Apelles made the canvas glow; I made ploughs and carts and ox-yokes and stools. They cannot see me. My simple words about God and man, and duty and destiny, would be foolishness to them. Let them wait until the world burns with the lustre of what is sprung out of me. When I have risen and stand with the martyr in the fire; when I shine in the catacombs until there is no need of the sun; when I have whispered my comfort and confidence to millions of desolate souls, who are now, and will be looking at what seems to them the fearful vacancy of the hereafter; when I have created new homes for purity and peace to dwell in, and brought men and women and children back to the Divine will; when the love and truth and self-sacrifice of which God has made me, though I seem but a poor peasant, shall have done what all the genius of all the ages has failed to do; when I have hushed the fevered heart of the world to rest, and quickened it into a new life, then they can see me. But I must die to live. The burial comes, then the resurrection. I must be absent as a root, or I can never be present as a flower." Such, as I understand it, is the meaning folded, not only in my text, but also in the richest life of the world. Just as this most celestial soul was folded in a life about which there is a very early application of those old prophecies of some chosen. one who should be as a root out of a dry ground, whose face should be marred more than that of any man, who should have no form nor comeliness in him, so that, when men saw him, there should be no beauty that they should desire him; and as God cast him, so folded, into the place which, of all others at that time, held the heaviest proportion of shard and refuse hastening to decay, cast him into that place as the choicest spot in the garden of the world, and then, by sunlight and darkness and dryness and rain and life and death, wrought out his purpose, until the flower came up, in the full time, to fill the world with wonder and blessing, so it will be with God's best blossom and fruit for ever and ever. The world bends with infinite tenderness over the story of that woman who had no beauty and no blessing, out on the Yorkshire moors. We pity her for the, dismal, scranny school of her childhood, where food for the outer and the inner life was alike hard and crusty and mouldy. We pity her for the lonely drudgery, so hapless and so hopeless, out in Brussels, as we see her sit down to it, while her wings bleed beating the bars of her cage, and the music soars within her, "And the life still drags her downward To its level, day by day, What is fine within her growing Coarse to sympathetic clay." Our lips tremble as we see that striving after some touch of grace and beauty to deck the hard, gray home, though it embody itself in no better thing than a bright little frock and a pair of tiny red shoes; yet to see the poor blossom of grace and beauty shrivelling in the fire, put there and held there by a father harder than the home. We watch her, a woman while yet a child, -a woman, because other little children, still more helpless, are motherless, and can find no other nature large enough to take them in and understand and adopt them; a sister in all sweet, ingenuous, simple ways; a mother in all wise, overbending care and love; and then, at last, a woman grown, walking over great stretches of wild country, that she might be alone with that - other Father and Mother, the Father and Mother of us all, and gather strength and courage from the communion, to go back and bear her burden. of a stern, half-mad father, and a reckless, lost brother, and a bare, rugged life; then we say, "Oh! why was not such a soul clothed in the beauty of Juno, and born in the vale of Tempe, in the golden days, the first-born and nursling of a queen?" But we say this no longer when the flower unfolds to the sun, when her books and her life, in all their variant strength and fulness, reveal the mystery of the homely enfolding, the rank, sharp contrasts of the garden-plat and the hot days and dark nights; for we see in the flower brimming with refreshment and blessing to thousands, how not to the beauty of the goddess, not to the flowery meadows and bosky dells of Arcadia, not to the firstborn and nursling of a queen, could this power come; but to such a soul, set in such a place, to battle through and gather all the influences of such a life. And so, again, dear, quaint, loving Charles Lamb flowered out of the sharp contrasts of Fleet Street and the South-sea House, and that other influence and element of bitterness almost too terrible to mention. No man who has been touched by the sweet beauty and merry twinkling humor of Elia and the Letters, can realize readily how it is that this airy, sprightly, and most wise, genial soul, could ever gather such nurture in the shadows of Christ's Hospital, and the eternal dust and din of London. One imagines that the endless drudgery of the desk, and the shadow of a home where no face of wife or child ever lighted at the sound of his footstep, ought to have withered him up; and so it ought, but for one thing that flashes down into the mystery, and, besides the fact of his endowment, solves the problem. When Charles Lamb was a young man, standing at the portals of life, with that rich nature beating in his heart, his sister Mary, in a sudden passion of insanity, did the most awful deed that daughter can do to mother. Then, when the dust was given to the dust, this young man said, "If I remain as I am, and make my sister a home, there may be months or years at a time when she can live with me in freedom and comfort; but, if I put her away, there can be no future for her but the asylum all the |