shadows creeping along the hillside. There is a stroke of transcendental truth in the reflection; and it is surely better to be a shepherd among green pastures and by the side of still waters, watching the silent revolution of your own shadow from dawn to dusk, than a dweller in dandydom with a gold Geneva watch ticking in your fob, instead of a warm human heart beating within your breast.

"O God! methinks it were a happy life
To be no better than a homely swain;
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run,
How many make the hour full complete,
How many hours bring about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live."

Apollodorus.-The dwellers in cities seem to think that watches rule the day and clocks rule the night; and they take no heed of rising and setting suns, or of the stars that trail their golden train of tresses night after night through the silent heavens, and disappear like foam bells when the glory-rivers of dawn are melting into the blue sea of day.

Diogenes. Said I not truly, Apollodorus, of a star-studded sky, that it is a dreary sight? When sitting alone with the night, I have tried to believe that where there is so much beauty there must be abundance of joy. But then the earth below is all covered with the blackness of darkness; and the same stars that have looked upon the ghastly faces of dying warriors on a thousand battlefields, and that have been reflected in seas of blood during centuries of world-conflagration, shine at this moment upon countless churchyards, where the brave and the beautiful are still enough now; they are lighting the murderer to the dwelling of the innocent, and trembling over the ragged hut where poverty pines away on a bed of

straw.

Apollodorus.—We do well indeed to mourn with the misery that is ever wailing to the stars; and there are moods of my own mind, when the wretchedness and sin of the world

transform the whole aspect of creation, so that the sun becomes black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon becomes as blood, and the lights of heaven are darkened. But it is wrong thus to diminish the joy, and so dim the glory of the universe of God. Rather let us believe with Coleridge, that in nature there is nothing melancholy. Instead of compelling the whole creation to groan and travail with our communicated pain, we ought to drink deep from her fountains of perennial joy. How can there be sadness in those crystal spheres, when their motions are harmonious as the songs of the seraphimwhen they surround in glittering ranks the palace of the Eternal, where sorrow and sighing are unknown-when they sever the soul from the valley of tears and lift it up to God? If they were to open their silent lips and speak in golden tones, surely they would send down from their far shrines tidings of great joy, and not voices of lamentation, mourning, and woe. The royal singer thought not of sorrow, when he exclaimed in an ecstasy of exultation, "Praise God, all ye stars of light!" Even in hours of darkness and fear the hearts of the holy have been wet with the dew of delight beneath the black but beaming countenance of the nightheaven. Listen to the seraphic voice of the last of the Scottish martyrs, and then tell me if no change has come over the spirit of your dream: "Enemies think themselves satisfied that we are compelled to wander in mosses and upon mountains; but even amid the storms of these last two nights I cannot express what sweet times I have had, when I had no covering but the dark curtains of night. Yea, in the silent watch, my mind was led out to admire the deep and inexpressible ocean of joy wherein the whole family of heaven swim. Each star led me out to wonder what he must be who is the star of Jacob, of whom all stars borrow their shining."

Diogenes.-Almost, Apollodorus, thou persuadest me to be a Christian. Willingly would I suffer martyrdom to en

joy for one hour the feelings of that heroic man.

Apollodorus.-You breathe the melancholy of your own unsatisfied spirit over the works of God; but the soul of the beautiful Renwick, amid the horror of darkness that hung over the moors and mountains of his native country, rested in the Beulah land of a blessed belief, and thus was he able out of the fulness of his heart to shed a divine rapture over the face of heaven. To feel like a Christian, you must stand on the firm footing of a Christian faith. There is no finer testimony to the truth of Christianity than the exuberance of delight with which it fills the believing soul a delight that is most wonderfully manifested during a period of persecution. This rapture differs in kind as well as in degree from the ecstasy of the poet, when he beholds "a hundred and a hundred savage peaks in the last light of day, all glowing of gold and amethyst, like giant spirits of the wilderness" or when a great thought rises like the morning sun out of the ocean of his soul. It resembles rather that state of divine delirium in which the old Hebrew prophet saw the mountains skipping like rams, and the forests clapping their hands in one wind of delight, and heard the whole earth shouting aloud for joy. The poet is kindled into a glow by gazing on the glory of heaven and the gladness of sea and shore; but the exultation of the Christian hero ever springs from within, and the whole universe seems filled with the feelings and clothed with the raiment of his own soul.

Balder.-I never knew an unbeliever who was not more melancholy than Jaques in the forest of Arden. Life to the sceptic appears but as a great funeral procession-the heavens are hung with the eternal drapery of deathevery heart is beating a burial-marchand generations in thick succession come forth from a land where the light is as darkness, and then return to deeper darkness again. The man who asserts that his own soul is a portion of the divine essence, and that nature is only

an inferior incarnation of God, seems to derive no tidal impulses of delight from a union so high and holy. Do not drifting clouds of doubt dim the serenity of his soul in the most tranquil hours? Do not wailings of woe rise up from his heart instead of pœans of jubilant praise? The hundreds who are dwelling in the "everlasting No," and the myriads who are clinging around the "Centre of Indifference," and many even who believe themselves to have reached the "everlasting Yea," know not the nature of the happiness that exalts the Christian martyr to heaven. The heart of Emerson seems as sad and solemn as the recesses of an old pine forest. Your own laughter, Diogenes, is more wildly sorrowful than your tears. It reminds me of the forced and very tragical mirth of Hume on his death-bed, or of the song with which the Girondists on the scaffold sung themselves away into annihilation.

