"Here, if anywhere, we see the golden stairs on which angels descend from heaven to earth, and whisper sweet sounds into the ears of those who have ears to hear. Words cannot be so inspired, for words, we know, are of the earth earthy. Melodies, however, are not of this earth, and the greatest of musical poets has truly said “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.'" "Music," says Carlyle, "is a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into it.” And Edgar Allan Poe, who was ever harking after music through the medium of words, declares: "It is in music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the poetic sentiment, it struggles the creation of supernal beauty. It may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, attained in fact. We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels." It is Tennyson who speaks of "The tides of Music's golden sea A beautiful dying word was that of the mighty poet-musician, Beethoven, who through so many weary years had been deaf to his own divine harmonies: "I shall hear in Heaven.” VIII SERAPH HOPE "Fair hope, our earlier heaven, by thee Richard Crashaw. EVEN in worldly affairs we live by hope. "All which happens through the whole world," says Luther, "happens through hope. No husbandman would sow a grain of corn if he did not hope it would spring up and bring forth the ear. How much more are we helped on by hope in the way to eternal life." It has been said that man is never happy in the present, that his joys belong all either to memory or to hope, that it is only the very young who can say, in the passing hour, "I am happy." And even in the comparatively careless joys of the young there is often an obscure sense of uneasiness, some haunting apprehension of the fleetingness of bliss; so that if their feelings be analysed it will often be found that their happiness consists in the anticipation of pleasure. "Young men may be happy, but not otherwise but by hope," quotes Bacon from Aristotle, and he himself thus pleasantly applies the moral--" So we must all acknowledge our minority and embrace the felicity which is by hope of the future world.” "Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar ; The soul, uneasy and confined, from home, It was a gallant heart in a poor crippled little travesty of a body that framed in these golden words the lesson of hope. By this gift of hope likewise does Coventry Patmore justify the obscurity in which our after-life is wrapped :- "On fleshly tables of the heart He penn'd truth's feeling counterpart We cannot give up the mighty hopes that make us men," wrote Tennyson, with reference to this Godimplanted sense of immortality in man. It is enough, says Wordsworth, resting on these same instinctive aspirations, "if, as toward the silent tomb we go, Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, We feel that we are greater than we know." Races better than we, as the Swedish Bishop Tegner remarks, have had nothing but hope to rest on; and with her promises only were planted the amaranthine walks of Elysium. Indeed, here and there, to some of the old-time seekers after God, hope was all but transfigured into faith. She was transfigured thus to Socrates, who on the very brink of death could say, "No one knows but that death is the greatest of all goods to man." And, with even more assurance, "You, therefore, O my judges, ought to entertain good hopes with respect to death, and to meditate on the one truth that to a good man nothing is evil, neither while living nor when dead, nor are his concerns neglected by the gods." Thus to these mighty spirits of old came intimations of those beliefs with which, in our day, the youngest and most ignorant are made familiar; so that, as Ruskin says— 'By loom, or forge, or mine, Or squalid hut, there breaks for these Taking other gifts for granted, those writers are always the most popular who speak to us of hope What boundless hope is in Dickens's New Year's wish: Many happy New Years, unbroken friendships, great accumulation of cheerful recollections, affection on earth, and heaven at last for all of us." The following of George Du Maurier is rather an assurance than a hope: "All I know is this: that all will be well for us all, and of such a kind that all who do not sigh for the moon will be well content."1 It is Tennyson who sings of the and of his trust "that good shall fall And it is Tennyson who is the idol of the people's heart. This quality of hopefulness in him it was that appealed to Carlyle, whose dour and gloomy nature was yet so open to sunny influences, and who clung in his last days to Goethe's saying, "We bid you to hope." In Tennyson he recognised a note of "the eternal melodies." "And so I say," he wrote to the poet, quoting from "Ulysses," "let us all sail forward with new cheer, beyond the sunset,' whither we are bound It may be that the gulfs will wash us down : It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles And see the great Achilles whom we knew !'" We most of us have an Achilles whom we crave to see, and Tennyson's hope of seeing again his Achilles, Arthur Hallam, the friend of his youth, was far from being bounded by that vague "may be" of Ulysses. This passage it was which also appealed to that "doubting Thomas," as he called himself, Professor Huxley, who quoted it in one of his latest lectures, inclining for one moment to the possibility of bliss the lines suggest. Says Hartley Coleridge "To hope is paradise; and to believe Is all of heaven that earth can e'er receive." So delightful a symbolism pervades a sonnet of |