Ford

Or, if I would delight my private hours With music or with poem, where, so soon As in our native language, can I find That solace?

-Milton.

Paradise Regained

Men

who shed great thoughts

As easily as an oak looseneth its golden

leaves

In kindly largess to the soil it grew on,

Whose hearts have a look southward, and

are open

Co the whole noon of nature.

-Festus

T

HE ancients were wont to say that he who saw a god must die. Perhaps this meant simply that he who has

looked deepest into the vast mysteries of being, and held closest converse with the Eternal Love, is overpowered by the yearning and necessity to speak that which cannot be spoken, and which yet seems hovering in fiery words upon the tongue. The voice of the mighty universe flows through the slender reed and shatters it with the very excess of quivering melody. Certain it is that without that law of genius which compels it to utter itself as it best may, very few great words had been spoken or great deeds done. Every great man is more or less tinged with what the world calls fanaticism. The disbelief of the whole world cannot shake the faith that he is God's messenger, which upbears him like a rock. He knows that the whole power of God is behind him, as the drop of water in the little creek feels that it is moved onward by the whole weight of the rising ocean. Unsupported by any of earth's customs or conventions, he leans

wholly on the Infinite. The seal of God's commissions is set within, and they have no ribbands about them to make them respectable in the eyes of the many. Most men are fear

other world, and, set

ful of visitings from the on by those whose interest lies mainly in this, they look with distrust, and often with hate, on him who converses with spirits. All the reliance of the seer is on what is within him. His own fiery soul-for the bush wherein God veils himself must needs burn-is all that urges him on and upholds him.

Men at first always deny the messenger of God. For the cunning devil holds a glass before their eyes which turns everything upside down and makes that seemingly come from hell which has indeed just descended, warm and fragrant, from the bosom of God. But Time

can never put off Eternity more than a day;swift and strong, with a step made majestic and irresistible by an eternal law, comes the fair To-morrow, and with it that clearer perception of the beautiful which sets another star in the fair girdle of the universe. The world is at

last forced to believe the message, but it despitefully uses the bearer of it. In most cases man does not recognize the messenger until the disguise of flesh falls off and the white wings of the angel are seen gleaming in the full sunshine of that everlasting peace back into the home of whose fathomless bosom their flight is turned. If they recognize him earlier, it is with an ill grace. Knowing that hunger is the best taskmaster of the body, and always using to measure spirit by the laws of matter, in which their skill chiefly lies, they think that it must needs be the sharpest spur for the soul also. They hold up a morsel of bread, as boys do to their little dogs in the street, and tell the prophet to speak for it. They know that he has a secret to tell them, and they think that they must starve it out of him, as if it were a demon. is true enough that hunger is the best urger of the soul, but it is the hunger, not of the body, but of the soul, which is love. A state of rest and quietude in the body is the most comfortable to the happiness and serenity, and so to the inspiration of the soul. Love, which is its nature, quickens the soul of the seer,

It

And then, even of itself, it high doth climb;
What earst was dark, becomes all eye, all sight,

Bright starre, that, to the wise, of future things gives light. *

The distracting cares and sorrows of want are not the best nurselings of genius. It is fit that the great soul should pass through the fiery furnace of sorrow, that it may come out refined and whitened, and that it may learn its own infinite deepness and strength, which sorrow alone can teach it. But that the fierce gnawings of

that bitter flame are consistent with the calmness and serenity which are needful to the highest and noblest moments of the creative power has never yet been proved. The prophet knows his calling from childhood up. He knows that he has that to say which shall make the heart of the vast universe beat with a more joyous peacefulness and a serener motion. he grows to man's estate, the sense of a duty imposed on him by nature and of a necessary obedience to heavenly messengers which the world neither sees nor acknowledges, becomes stronger and stronger. He feels his divine right

* Henry More's Psychathanasia.

As