on them, all hope that they should be saved was then taken away. The fourteenth night was come, and they were driven up and down in Adria, and about midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country, and sounded once and again, and found reason to fear lest they should have fallen upon rocks. So they cast four anchors out of the stern, and wished for the day-nuxovто пμéрav yevéσba. If 'tis double death to die in sight of shore, as Shakspeare says, it is also, or nearly, double death to die in the dark. Some would almost say, Surely the bitterness of death is past, if light be vouchsafed to the dying, and so the shadows flee away. Well can they understand a pregnant symbolism in that incident of patriarchal days, when a deep sleep fell upon Abram as the sun was going down; and, lo, a horror of a great darkness fell upon him. With something of a shuddering sympathy can they connect the fact that, on the day whence all Good Fridays take their name, there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour, with that other fact that about the ninth hour there was heard a wailing cry, whose echo reverberates through all space and time, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? Ever memorable in classical lore is the supplication of the Greek warrior in Homer, not to die in the dark. Let him see his foe, and see his end, however imminent, however inevitable. King Edward II., in Christopher Marlowe's historical tragedy, left alone in the Berkeley Castle dungeon with Lightborn, a murderer, exclaims : "I see my tragedy written in thy brows; Frequent in historical narrative are instances like that of Labedoyère, who when brought out to be shot, refused to have his eyes bandaged, and looking straight at the levelled muskets, exclaimed in a loud voice, Fire, my friends!" Marshal Ney, a week or two later, also refused to have his eyes bandaged. "For five-and-twenty years," he said, "I have been accustomed to face the balls of the enemy." Then taking off his hat with his left hand, and placing his right upon his heart, he too said in a loud voice, fronting the soldiers, "My comrades, fire on me." Murat fell in a like manner, after a like request, but gazing to the last on a medallion which contained portraits of his wife and four children. What mainly tends to pile up the agony of Goisvintha, in the historical romance of "Antonina," when alone in the vaults with the madman Ulpius, is the distracting absence of light. "Bewildered and daunted by the darkness and mystery around her, she vainly strained her eyes to look through the obscurity, as Ulpius drew her on into the recess. Suddenly he heard her pause, as if panic-stricken in the darkness, and her voice ascended to him, groaning, 'Light! light! oh, where is the light?'" She is held forth at this crisis, as a terrible evidence of the debasing power of crime, as she now stands, enfeebled by the weight of her own avenging guilt, and "by the agency of darkness, whose perils the innocent and the weak have been known to brave." It is only your melodramatic villain that flings forth his flourish in the style of Velasquez in "Braganza,”—addressing the duke, his judge:— "Yes, in your gloomiest dungeons plunge me down. No more these loathing eyes shall see that sun Whose irksome beams light up thy pageant triumph." And thus Sir Walter Scott has full warranty for proving the exceptional courage of his captive Englishman, when subjected to a midnight trial in the vaults of the Vehmgericht, by showing him unappalled by even the utter darkness of that terrible. court. "Even in these agitating circumstances, the mind of the undaunted Englishman remained unshaken, and his eyelid did not quiver nor his heart beat quicker, though he seemed, according to the expression of Scripture, to be a pilgrim in the valley of the shadow of death, beset by numerous snares, and encompassed by total darkness, where light was most necessary for safety." It is only in an oblique sense that what Euripides says is true, of the coward being very valiant in the darkἐν ὄρφνῃ δραπέτης μέγα σθένει. Dr. Croly applies the Homeric prayer of Ajax to an incident in the long war with France, when twenty-seven thousand British were eager, under Abercrombie and the Duke of York, to attack the French lines, and at the first tap of the drum a general cheer was given from all the columns. But the day, we read, had scarcely broke when a dense fog fell suddenly upon the whole horizon, and rendered movement almost impossible. "Nothing could exceed the vexation of the army at this impediment, and if our soldiers had ever heard of Homer there would have been many a repetition of his warrior's prayer, that 'live or die, it might be in the light of day."" One is reminded of the lines in Racine : "Enfin toute l'horreur d'un combat ténébreux; Que pouvait la valeur dans ce trouble funeste?" It has been observed of a certain railway catastrophe, where the crash and collision occurred in a