a saving power of immortality-at least in the wife's fancy

"Thy love shall hold me fast

Until the little minute's sleep is past

And I wake saved."

While Coleridge's "Happy Husband" recognises in the very title of "wife" the promise of something beyond this fleeting present

'Oft, oft methinks, the while with thee
I breathe, as from my heart, thy dear
And dedicated name, I hear

A promise and a mystery,

A pledge of more than passing life,
Yea, in that very name of Wife!"

A promise which some have found in other of the "starry names" of home, in the names of father, of mother, those types and shadows of the deity on earth.

Woman, by her very being, has been regarded as significant of some divine hereafter. Charles Follen, whose essay "On the Future State of Man" inspired his friend Whittier with one of his most striking poems, refers to this attitude toward woman among the Teutons of old. "In the lays of the lovesingers," he writes, "you still perceive what Tacitus. said of the ancient Germans, that they recognised in the soul of woman something divine and prophetic.' Maeterlinck says very much the same, and that in a woman's presence glimpses from an unseen life are most likely to flash across the soul.

Seraph of heaven, too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman
All that is insupportable in thee

Of light and love and immortality!"

So Shelley sang to the beautiful Emilia Viviani, one of the "two beams of one eternity," of which his poor Mary was the other—

"See where she stands! a mortal shape indued
With love and life and light and deity,

And motion which may change but cannot die;
An image of some bright eternity."

Richard Green, the historian, as reported by a hearer of one of his sermons, saw in a mother's joy over the birth of her child a prophecy of the child's eternal well-being. The preacher, described as “a bright little gentleman, building up beautiful images of hope," worked up from the text, "For joy that a man is born into the world," to his conclusion : "Ushered into the world with such pæans of joy, like a conqueror already, surely this child that is born. must be destined for joy; surely in the mother's joy is a presage of immortality; surely the race SO bravely started shall reach the goal of gladness!"

I

Wordsworth says the same, in a peculiarly touching poem to a mother on the birth of her first child. Though he makes the prophecy to consist rather in the mother's pangs, to which such a blessed reward is vouchsafed, than in her joy over the new-born delight

"But, O mother, by the close
Duly granted to thy throes;

By the silent thanks, now tending
Incense-like to heaven, descending
Now to mingle and to move
With the gush of earthly love,

Rev. W. J. Ferrar in the Sunday Magazine, Dec., 1895.

As a debt to that frail creature,
Instrument of struggling nature
For the blissful calm, the peace
Known but to this one release-
Can the pitying spirit doubt
That for human kind springs out
From the penalty a sense

Of more than mortal recompense?"

Baby himself is one of the chief links between this world and the other. The "bright shoots of everlastingness" pierce through his little fleshly robe to us, with their subtle fragrance waking our dulled perceptions to a sense of something beyond our mere material existence of which, but for these heavenly reminders, we might lose the trace. "A child," says Cardinal Newman, “is a pledge of immortality, for he bears upon him in figure those high and eternal excellencies in which the joy of heaven consists and which would not be thus shadowed forth by the allgracious Creator, were they not one day to be

In our very life Tennyson found a presage of life's continuance :

My own dim life should teach me this
That life shall live for evermore."

Dr. Westland Marston gathers up some of these signs and tokens of futurity in which nature, both

the nature without and the nature within us abounds, and weaves them into his sonnet,

IMMORTALITY-AN INFerence.

“If I had lived ere seer or prince unveiled
A life to come, methinks that, knowing thee,
I should have guessed thine immortality;
For Nature, giving instincts, never failed
To give the ends they point to. Never quailed
The swallow, through air-wilds, o'er tracts of sea,
To chase the summer; seeds that prisoned be
Dream of and find the daylight. Unassailed
By doubt, impelled by yearnings for the main,
The creature river-born doth there emerge.

So thou, with thoughts and longings which our earth
Can never compass in its narrow verge,
Shalt the fit region of thy spirit gain,

And death fulfil the promptings of thy birth."

IV

THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

"The voice of Nature loudly cries,
And many a message from the skies,
That something in us never dies."

Robert Burns.

"GOD writes His Gospel," says Luther, "not in the Bible alone, but in trees and flowers and clouds and stars." And in the flowers as clearly to some as in the stars. Longfellow makes of the compass-flower, which, ever turning northward, serves as a guide to the traveller on the prairie, a symbol of faith. Faith which, guiding us through the desert of this world, leads us at last to heaven.1

But the flowers have but to bloom to lead our fancies heavenward. In language lovely as the things he treats of, the old poet John Hagthorpe sings of them :

"The flowers that we behold each year
In chequered meads their heads to rear,
New rising from the tomb;