THE GATE OF SIN. (How else but through a broken heart May Lord Christ enter in?"

-The Ballad of Reading Gaol.) "Child," whispered the star: "Look up to me

From a world of grief and sin

The star of faith shall guide thee straight

By the way of the Cross through Heaven's gate.

Lord Christ will let thee in!"

The old earth said: "Be thou my child

Come frolic and dance with the rest, In the sun's bright gold and the dia

mond dew,

Where the gay nymphs fly and the fawns pursue,

Till they drop to sleep on my breast."

The sands ran fast through the reckoning glass

In the lapse of the whirling years. Old earth proved false and joy was brief:

The fairy gold was a withered leaf,

And the diamond dew, salt tears.

The sick leaves shrank, the dead leaves dropped;

The wind blew dank and cool.

An old man lay on the shores of time, Like a dying moth in the silken slime At the edge of a stagnant pool.

The red sun sank in a shroud of fog
As he lay in dumb despair.
On the purple pall one star shone
bright,

And a voice, like a ray of liquid light,
Fell soft through the quivering air:

"Poor child of earth, thou art halt and blind:

Thy heart is a clay-cold clod

But the shrivelled soul within thee pines

For the mystic bread in the altarshrines,

For the light and the love of God!"

"Too late, too late," the old man said; "I have turned from the guiding star; The rose light fades in the purple gloom,

Sharp thorns have banished the summer bloom,

My feet have strayed too far." "Look up, dull soul," the voice replied, "God's grace to thee is given; Through the gate of sin, Thou hast wandered in

To the outer court of Heaven!

"Far off thou hast followed the Way of the Cross,

By the Master set apart

In tears and pain thou hast paid they toll,

The Lord Christ comes to thy ransomed soul

Through the rift of a broken heart." Maria Longworth Storer.

The Dublin Review.

THE SONG OF THE TINKER.

I am the man of pot and pan,
I am a lad of mettle;

My tent I pitch by the wayside ditch
To mend your can and kettle;
While town-bred folk bear a year-long
yoke

Among their feeble fellows,

I clink and clank on the hedgerow bank,

And blow my snoring bellows.

I loved a lass with hair like brass,
And eyes like a brazier glowing;
But the female crew, what they will do,
I swear is past all knowing!
She flung her cap at a ploughman chap,
And a fool I needs must think her,
Who left for an oaf the mug and loaf,
And the snug little tent of a tinker.

But, clank and clang, let women go hang,

And who shall care a farden? With the solder strong of a laugh and a song

My mind I'll heal and harden.

My ways I'll wend, and the pots I'll mend

For gaffer and for gammer, And drive my cart with a careless heart,

And sit by the road and hammer!
May Byron.

The Spectator.

There is a certain mournful consolation in the thought that King Edward died as he would have wished to die in harness, laboring to the last, with that hearty, winning zest of his in life and men and affairs still unimpaired, at the height of the popularity that was so humanly dear to him, with his work and fame as one of the two foremost figures and forces in European politics established unassailably. One could have chosen for such a man and such a Sovereign, since end there had to be, no other end than this. Without abatement, suffering or decay, at a summons mercifully brief, that honest, open heart ceased to beat, the toiling competent hands were folded in rest, the shrewd brain and the warm, radiant, unflagging spirit passed to their eclipse. Who among us would not ask for ourselves the privilege of such a death? "It was too soon," was the first irrepressible cry of the nation as it woke to a strange self in a new world. Yes, it was too soon; too soon for him in the ripeness of his charm and his power; too soon for the country trusting in an unexampled crisis to his sagacity and experience; too soon, above all, for that tender and desolate Queen now more than ever enshrined in the hearts and prayers of her people. But it was not too soon

in the broader sense that here death overtook, not a wasted life, faculties undeveloped, a character gone astray, opportunities unused-when it is always and hideously too soon-but a work three-quarters accomplished, a scheme of existence fully and fruitfully rounded out, aptitudes that for fifty brimming years and more had never rusted. It was not too soon unless we who remain elect to make it so; unless we obliterate from our minds that lesson of practical toleration which it

