parted to the right and to the left, laying bare the infinite revelations that can be made visible only to dying eyes; and how, as the child of Lebanon gazed upon the mighty visions, she saw bending forward from the heavenly host, as if in gratulation to herself, the one countenance for which she hungered and thirsted. "The twin-sister, that should have waited for her in Lebanon, had died of grief, and was waiting for her in Paradise. Immediately in rapture she soared upwards from her couch; immediately in weakness she fell back; and being caught by the evangelist, she flung her arms around his neck; whilst he breathed into her ear his final whisper, 'Wilt thou now suffer that God should give by seem ing to refuse?'-'Oh yes-yes-yes,' was the fervent answer from the daughter of Lebanon." Hitherto she had known not what to ask for as she ought. Hitherto her asking had been amiss she had asked for she knew not what. But now her vision was purged. Now she had the second-sight that could pierce through and beyond the night-side of nature, and gaze on the land that is very far off. Hitherto she had, at the best, seen through a glass darkly; but now, it might be said, face to face. So that she knew what to ask for, now.

:

Chactas, the blind old sachem in Chateaubriand's Wertherian romance, is made to bring that once enthusiastically admired story to an end by relating a parable to his woe-fraught young listener. It tells how the Meschacebé, soon after leaving its source among the hills, began to feel weary of being a simple brook; and so asked for snows from the mountains, water from the torrents, rain from the tempests; until, its petitions granted, it burst its bounds, and ravaged its hitherto delightsome banks. At first the proud stream exulted in its force; but seeing ere long that it carried desolation in its flow, that its progress was now doomed to solitude, and that its waters were for ever turbid, it came to regret the humble bed hollowed out for it by nature,-the birds, the flowers, the trees, and the brooks, hitherto the modest companions of its tranquil course.

The moral of the myth of Tithonus is one for all time. Mr. Tennyson has pointed it for ours. He shows us in Tithonus a

white-haired shadow roaming like a dream the ever silent spaces of the Fast; and from this grey shadow, once a man, the wailing utterance of a sad story comes :

"I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.'

Then didst thou grant my asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indiguant work'd their wills,
And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me,
And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes.

Let me go take back thy gift :
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance

Where all should pass, as is most meet for all?

Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far off, on that dark earth, be true?
'The gods themselves cannot recal their gifts.""

"AND HE DIED."

GENESIS V. passim.

ELL known is Addison's reference to an eminent man

WEL

in the Romish Church, who upon reading in the Book of Genesis how that all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died; and all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died; and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty nine years, and he died;-immediately shut himself up in a convent, an absolute recluse from the world, as not thinking anything in this life worth pursuing, which had not regard to another.

What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death? "Dead !—Man's 'I was,' by God's ‘I am ’—

All hero-worship comes to that.

High heart, high thought, high fame, as flat

As a gravestone. Bring your facet jam—
The epitaph's an epigram."

So writes Mrs. Browning. And thus writes Barry Cornwall, on the same trite text; it is the last stanza of the History of a Life, and of a successful one :

"And then-he died. Behold before ye

Humanity's poor sum and story;

Life-death-and all that is of glory."

And again, in the same poet's chanson of the time of Charlemagne, the stanza that magnifies that hero-king, and tells how he fought and vanquished Lombard, Saxon, Saracen, and ruled every race he conquered with a deep consummate skill-is followed by one beginning,

"But he died! and he was buried

In his tomb of sculptured stone," etc.

And once again, in one of this author's dramatic fragments is sketched the career of what Mr. Carlyle would call a "foiled potentiality "of one who, in favourable circumstances, might have been, but who in prosaic reality and the matter-of-fact pressure of this work-a-day world, never actually became, great. Had he but lived under better auspices, he would have been

Death stands everywhere in the background, as the elder Schlegel says in his analysis of the elements of tragic poetry, and to it every well or ill-spent moment brings us nearer and closer; and even when a man has been so singularly fortunate as to reach the utmost term of life without any grievous calamity, the inevitable doom still awaits him to leave or to be left by all that is most dear to him on earth. In the words, most musical, most melancholy, of the laureate,

"The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground;

Man comes and tills the field, and lies beneath;
And after many a summer dies the swan."

Addison, in another essay than that already referred to, describes an afternoon he passed in Westminster Abbey, straying through and lingering in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, "amusing himself," as the phrase then ran— not quite in our frivolous sense-with the tombstones and the inscriptions that he met with in those several regions of the dead, most of which recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another; the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances that are common to all mankind. The "Spectator" could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons, who had left no other memorial of them but that they were born, and that they died. Mr. de Quincey characteristically opened his autobiographic sketches in their original form, with the avowal that nothing makes such dreary and monotonous reading as the old hackneyed roll-call, chronologically arranged, of inevitable facts in a man's life. "One is so certain of the man's having been born, and also of his having died, that it is dismal to be under the necessity of reading it." The man-a man—any man—every man. It is the common lot. And we know what James Montgomery has made of the Common Lot. Here are two or three of the stanzas that are most to the purpose :—

"Once in the flight of ages past,

There lived a man: and who was he?
Mortal! howe'er thy lot be cast,

That man resembled thee.

*

"He suffered,--but his pangs are o'er ;

Enjoy'd, but his delights are fled;
Had friends, his friends are now no more;
And foes,-his foes are dead.

"He saw whatever thou hast seen;
Encounter'd all that troubles thee:

There lived a man-lived, and loved, and learned, and laboured-enjoyed the common joys of his kind, endured the common sufferings. AND HE DIED. Old Egeus mooted a veritable truism when moralizing thus, in Chaucer :—

"Vit ither ne lyvede never man, he seyde,

In al this world, that some tyme he ne deyde."

A French historian comments on this characteristic of old cloister chronicles, that the obscurest event of the cloister holds in them as conspicuous a place as the greatest revolutions in history. For instance, in a chronicle cited by him of the year of grace 732, which produced the battle of Poictiers, whereby Charles Martel arrested the vast invasion of Islamism, not a line is vouchsafed to that event. In fact, the year is passed over without notice, as containing nothing really deserving of notice. But beside a date expressly given, we read, "Martin est mort,"-Martin being an unknown monk of the Abbey of Corvey; and, farther on again, "Charles, maire du palais, est mort." Martin was an unknown monk, and he died. Charles Martel was mayor of the palace, and the conqueror at Poictiers, and he died. Well remarks M. Demogeot, that "tous les hommes deviennent egaux devant la secheresse laconique de ces premiers chroniqueurs." "We must all go, that is certain," writes Mrs. Piozzi to Sir James Fellows, "and 'tis the only thing that is certain. Kai ȧne@ave ends all the cases Dr. James quotes from your old friend Hippocrates." All the physician's cases have the same terminal affix, AND HE DIED. Very long-lived some of them may be; but, as Mr. Browning puts it in his fine poem of "Saul,"

"But the licence of age has its limit; thou diest at last."