shall be taken even that which he hath-this, according to the author of The Way we Live Now, is the special text that we delight to follow, and success the god we delight to worship. But Churchill long ago explained to us that

It is by the thoughtful deemed matter of great congratulation that there is not an invariable alliance between prosperity and desert; and some think it even more fortunate that it is not the province of society at large to gauge the exact merits of its members, and to assign them precedence accordingly-for the result would demonstrably be, not only a social slavery of the most degrading kind, but the introduction of a universal system of Mammon-worship such as the world has happily never seen. "At present, a poor man feels that no one but an insolent fool would despise his poverty; but it would be far otherwise if poverty and misfortune were the sure marks of crime or folly." Pope glances at this hypothetical state of things, as actual, in those expressive lines of his,

"The grave Sir Gilbert holds it for a rule

That every man in want is knave or fool:

'God cannot love,' says Blount, with tearless eyes,
"The wretch He starves,'-and piously denies,'

therefore, the assistance implored. Fielding's Allworthy had often observed with concern that distress is more apt to excite contempt than commiseration, especially among men of business, with whom poverty is understood to indicate want of ability.

"If your lot in this life should be hard, men will treat you with scorn and neglect:

For they always mete out their regard by the credit that yours will reflect.

While you till your poor acre alone, they will mock as they sit and

carouse;

When your wide fields are harrow'd and sown, they will hasten to lend you their ploughs.

If your foes shall be thoroughly thrash'd, they will see your success with delight;

But if your own head should get smash'd, their verdict will be 'Serve you right!'

For, how noble soever your plan, the world lays it down as a rule — 'To succeed is to be a great man, to fail is to be a great fool.""

TE

XXI.

FAR AWAY REMEMBRANCE OF ZION.

PSALM CXXXVii. 1, 5, 6.

EARFUL were the remembrances of Zion, that swelled the hearts of the Hebrew exiles as they sat down by the rivers of Babylon, and hanged their harps upon the willows that fringed those watercourses. Singer's voice may be all the sweeter, more sympathetic, more telling, more thrilling, for les larmes dans la voix. But how if the tears choke utterance? How then sing the home songs of Zion in a strange land?

"Tears from the depth of some divine despair,

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In thinking of the days that are no more,"

and of the native land that is very far off. And as Camöens paraphrased in a sonnet the psalm of pious, patriotic remembrance, "When the cup of woe Is fill'd, till misery's bitter draught o'erflow, The mourner's cure is not to sing-but die." So at least Mrs. Hemans Englished the Portuguese; and from her own miscellaneous poems might be offered a choice of more or less parallel passages; as where the Norsemen bade the Sicilian captive sing of her distant land, whose lyre she held with a trembling hand, till the spirit its blue skies had given her woke, and the stream of her voice into music broke: "They bid me sing of thee, mine own, my sunny land, of thee! Am I not parted from thy shores by the mournful-sounding sea?

How should thy lyre give here its wealth of buried sweetness forthIts tones of summer's breathings born, to the wild winds of the north?" But the heart of the songstress breaks with the singing.

The weeping Hebrews were not a cheerful sight to those who had carried them away captive. And if the captors required of them a song, it was with a view to gladsomeness. Might not music, in the sense and spirit of mirth, disperse their heaviness? Might not singing help them to forget? But that was just what the exiles would not hear of, could not bear the mere thought of. Forget? "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy."

Breathes there a man with soul so dead, as not to respond to, not to beat in unison with, this utterance of the exiles? Who can forget, or who would, in such a case?

"Nescio quid natale solum dulcedine cunctos

Ducit, et immemores non sinit esse sui."

There is, says Goldsmith, something so seducing in that spot in which we first had existence, that nothing but it can please; whatever vicissitudes we experience in life, however we toil, or wherever we wander, cur fatigued wishes still recur to home for tranquillity, and we long to die in that spot which gave us birth. His Traveller sets the sentiment in metre:

"And as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,
Pants to the place from which at first she flew,

I still had hopes, my long vexations past,
Here to return-and die at home at last." *

* Old as human nature itself is the wish to die at home, and, if not, at least to be buried there. Barzillai prayed David the King to let him turn back again, in his old age, and die in his own city, and be buried by the grave of his father and of his mother. It was part of the prophetic malediction upon Coniah, the son of Jehoiakim (Jerem. xxii. 26), that he should be cast out, and his mother that bare him, into another country where they were not born, and there should they die; but to the land whereunto they desired to return, thither should they not return. Vain would it for them to emulate Joseph, who “ gave commandment concerning his bones." The night before the exiled Hippias conducted the Persians to the plains of Marathon, he dreamt a dream which he was fain to hope promised his reinstatement at Athens, and his dying in his own house there of old age. Neither the pomps of Rome nor the pleasant seclusion of Montefiascone,

