poets from the beginning of the world, is moved to sing

When, overarched by gorgeous night,

I wave my trivial self away;

When all I was to all men's sight
Shares the erasure of the day;
Then do I cast my cumbering load,
Then do I gain a sense of God."

To Campbell the stars were symbols not only of immortality, but also, as the sun was to Leigh Hunt, of the Divine love ::

"Fair stars! are not your beings pure?
Can sin, can death your worlds obscure?
Else why so swell the thoughts at your
Aspect above?

Ye must be Heaven's that make us sure
Of heavenly love!

And in your harmony sublime

I read the doom of distant time!

That man's regenerate soul from crime
Shall yet be drawn,

And reason on his mortal clime

Immortal dawn."

It is, however, the poet of one poem, Blanco White, who has most perfectly embodied the old, old lesson of night and of the stars, in his sonnet

TO NIGHT.

Mysterious night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,

This glorious canopy of light and blue?
Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew

Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,

And lo! Creation widened in man's view.

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,

Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind!
Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?"

The same thought occurred to Whitman. And perhaps no more curious contrast exists in literature than that between White's polished gem, and the American bard's wild, rough chant of "Night and Death."

Whitman stands by himself on the prairie looking up at the stars, the wearied emigrants, his companions, sleeping around the low-burning fire. The great thoughts of space and eternity come over him, and he absorbs immortality and peace :-

"I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not-day exhibited,

I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.

OI see now that life cannot exhibit all to me—as the day cannot ;

I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.”

For no poet was ever more en rapport, as he himself might have phrased it, with the skies, with "the splendid silent sun," the moon, the stars, than Whitman. He confides to his readers how, when depressed by any sad event or "tearing problem,” he would wait till he could go out under the stars for comfort. In silence, he says, of a fine night, the soul receives answers of peace to her questionings. spirit of sublime mysticism breathes through his whispers of Heavenly Death," where, amid the murmured gossip of the night, he seems to catch

A

the sound of footsteps gently ascending, of the ripple of unseen tides. He faintly discerns, amid the great cloud masses that swell and mingle together, the appearing and disappearing ever and anon of some half-dimmed, far-off star

"Some parturition rather, some solemn immortal birth ; On the frontiers to eyes impenetrable,

Some soul is passing over.”

There is a soothing charm in another of his poems, in which a child stands with her father on the beach at night. Clouds speed thick and black athwart the autumn sky, threatening to swallow the large, calm "lord-star" Jupiter ascending into a clear belt of ether yet left in the east, while just above “swim the delicate sisters, the Pleiades." And watching the stars' impending doom, the child silently weeps. Her father comforts her—

Weep not child,

Weep not, my darling,

With these kisses let me remove your tears,

The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,

They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,

Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge.

They are immortal; all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again;

The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure;

The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

Then, dearest child, mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

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*

*

*

Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights passing away),
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter,
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,

Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades."

It is a lesson of more intimately human comfort that Professor Max Müller draws from the stars : "As we grow old it is our lot to lose our friends; but the friends we have lost are often nearer to us than those who remain. Will they never be quite near to us again? Stars meet stars after thousands of years, and are we not of more value than many a star?” 1

"Auld Lane Syne": Preface.

VI

BEAUTY IN DEATH

"Yet at times I see upon sweet pale faces
A light begin

To tremble, as if from holy places
And shrines within.

And at times methinks their cold lips move
With hymn and prayer,

As if somewhat of awe, but more of love
And hope were there."

F. G. Whittier: "My Soul and I."

LITERATURE is full of allusions to the look of peace and beauty often left upon the countenance when the shadow of life has lifted from it; the "rapture of repose," Byron calls it, which is reflected there, and which constitutes to many a token of the happiness to which the parted soul has won. So, in a beautiful passage in his fantastical romance, "Arcadia," Sir Philip Sidney says of the departed soul of Parthenia, that it had gone, "one might well assure himself, to heaven, which left the body in so heavenly a demeanour."

"No sight upon earth is in my eyes half so lovely," wrote Charles Wesley, referring to this look on the