No more! Thine hosts have not o'erthrown One, and one alone, is veritably the ruler of the waves. When the floods are risen, when the floods have lift up their voice, and lift up their waves, to Him only it pertaineth to still their tumultuous clamour, and to level their aspiring crests. The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage horribly; yet the Lord, who dwelleth on high, is mightier. "O Lord God of hosts, who is like unto thee? Thou rulest the raging of the sea: Thou stillest the waves thereof when they arise." With a moral application we conclude, borrowed from one whose was ever the pen of a ready writer to point a moral. Some dream, says Cowper, that 66 they can silence when they will The storm of passion, and say, 'Peace, be still: ' But 'Thus far and no farther,' when addressed To the wild wave, or wilder human breast, Implies authority that never can, That never ought to be the lot of man." IN DEADLY PERIL UNAWARES. SOUNDLY I SAMUEL Xxvi. 8-25. OUNDLY the stalwart king of Israel slept within the trench, while David and Abishai gazed on him by stealth in the night-watches-his spear stuck in the ground at his bolster, and Abner and the people lying round about him. Abishai was for smiting him with the spear at once, promising that once should be quite enough. Could David hesitate? Was it not a special Providence? Had not God delivered his enemy into his hand? Let but David give the word, the look, the nod, and Abishai would at one fell swoop send Saul to his account, with all his imperfections on his head. "Now, there fore, let me smite him, I pray thee, with the spear, even to the earth at once, and I will not smite him the second time." But David was inflexible in repudiating the regicide. Not for him was it to stretch forth a hand against the Lord's anointed. So Saul slept on, and the shadow of death passed away. Unaware of the peril that had approached him, his awaking was an ordinary awaking. But, to convict the watchers of unwatchfulness, if not to convince the king of a narrow escape and a generous foe, David took the spear and the cruse of water from Saul's bolster; and he and his companion gat them away unperceived-for no man saw it, nor knew it, neither awaked; for they were all asleep; because a deep sleep from the Lord was fallen upon them. Anon David roused the host with the story of that narrow escape, charging Abner with criminal neglect worthy of death. And as he recited the story, Saul was touched; and there was emotion in his voice and in his words when he felt what the peril had been, and knew whom he had to thank for its harmless issue. Had we eyes sharp enough, observes Cowper in a letter to Hayley, we should see the arrows of death flying in all directions, and account it a wonder that we and our friends escape them but a single day. Many years previously the poet had written to the same effect to Unwin,-that could we see at a glance of the eye what is passing every day upon all the roads in the kingdom, we should indeed find reason to be thankful for journeys performed in safety, and for deliverance from dangers we are not perhaps even permitted to see. "When in some of the high southern latitudes, and in a dark tempestuous night, a flash of lightning discovered to Captain Cook a vessel which glanced along close by his side, and which but for the lightning he must have run foul of, both the danger and the transient light that showed it were undoubtedly designed," as Cowper is devoutly convinced, "to convey to him this wholesome instruction, that a particular Providence attended him, and that he was not only preserved from evils of which he had notice, but from many more of which he had no information or even the least suspicion." It is noticeable, as Mr. de Quincey points out, that a danger which approaches, but wheels away— which threatens, but finally forbears to strike-is more interesting by much on a distant retrospect than the danger which accomplishes its mission. "The Alpine precipice, down which many pilgrims have fallen, is passed without much attention; but that precipice, within one inch of which a traveller has passed unconsciously in the dark, first tracing his peril along the snowy margin on the next morning, becomes invested with an attraction of horror for all who hear the story." In another of his books, and the most celebrated of them all, the same impassioned master of English prose, recites the thoughts that arose within him, at a crisis in his youthful life, on the ṣuggestive opening of that beautiful collect, "Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord!" in which the great shadows of night are made symbolically significant-those great powers, night and darkness, that belong to aboriginal chaos, being made representative of the perils that, unseen, continually menace poor afflicted human nature. "With deepest sympathy I accompanied the prayer against the perils of darkness, perils that I seemed to see, in the ambush of mid night solitude, brooding around the beds of sleeping nations; perils from even worse forms of darkness shrouded within the recesses of blind human hearts; perils from temptations weaving unseen snares for our footing." As Marcello has it, in Beddoes' tragedy, "Each minute of man's safety he does walk A bridge, no thicker than his frozen breath, With admirable subtlety and suggestiveness, Mr. Hawthorne illustrates this subject in that fantasiestück of his, called "David Swan." A young man of that name falls asleep on the roadside, of a summer's day, and we see, what he sees not, nor dreams of happening to him, a series of incidents that go near to alter the current of his being, and very near, in one instance, to stop altogether its earthly course. When he awakes from that sound sleep, and hies him cheerily homeward, he knows not, nor ever will know, in this world at least, that while he slumbered, all in one brief hour, wealth was all but made over to him by one heirless passer-by, and death all but dealt him. by two reckless ruffians. They were interrupted, and left him, and he never was to know of the narrow escape. The moral of the fantasy is, that sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen. And the moralist's query ensues, Does it not argue a superintending Providence, that while viewless and unexpected events thrust themselves continually athwart our path, there should still be regularity enough in mortal life to render foresight even partially available? The moral of "David Swan" is implicitly conveyed in that passage in "Waverley" which relates Colonel Gardiner's unconscious escape from the raised and pointed weapon of the Highlander, Callum Beg. An incident that appeals to his superstition makes the intending slayer drop his piece; and "Colonel Gardiner," we read, "unconscious of the danger he had escaped, turned his horse round, and rode slowly back to the front of his regiment." So with Mrs. Hilyard, in "Salem Chapel," on the evening of the secret interview upon the chapel steps. A hidden witness there is of that interview, who, however, sees not the gesture of her companion which bodes, and almost involves, a fatal, a murderous issue. But even Mrs. Hilyard herself never knew how near, how very near, she was at that moment to the unseen world." 66 Or glance, again, at the Azteca, in Southey's "Madoc," gliding like a snake to where Caradoc lay sleeping—all unconscious of peril, 'as happy, and happily unconscious, David Swan : Sweetly slept he, and pleasant were his dreams His victim, and the power of vengeance gave That instant, o'er the Briton's unseen harp It seemed no earthly tune. The savage man He thought that some protecting spirit watched ; To Cremona went together, in seeming amity, the Emperor Sigismund and Pope John XXIII., and there an incident had nearly taken place, which, as the historian of Latin Christianity says, might, by preventing the Council of Constance, have changed the fortunes of the world. Gabrino Fondoli, who from podestâ had become tyrant of Cremona, "entertained his distinguished guests with sumptuous hospitality. He led them up the lofty tower to survey the rich and spacious plains of Lombardy. On his deathbed Fondoli confessed the sin, of which he deeply repented, that he resisted the temptation, and had not hurled pope and emperor down, and so secured himself an immortal name." Pope and emperor on the tower-top were as little inclined to suspect how closely the shadow of death was then and there overshadowing them, as they would have been able to comprehend the ultimate repentance of the intending murderer, not for having intended murder, but for having not carried his intention out. It is one of Young's night thoughts that "the farthest from the fear, are often nearest to the stroke of fate." Often the stroke menaces them unawares, but after all is not dealt; and to the last they are unaware that on such a day, and at such a minute, there was but a step between them and death. Quid quisque vitet, says Horace, nunquam homini satis cautum est, in horas. The ignorance of what is impending is bliss, in a certain sense. Just as "The kid from the pen, and the lamb from the fold, R |