Sternitur, et moriens dulces reminiscitur Argos. Byron's dying Gladiator, butchered to make a Roman holiday, regards not the brutal shout that hails his fall: he heard it, but he heeded not his heart was far away, at his rude hut on the banks of the Danube. Campbell's Swedish soldier, one of the bleeding thousands marched by their Charles to Dnieper's swampy shore,-ere yet he sank in Nature's last repose,

"Ere life's warm torrent to the fountain froze,

The dying man to Sweden turn'd his eye,

Thought of his home, and closed it with a sigh."

The military hospital experiences of Sisters of Mercy show how very generally the force of early association asserts itself in

writes Dean Milman, could retain a French prelate, though that prelate was Urban V. To Avignon he returned to die; his alleged excuse a parental desire to reconcile the kings of France and England (A.D. 1370), but the accepted motive "a secret inward longing for his native land." We find a later Pope, Æneas Sylvius, writing: “I dread nothing so much as to lay my bones in a foreign land, though the way to heaven or to hell lies open alike from both." It is touching to read of the deprived Archbishop Sancroft retiring to Fresingfield, the place of his birth, and writing his own epitaph, "returned hither to end his life," when deprived of all he could not keep with a good conscience. So it is to find Charles Leslie, the non-juror, seeking permission from the government of King George I. to return and die in the land which gave him birth, and not in that sunny Italy whither he had followed the Pretender. Hanz Egede, the apostle of Greenland, carried back with him to Copenhagen the coffined wife who had so vainly yearned to see her native land again; and when, some twenty years later, his own time was drawing nigh, and he too again at a distance, he was for going to Copenhagen to die there, and would have done so, dying, but that he was promised he should be laid beside her, dead. We bear within us, said the first Lord Lytton, an irresistible attraction to our earliest home: "It matters not where our mid-course is run, but we will die in the place where we were born-in the point of space whence began the circle, there shall it end." Like Adrastus in Ion:

"Here let me rest;

In this old chamber did my life begin,
And here I'll end it.'

Charles Magnin's attachment to the town of Salins, "où il a voulu que ses restes furent transportés pour y reposer dans le terroir paternel," evokes from Sainte-Beuve a note of admiration for "cette fidelité au pays, à la source originelle," which was "un des traits de sa nature." Shakspeare's

supreme moments of physical weakness, the thought of the household grave, in the familiar churchyard, pressing upon the last thoughts of the men, especially of those country born. “Oh, with what vivid hues life comes back oft on death!" Macaulay's exiled Jacobite, "grey-haired with sorrow in his manhood's prime," pined to death in Italy for his own English lakes and falls,

"Heard on Lavernia Scargill's whispering trees,

And pined by Arno for his lovelier Tees;
Beheld each night his home in fevered sleep,

Each morning started from the dream to weep,"

till his last sleep overtook him, and his last thoughts were still

Camillo, after fifteen years' absence, importunes his royal master to let him see Sicily again: "Though I have, for the most part, been aired abroad, I desire to lay my bones there." Some there are, muses Wordsworth's Solitary,

"Who, drawing near their final home, and much

And daily longing that the same were reached,
Would rather shun than seek the fellowship
Of kindred mould."

But with the morbid muser the poet could have little sympathy; and the suggested instinct of the dying hart of Harp-leap Well is more to his mind -coming to make his death-bed near the well, whose water was perhaps the first he drank when he had wandered from his mother's side: "And he, perhaps, for aught we know, was born Not half a furlong from that selfsame spring." Burns's wanderer beside the Thames is pining for his

native banks of the Nith:

"Though wandering now must be my doom, far from thy bonnie banks and braes, May these my latest hours consume, amang the friends of early days."

In one of Crabbe's tales we see old Allen landing in his native bay, "Willing his breathless form should blend with kindred clay;" for, when

Nothing can be simpler or quieter than the pathos of John Evelyn's entry in his Diary, of his going, "after more than 40 years, to spend the rest of my dayes at Wotton, where I was born." Macaulay writes of Warren Hastings that when, under a tropical sun, he ruled fifty millions of