was his life-work to teach; unless we falter because he, the strong leader, has fallen, bury with him the spirit in which he so greatly lived and labored, and dishonor his memory and our own best instincts by holding over the grave of Edward the Peace-maker an orgy of factional strife. He is gone, but it is left to us to extract and apply the meaning of his reign; to put the nation first in our thoughts as he always put it; to work as he worked for appeasement and mutual understanding. How petty and barren seemed our controversies and passions in the august presence of death; how the scales fell from eyes blinded by the dust of political conflict; how different the speechless, dazed emotion of a nation's grief from the shrill factitious fumings of party combatants. All the little things we had for months been mistaking for great shrank back to their true proportions at that grim cold touch of reality. In the mirror of Death, which never lies, we saw ourselves as we were "Our petty souls, our strutting wits, Our labor'd, puny passion-fits"-and the sight seemed suddenly mean and hateful. Of all the tens of thousands who thronged in Westminster Hall to pay the last tribute of affection to their Sovereign, there was not one who could think of the two Chambers near-by, and of their scenic warfare, without revulsion. The King was dead. That mattered; that was real; all else was a shadow or a sham. One felt the deep, unuttered yearning of the nation to have done with the bitterness of strife. The mood may pass, but not the sure instinct that was behind it. We must all of us capture and keep and be guided by the vision and exaltation of those clarifying days. It is the least service we can render to him who

served us so faithfully and well. King Edward in his life wrought unwaveringly for peace; his death enjoins it. But if a general coming together of all parties in a spirit of conciliation and unselfishness is something we owe, is indeed the only homage we can worthily render, to the dead, we owe it not less to the living. We have not only a new King, but to some extent an unknown one. Since he came of age nearly one-half of the present Sovereign's life has been spent out of England as a sailor and a traveller. He has visited almost every corner of the Empire. He assumes the Imperial sceptre with a better right to it than any of his predecessors possessed-the right of having seen with his own eyes nine-tenths of that Greater Britain which to the bulk of his subjects, for all their pride in it, is necessarily little more than a glittering abstraction. And his Majesty has repeatedly shown that he has not only breathed but has imbibed the air of the over-sea democracies. He understands them. There is perhaps no man in England who understands them better. More than once he has interpreted their secret sentiments to his home-keeping fellowcountrymen with real justice and insight. He has never hidden the intensity of his pride in being an Englishman with a share in the ordering of so vast a heritage. Many and splendid as are the attributes of the British Crown, there is probably none of them that appeals to him more closely than the thought that it is the symbol of unity and kinship to onefifth of mankind. King George's Imperial travels have never been those of the mere tourist. He has turned on all he has seen an alert intelligence, a studious mind, and, above all, an understanding spirit. It is probable, indeed, that the sailor in him, his hearty and engaging naturalness, has found something in the clearer and less ham

pered atmosphere of Colonial life that is more congenial to him than the com. plex and convention-ridden scheme of things that obtains in the older civili zation of Europe; and that if he were not a King, and could make his choice, he would be a settler and a pioneer amid the open, breezy spaces of some new and growing land. Experience, contact, and his own sound instincts have at any rate enabled him to bring to the throne the invaluable asset of an informed and sympathetic knowledge of the needs and sentiments of Greater Britain and of the general problems of Empire. Furiously as we may seem to rage over the issues of our domestic politics, we know, we Eng lish, in our heart of hearts, that they are parochial; that this is not what we are in the world for; that the masterquestion before us and before all British peoples is that of making the Empire for as many purposes as possible a single whole, and of giving it a Coherence, an effectiveness, and an organized power and stability it does not now possess. Slowly and cumbrously we are moving towards the ideal of converting the Empire from a number of ill-related communities into something that shall be, if not a single unit in the society of States, at least a body of a firmed cohesion and a more visible interdependence than at present among its several parts. With this ideal it is impossible not to think of King George as being in anything but the warmest sympathy; and it may mean much for the whole Empire that the throne should now be occupied by an energetic monarch, still in the prime of life, who delights in the society of Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, and South Africans, who knows the Empire, as hardly any of his subjects know it, at first hand, and in whom the best spirit of Imperialism burns with a clear and steady flame.

But this high and unique qualifica