VALEDICTION, FORBIDDING MOURNING. John Donne. As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say, "The breath goes now," and some say, "No;" So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move, "T were profanation of our joys, To tell the laity our love. Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears; Men reckon what it did and meant; But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent. Dull sublunary lover's love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it. But we by a love so far refined That ourselves know not what it is, Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss. Our two souls, therefore, which are one, A breach, but an expansïon, Like gold to airy thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; And though it in the centre sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, And grows erect as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Thy firmness makes my circle just, THE LOST LEADER. Robert Browning. I. JUST for a handful of silver he left us, They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, How all our copper had gone for his service! Rags were they purple, his heart had been proud! We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him, Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, Learned his great language, caught his clear accents, Made him our pattern to live and to die! Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us, Burns, Shelley, were with us, they watch from their graves! He alone breaks from the van and the freemen, He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves! We shall march prospering, II. not thro' his presence; Songs may inspirit us, not from his lyre; Deeds will be done, while he boasts his quiescence, Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels, One wrong more to man, one more insult to God! Forced praise on our part — the glimmer of twilight, Best fight on well, for we taught him—strike gallantly, Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us, EMERSON. Matthew Arnold. FORTY years ago, when I was an under-graduate at Oxford, voices were in the air there which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices! they are a possession to him forever. No 1 This discourse was given in Boston in the winter of 1883-84. such voices as those which we heard in our youth at Oxford are sounding there now. Oxford has more criticism now, more knowledge, more light; but such voices as those of our youth it has no longer. The name of Cardinal Newman is a great name to the imagination still; his genius and his style are still things of power. But he is over eighty years old; he is in the Oratory at Birmingham; he has adopted, for the doubts and difficulties which beset men's minds to-day, a solution which, to speak frankly, is impossible. Forty years ago he was in the very prime of life; he was close at hand to us at Oxford; he was preaching in St. Mary's pulpit every Sunday; he seemed about to transform and to renew what was for us the most national and natural institution in the world, the Church of England. Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music,subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem to hear him still, saying: "After the fever of life, after wearinesses and sicknesses, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness, struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this troubled, unhealthy state, at length comes death, at length the white throne of God, at length the beatific vision." Or, if we followed him back to his seclusion at Littlemore, that dreary village by the London road, and to the house of retreat and the church which he built there,- a mean house such as Paul might have lived in when he was tent-making at Ephesus, a church plain and thinly sown with worshippers, who could resist him there either, welcoming back to the severe joys of church-fellowship, and of daily worship and prayer, the firstlings of a generation which had well-nigh forgotten them? Again I seem to hear him: "The season is chill and dark, and the breath of the morning is damp, and worshippers are few; but all this befits those who are by their profession penitents and mourners, watchers and pilgrims. More dear to them. that loneliness, more cheerful that severity, and more bright that gloom, than all those aids and appliances of luxury by which men nowadays attempt to make prayer less disagreeable to them. True faith does not covet comforts; they who realise that awful day, when they shall see Him face to face whose eyes are as a flame of fire, will as little bargain to pray pleasantly now as they will think of doing so then." Somewhere or other I have spoken of those "last enchantments of the Middle Age" which Oxford sheds around us, and here they were! But there were other voices sounding in our ear besides Newman's. There was the puissant voice of Carlyle; so sorely strained, over-used, and misused since, but then fresh, comparatively sound, and reaching our hearts with true, pathetic eloquence. Who can forget the emotion. of receiving in its first freshness such a sentence as that sentence of Carlyle upon Edward Irving, then just dead: "Scotland sent him forth a herculean man; our mad Babylon wore and wasted him with all her engines,— and it took her twelve years!" A greater voice still, the greatest voice of the century, came to us in those youthful years through Carlyle: the voice of Goethe. To this day,- such is the force of youthful associations, I read the Wilhelm Meister with more pleasure in Carlyle's translation than in the original. The large, liberal view of human life in Wilhelm Meister, how novel it was to the Englishman in those days! and it was salutary, too, and educative for him, doubtless, as well as novel. But what moved us most in Wilhelm Meister was that which, after all, will always move the young most,-the poetry, the eloquence. Never, surely, was Carlyle's prose so beautiful and pure as in his rendering of the Youth's dirge |