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daily-in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers, and a half adieu unto the world, and take my farewell in a colloquy with God. This,' he continues, after quoting some verses of a sacred hymn, ‘is the dormative I take to bedward: I need no other laudanum than this to make me sleep: after which I close my eyes in security, content to take my leave of the sun, and sleep unto the resurrection.

Pagan

vain glories, which thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement for ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the immortality of their names, were never damped with the necessity of oblivion.

Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal so with men in this world, that they are not afraid to meet them in the next, who, when they die, make no commotion among the dead, and are not touched with that poetical taunt of Isaiah.* That mystical metal of gold exposed unto the violence of fire,

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Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us? Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! . . . They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; that made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners ?'—Isaiah xiv. 9–17.

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grows only hot, and liquefies, but consumeth not: so when the consumable and volatile pieces of our body shall be refined into a more impregnable and fixed temper, like gold, though they suffer from the actions of flames, they shall never perish, but lie immortal in the arms of fire.' 'Lie immortal in the arms of fire!' There is nothing grander in Paradise Lost.

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Yet when we come to consider the meaning attentively, we find that in spite of the paradoxical attitude, there is often sagacious insight and sound sense at bottom. I can hardly think there was any ever scared into heaven: they go the fairest way to heaven that would serve God without a hell. Other mercenaries that crouch unto him in fear of hell, though they term themselves the servants, are indeed but the slaves of the Almighty. There go so many circumstances to piece up one good action, that it is a lesson to be good, and we are forced to be virtuous by the book.' These are the sober words of a sober thinker. That he should immediately afterwards arrive at the conclusion that Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain,' is, no doubt, rather startling: but, after all, not a little of the charm of the book is owing, it must be owned, to this quaint and whimsical logic. ""Before Abraham was, I am," is the saying of Christ: yet it is true in some sense if I say it of myself: for I was not only before myself, but Adam—that is, in the idea of God, and the decree of that synod held from all eternity. And in this sense I say the world was before the creation, and at the end before it had a begin

ning and thus was I dead before I was alive: though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise: and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain.'

So let us all, during these autumn afternoons, read the Religio Medici and the Urn Burial once again. You must like the good knight of Norwich. Sir Thomas is not, indeed, a very lively writer; for, like most moralists, he loves to wander among the tombs. Shakspeare dallies with death through the mouths of clowns and kings (as in Antony and Cleopatra, and that wonderful scene in the fourth act of Measure for Measure), and his fooling is more effective than direct and serious treatment could be: yet it is not more effective than the grand and solemn trifling of the Religio Medici.

These, and such as these, were my companions last autumn, upon the mountain-side, beside the Mountain Spring, whose lonely, yet cheerful charm has been celebrated in not unmusical numbers :

There is a pebbly beach, with jutting slopes
Of gray and lichened rock, where quiet pool
And fretting fall go gleaming side by side.
The feathery mingled copse behind upswells
Rich with old roots and wealth of ferny green.
The sparse wild-flowers bloom sweetly down beneath
The branching sprays, and clustered lower still
The deep soft mosses grow and spread and cling
In trails and clumps of verdure. Eglantine
Hangs in a blushing arch along the bank,
And flings rose-shadows where we sit below.
There sitting have we made the soft air rich
With costly thoughts: the echoes there have heard

The measured waves of stately-flowing verse,

Or sweet low pauses of some murmured song,

Through whose calm heart the minstrel breathed his own.

To-morrow we start for home. Winter is coming down the hill-side, and the quiet meadows and hedgerows of Hazeldean are fitter for rheumatic Campaigners than this sharp mountain air.

325

XIII.

NANCY'S TRYST:

A REMINISCENCE OF THE HIGHLANDS.

SINCE

INCE our return from the hillside, we have had death on the premises-old Donald, the gamekeeper, gardener, coachman, and poacher-in-ordinary to the united households of the Laburnums, has shaken the dust out of his last pair of shoes, and left a world of which he never thought much. Donald did not belong to what, in the slang of translated Cockneys, is called the Gushing School. He was a confirmed grumblernot indeed venturing to impeach the arrangements of Providence (which in his view had been fixed from a remote period), but by no means desiring to conceal his impression that, generally speaking, his fellow-creatures were a set of arrant bunglers and knaves. The Doctor had, one autumn morning, fished him out of a wet ditch, where he was standing up to his knees in frozen water, watching a flock of wild geese that were feeding in a neighbouring field. Instead of having him up for poaching, the Doctor, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief, made him his keeper. He proved a

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