a mere boy, he tramped a hundred miles, begging his way, to hear a wonderful organist at Hamburg, and hid his tow head and dusty body behind one of the cathedral's great pillars, filling his soul with music that never left him, though he poured it out in abundance for all ages. ARDINAL NEWMAN himself said of his great hymn, "Lead, Kindly Light," that it was the tune which gave it its widespread popularity. So, too, the pictures which are conjured up the things you read between the lines—often give a hymn far greater spring and verve than the actual words express. Take that great hymn of Mary Lee Demarest, "My Ain Countrie." Fine as it is in language, yet every line seems to bring up a wide vision far beyond the written words: I am far frae my hame, an' I'm weary aftenwhiles, For the langed for hame bringin', an' my faither's welcome smiles, An' I'll ne'er be fu' content, until mine een do see The gowden gates of heaven an' my ain countrie. I've his gude word o' promise that some gladsome day the king The king in his beauty, in oor ain countrie. My sins hae been mony, an' my sorrows hae been sair; For his bluid hae made me white, an' his han' shall dry my e'e, He is faithfu', that hath promised, an' he'll surely come again, Sae I'm watching aye, and singin' o' my hame, as I wait, The lilt of the Scotticisms doubtless adds to the attractiveness and effect, just as they impart enchantment to Robert Burns' poems. We say "Scotticisms," but really Burns himself originated most of them. Cunningham, Ramsey, Ferguson, Hogg, used comparatively few of them. The Gaelic-the real Scotch-is, of course, a language of itself, and like the Welch, goes back to the tower of Babel, but the chopping off and the using of other letters in place of the regular ones in English words is essentially a Burns feature, and gives to his writings the piquancy which a cloud of worshippers, mostly Englishmen, have essayed to imitate and market their lucubrations as genuine Scotch. But, whether we will or not, the taste for the "Burnsisms" has been established, with the result that carloads of simulations of the great Scotchman's style have been unloaded upon a confiding public by writers, many of whom have probably never seen the north side of the Tweed. True, the Scotch have, or rather had in the time of Burnsfor it is fast passing away-a somewhat broad and rough dialect of their own. Not a particularly poetic one, but such as created about the same kind of difficulty for southrons to apprehend as existed between the language of a Yorkshire farmer and a Cornish miner. For example, the little pieces used in playing checkers were called by the Scotch "dams," and the draught board, or "checkerboard" as we call it, was styled by them a "dam-brod." Dean Ramsey tells of a highborn Scotch gentlewoman going down to London on a shopping excursion. Among other things she wanted tablecloths of the checkerboard pattern. She asked the shopman to show her some "dam-brod" table linen. The attendant was nearly knocked off his feet, but contrived to gather himself together sufficiently to reach down a great roll, assuring her that it was the largest and widest made. However, it would not fill the bill, and she marched from the place grumbling at the stupidity of the shopman. It is noticeable that in his great moments of inspirationwhen Burns rises to lofty sentiment-his language grows with his thoughts into full and sonorous English, whether in prose or Witness his "Man was Made to Mourn": verse. Many and sharp the num'rous ills More pointed still we make ourselves And man whose heaven erected face Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn. His letters to Sir John Sinclair, the earl of Glencairn and others, show the same thing. Perhaps I may quote a word from a letter to Mrs. Dunlop: "How seldom do we meet in this world that we have reason to congratulate ourselves on accessions to our happiness! I have not passed half the ordinary term of an old man's life and yet I scarcely look over the obituary of a newspaper that I do not see some names which I have known and which I and other acquaintances little thought to meet with there so soon." His conservation speaks the same, as recorded by Hugh Miller: ""Yes,' Mr. Burns continued, with growing enthusiasm, 'man is essentially a religious creature, a looker beyond the grave from the very constitution of his mind, and the skeptic who denies it is untrue not only to the being who made and preserves him, but to the entire scope of his own nature. Wherever man is, whether a wanderer in the wild forest or still wider desert, a dweller in some lonely isle of the sea or a tutored, full minded denizen of some blessed land like our own, he has hopes that look forward and upward, the belief in an unending existence and a land of separate souls.' 999 Hugh Miller adds that he was carried away with the enthusiasm and the magnificence of his language. "The Cotter's Saturday Night" eminently illustrated the same thing: Then kneeling down to heaven's eternal king, Hope springs exulting on triumphant wing That thus they all shall meet in future days, No more to sigh or shed the bitter tear, In such society yet still more dear While circling time moves round in an eternal sphere. When the whole matchless poem was read in the presence of a domestic of Mrs. Dunlop's, the maid said: "I dinna ken wha' they mak sae muckle ado aboot Maister Burns' verses. They are no ither than I see every time I gang hame to my faither's hoose." Burns called this the finest compliment he ever had. WHILE the tremendous iron tongue of war is ringing all over the earth it may not be out of place to call up some of the great war hymns of olden days. George Neumarck said in 1650 that a truly great hymn could be pressed out only by the weight of sorrow and suffering. Martin Luther wrote many hymns, but easily the best is "Eine feste Burg." Carlyle says: "Luther wrote this song in a time of blackest threatenings. In these tones, rugged as they are and broken, do we not recognize the accent of that summoned man (summoned not by Charles the Fifth, but by God Almighty also), who answered his friends' warnings not to enter Worms in this wise: 'Were there as many devils in Worms as there are roof tiles, I would on'—of him, who, alone in that assemblage, before all emperors and principalities and powers, spoke forth these final and forever memorable words, 'It is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here stand I. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen!'" W. T. Stead's comments upon this hymn in his "Hymns that Have Helped" possess a special interest at this time. He says: "It was sung at the battle of Lutzen. It was sung also many a time and oft during the Franco-German war. In fact, whenever the depths of the German heart are really stirred, the sonorous strains of Luther's hymn instinctively burst forth. M. Viconte de Vogue, in his criticism of M. Zola's Debacle, pays a splendid tribute to the element in the German character which finds its most articulate expression in Luther's noble psalm. M. de Vogue says that M. Zola in his work entirely fails to explain in what the superiority of the German army consisted. "He who is so well up on all the points of the battle field of Sedan must surely know what was to be seen and heard there on the evening of September 1, 1870. It was a picture to tempt his pen-those innumerable lines of fires starring all the |