Apollodorus. If any spot on the face of this earth can persuade the sceptic to become a Christian, it is the GreyFriars' Churchyard of Edinburgh. Let him go thither and read the rude inscription on the simple memorial stone that marks out the hallowed ground where one hundred martyrs of the covenant were buried by the side of murderers and the castaways of society; and then let him think how serenely on the scaffold these noble Christian heroes smiled in the face of death-how melodiously they welcomed glory and the grave-and how brightly on their brows the gleam of victory lay, when the imperishable spirit was soaring up to God! The man who, after meditating on these scenes, can still doubt the divinity of the faith that filled the hearts of the martyrs to the brim with joy is wandering in a region where there is neither Sun nor star, where no morning comes down in green and gold upon the voiceless mountains, and where all the daughters of music are brought low.

Diogenes.-Earnest and truly heroic men once made glad the solitary places of our fatherland; but their earnestness and their belief have been buried with

them in the grave. seen face to face.

his footstool no more.

God is no longer The wide world is Shall we not mourn, then, that the old spirit of heroism is for ever gone? The dust and memorial stones of the martyrs are all that remain of them now. And through this weary life, with the longing for light within and the silent darkness all around-with the infinite universe in its dumbness and splendour mocking the misery of the mind-with the struggle between fate and freedom never ending, still beginning and with a thousand mysteries pressing in upon the bewildered soul-shall there not be suspiria de profundis-voices of lamentation and woe? "Oh! I feel like a seed in the cold earth, quickening at heart and pining for the air." Happiness once I knew in the sunny prime of life, but the seasons revolve forward and never backward to those departed days. The true golden age lay around us in our infancy, when days were as long as years, and the sun stood still over the rejoicing world. Then dawn and dusk alike brought peace and gladness on their wings, and our sleeping and our waking hours were girdled with dewy dreams. With a father's roof above us and a mother's arm around us, we had nothing to fear; and so our "ringlets danced to the whistling wind." Love, Hope, and Joy formed a roundel about the heart, and sung their syren songs in the spirit's ear; our little garden was a paradise regained, where the birds warbled like seraphs through the long bright day, where the golden fruit gleamed through the glossy leaves, and where the flowers that nodded dreamily to the fanning wind were steeped in richer colours than our eyes can now see over all the surface of the degenerate earth. In that blissful time we saw nothing but brightness, knew nothing but joy, every countenance seemed radiant with one delight, and all nature was but a mirror reflecting our own happy looks and smiles. But now a garment of sackcloth is spread over the face of creation; "the singing birds of that time now sing no more;" sorrow and care

are desert places that seem conscious of their own solitariness, and their dead silence seems the pent-up hush of fear. Many birds and animals have a melancholy cry, as if they felt that they were alone in the world. Each star in the heavens is a "lonelihood of light." The sun, although a bridegroom, is never accompanied by his bride, and stalks through the sky silent and alone. The moon also is a solitary, and steals through the streets of the city of God by night with the sad deserted countenance of one who is seeking but cannot find. The flowers of the field dwell apart, and each in its little lone nook communes with its heart and is still. Every man is an eremite shut up in the solitude of his own weary cell. The husband and wife live together in peace and love for fifty years, and yet continue strangers to each other until their dying day. Of our most intimate friends we know little more than their faces and names, for the individuality of each is so carefully hedged around that his purest feelings and his holiest thoughts are known only to himself and to God. A man is even a mystery to himself, a spectre shrouded up in darkness; and, should he have a desire to escape out of the waste howling wilderness of his own soul, to break through the painful silence and seclusion in which he is condemned to dwell, and to mingle with the great soul of the world, that desire would only compel him to feel more forcibly that he is a prisoner for life, and that he is as solitary in the society of his fellow-creatures as if he lived alone on an island amid the melancholy

main.

Apollodorus.-These sombre reflections have not been suggested, I hope, by the uncongeniality of your present companionship. But, as a lover of solitude and the society of my own heart, it seems to me a blessed thing that every soul is "like a star and dwells apart." Emerson has said, "To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me." Are

we alone when the living creatures of the imagination, like an innumerable company of angels, surround with their serene countenances the silent heart? Are we alone when the thaumaturgic faculty is at work, and thoughts in swift succession come and go? Did Shakspeare feel himself in solitude when Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othellowhen Cordelia, Desdemona, Juliet, and Miranda-when Ariel, Oberon, Puck, and the wierd sisters-were peopling the haunted chambers of his soul? Was John alone in Patmos when he beheld vast multitudes such as no tongue can number, and heard their mingled voices swelling up like the sound of many waters?

rose.

Balder. It is true that great men are least lonely when left to their own society, and that absolute solitude is an impossibility; for God is with us when we know it not, and his presence makes the desert to rejoice and blossom as the But when a Milton in power of genius and purity of heart towers up above the common multitude, like Mont Blanc above the surrounding mountains, he appears to be a companionless pilgrim in the land. The loftier the spirit the more lonely does he seem. Thus throughout the whole course of the Divine Man on earth we cannot fail to be struck with his utter isolation. In the

midst of a gazing crowd, while he stilled the storm in the reeling brain of the demoniac, no soul out of the vast concourse could fathom the divine melancholy that trembled in his "burdened eye." He was far removed from human sympathy and aid, when "he trode in majestic solitude the mountain of temptation." From the company of friends he retired to desert places apart, and there, while his locks were drenched with the dew of night, he lifted up his lonely voice to God. Alone he walked the waters of the Galilean lake-alone he suffered in the garden, while his followers slept. He trod out the winepress alone.

Apollodorus.-How awful, too, was the shrouded solitude of the Ancient of Days, before the foundations of the