tunnel-in that very place which nobody, even on ordinary occasions, passes through without a slight shudder and an undefined dread of some such disaster as the one in question-that "Ajax's prayer has been muttered by many who never heard of Ajax; and if we are to die, it is at least a mitigation of the hour of fate when it overtakes us in daylight." In tracing, psychologically, the development within us of the sense of awe, Professor Newman attributes to the gloom of night (deadly night, as Homer terms it), more universally perhaps than to any other phenomenon, the first awakening of an uneasy sense of vastness. A young child, as he says, accustomed to survey the narrow limits of a lighted room, wakes in the night, and is frightened at the dim vacancy. "No nurse's tales about spectres are needed to make the darkness awful." Nor, he adds, is it from fear of any human or material enemy: it is the negation, the unknown, the unlimited, which excites and alarms; and sometimes the more if mingled with glimpses of light. 66 The last words audible of Goethe were, More light!" The final darkness grew apace, in the words of his ablest biographer; and he whose eternal longings had been for more light, gave a parting cry for it as he was passing under the shadow of death. "Light! give me more light," is the cry of the dying woman in "The Dead Secret,"-whereby hangs that tale. How often Lord Lytton remarks, is "light!" the last word of those round whom the shades are gathering. And he says it in reference to the last hours of one of the characters he has described with most success as well as elaboration, John Burley, who discourses of what is precious in light, as the darkness. closes about him. When he lies down, and the attendant would withdraw the light, he moves uneasily. "Not that," he murmurs, "light to the last!" And putting forth a wan hand, he draws aside the curtain, so that the light may fall full on his face. When his only friend returns, and steals back to Burley's room on tiptoe, it is to see light stream through the cottage lattice-not the miserable ray lit by a human hand-but the still and holy effulgence of a moonlit heaven. Burley has died in sleep-calmly, and the half open eyes have the look of inexpressible softness which death sometimes leaves; "and still they were turned towards the light; and the light burned clear." Which things are an allegory. Mr. Dickens intensifies the wretchedness of his prisoner at Marseilles by the deprivation of light in a prison that, like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean. What light he does get comes languishing down a square funnel that blinds a window in the staircase wall, through which the sky is never seen-nor anything else. What he does see of the "light of day" he calls the light of yesterday week, the light of six months ago, the light of six years ago: so slack and dead. Bitter indeed is the import of the curse, "Let it look for light and have none." Piteous indeed is the import of the pathetic remonstrance, "Wherefore is light given 304 Pharaoh's Moses an "Thou d sank as 1 reading. counsel the peop princes. posing, the thou The san men bac Word critical j he inter For: be fou let:" But is purs to him in misery?" Graphic indeed is the description of a place "where the light is as darkness." Darkness and light are both alike to One only. The record of the last day in the life of Patrick Fraser Tytler opens as follows:-"On Sunday, the 23rd, he grew confused in memory, experienced difficulty in swallowing, and complained of darkness. The curtain was drawn, and the light of the winter morning was suffered to stream on his bed; but in vain. He folded his hands, and exclaimed, 'I see how it is.'" John Foxe relates this incident in his narrative of the martyrdom of William Hunter, apprentice to a silk weaver in London, but discharged from his master's employment for refusing to attend mass, and finally condemned to the stake as an incorrigible heretic. “Then said William, 'Son of God, shine upon me!' and immediately the sun in the element shone out of a dark cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to look another way, whereat the people mused, because it was dark a little time before." THE MORE THAN BROTHERHOOD OF A BOSOM I' PROVERBS xviii. 24. N the last book of the Pentateuch we meet with a verse which, incidentally, seems to recognise how much more vitally close and intimate may be the affinity between a man and his bosom friend, than between the same man and his own brother. The brother is spoken of without descriptive epithet or adjunct of any kind; while of the friend it is added, "which is as thine own soul."* An ever memorable verse in Deut. xiii. 6. Observe too the seeming climax,-ascending from "thy brother, the son of thy mother," through the successive stages of "thy son, thy daughter," and "the wife of thy bosom," to "thy friend, which is as thine own soul." As though "The force of Nature could no further go." |