange lands. "As if,” says Bryant, in a note to his poem on the death of Schiller, "his spirit had a presentiment of its approaching enlargement, and already longed to expatiate in a wider and more varied sphere of existence." "How could he rest? Even then he trod "You must just think of me as being away in Australia for some necessary purpose," said the Reverend Andrew Crichton, of Glasgow, to his wife, as this earthly scene was closing for him. And in gallant spirit, worthy of the noble courage which had animated her through life, the venerable Mary Somerville wrote: "The Blue Peter has long been flying at my foremast, and now that I am in my ninety-second year, I must soon expect my signal for sailing. It is a solemn voyage, but it does not disturb my tranquillity. I trust in the infinite mercy of my Almighty Creator." Another nonogenarian, an old man unknown to fame, wrote some years since in a letter: "The dark river has dwindled to a summer brook, so narrow that I fancy sometimes I hear the birds sing on the Other Side." The same vision of peace broke on the delirium of General Stonewall Jackson, when he lay wounded to death. His mind, disturbed with the scenes of war he had just passed through, words of command kept rising to his lips. "But soon after," says a contemporary account, "a sweet smile overspread his face, and he murmured quietly, with an air of relief, 'Let us cross the river and rest under the shade of the trees.' These were his last words; and, without any expression of pain or sign of struggle, his spirit passed away." Even as gently did Colonel Newcome, a man no less real to us than any in actual life, respond to his summons hence, as described by Thackeray in perhaps the most beautiful scene in all his writings :- "At the usual evening hour the bell began to toll, and Thomas Newcome's hands outside the bed feebly beat time. And just as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he lifted up his head a little and quickly said, 'Adsum!' and fell back. It was the word we used at school when names were called; and lo, he, whose heart was as that of a little child, had answered to his name, and stood in the presence of The Master." THE jovial vicar of Dean Prior had here fallen on solemn thoughts, to which thoughts indeed the apparently light-hearted are often prone; and even if it be otherwise, the prospect of death and eternity may come upon the gay with a shock of surprise in which they appear perhaps in truer, more startling colours than they wear for those whose minds, like that sober Scot, Carlyle's, habitually dwell on the Immensities, the Infinities, the Eternities. Even children's eyes will gaze through the many-coloured glass of mortal life upon the white radiance of eternity. All Christendom has read how the child-saint, Teresa, and her baby brother, Rodrigo, became enraptured |