a plant or an animal can turn again to its dust without giving food and existence to other plants, other animals ? *

"Nought lives for self. All, all from crown to base

The clouds, whose glory is to die in showers,

The fleeting streams, who in their ocean graves

Flee the decay of stagnant self-content;

The oak, ennobled by the shipwright's axe;

The soil, which yields its marrow to the flower;

The flower, which feeds a thousand velvet worms
Born only to be prey to every bird;

All spend themselves on others."

And the poet moralizes his song by teaching that Man, whose every breath is debt on debt, must show himself the creatures' lord by free-will gift of that self-sacrifice which they, perforce, by Nature's laws endure-the law of self-sacrifice, whether unconscious or not in the animals, rising in man into consciousness just as far as he is a man.

"Death is the one condition of our life;

To murmur were unjust; our buried sires
Yielded their seats to us, and we shall give
Our elbow-room of sunshine to our sons.
From first to last the traffic must go on;

Still birth for death. Shall we remonstrate then?
Millions have died that we might breathe this day:
The first of all might murmur, but not we."†

Sic rerum summa novatur, thus Nature renews herself-this fragment from Lucian is coupled with Ovid's Mille animas una necata dedit (one death is made the opening to a thousand lives), by Montaigne, in an essay which deprecates an irrational dread of death, considering of how great utility it is to Nature in maintaining the succession and vicissitude of her works, and

* "Is it not true . . . that the very tiger, seemingly the most useless tyrant of all tyrants, is still of use, when, after sending out of the world suddenly, and all but painlessly, many an animal which would without him have starved in misery through a diseased old age, he himself dies, and, in dying, gives, by his own carcase, the means of life and of enjoyment to a thousandfold more living creatures than ever his paws destroyed?"-Kingsley On Bio-Geology.

† T. Lovell Beddoes: The Second Brother, Act iii., Sc. 2,

that, in this universal republic, it tends more to growth and increase, than to loss or ruin. Omnia commutat natura, et vertere cogit. This planet of ours is for ever, as De Quincey said, working by golden balances of change and compensation, of ruin and restoration : she recasts her glorious habitations in decomposing them; she lies down for death, which perhaps a thousand times she has suffered; she rises for a new birth, which perhaps for the thousandth time has glorified her disc. "Hers is the wedding-garment, hers is the shroud, that eternally is being woven in the loom of palingenesis. And God imposes upon her the awful necessity of working for ever at her own grave, yet of listening for ever to His far-off trumpet of resurrection."

The D'Holbach school, without God in the world, in similar terms aver that by this palingenesis, this regeneration, the great whole, the mighty macrocosm subsists; and they compare it to the Saturn of the ancients, perpetually occupied as it is with devouring its own children.

Spenser rhymes and reasons to the like purpose, in the second canto of his fifth book:

"Likewise the earth is not augmented more

By all that dying into it doe fade ;
For of the earth they formed were of yore:
However gay their blossome or their blade
Doe flourish now, they into dust shall vade.
What wrong then is it if that when they die

They turn to that whereof they first were made?"

We may take Mr. Robert Browning's word for it, that

"Roses will bloom, nor want beholders,

Sprung from the dust where our own flesh moulders."

Pourriture, c'est nourriture. The same elementary substances sustain in turn, or are animated by so many successive organisms, "the young Phoenix rising from the ashes of its parent." In Prior's diction,

"Here all is changed, though all is still the same,

Fluid the parts, yet durable the frame;

Of those materials which have been confess'd

The pristine springs, and parents of the rest,
Each becomes other."

In a lighter vein and looser strain the same poet sings how "reptiles perish, plants decay; flesh is but grass, grass turns to hay, and hay to dung, and dung to clay." And yet again, in statelier rhythm, Master Matthew inveighs against the folly which, after so much teaching, still thinks it strange

"That all the parts of this great fabric change,

Quit their old station, and primeval frame,

And lose their shape, their essence, and their name.

Our very mother-earth, as Mr. G. H. Lewes reminds us, is formed of the débris of life: plants and animals which have been, build up its solid fabric; the very quarry into which we dig, thousands of feet downwards, is mainly composed of the skeletons of microscopic animals; the Apennines and Cordilleras, the "chalk cliffs so dear to homeward-nearing eyes," are the pyramids of bygone generations of atomies. "So revolves the luminous orb of Life. Generations follow generations ; and the Present becomes the matrix of the Future, as the Past was of the Present: the Life of one epoch forming the prelude to a higher Life." What is this world? asks Blair; and answers his own question:

"What but a spacious burial-field unwall'd . .

The very turf on which we tread once lived;
And we that live must lend our carcases

To cover our own offspring; in their turns,
They too must cover theirs."

Life has been called the heir of Death, and yet his conqueror : victim at once and victor: all things living succumb to Death's assault; Life smiles at his impotence, and makes the grave her cradle. "Life never dies," as Philip von Artevelde takes it:

"Matter dies off it, and it lives elsewhere,

Or elsewhere circumstanced and shaped; it goes;
At every instant we may say 'tis gone,

But never it hath ceased: the type is changed,

Is ever in transition, for life's law

To its eternal essence doth prescribe

Eternal mutability."

Wordsworth's gray-haired Wanderer enforces one of his most impressive discourses with a reference to "Nature's pleasant

312

ST. PAUL'S GIFTS OR DEFECTS OF SPEECH.

robe of green, humanity's appointed shroud "-and with the sort of collateral reflection which becomes the most reflective of poets,-glancing from the individual to the social:

"The vast frame

Of social nature changes evermore
Her organs and her members, with decay
Restless, and restless generation, powers
And functions dying and produced at need,—
And by this law the mighty whole subsists.”

XXXVI.

FORCIBLE PEN AND FALTERING TONGUE.

2 CORINTHIANS X. 10.

O take the estimate of the men of Lystra, St. Paul was a distinguished speaker. They called Barnabas, Jupiter, and Paul, Mercurius, because he was the chief speaker. To take the estimate of the Corinthians, the great Apostle of the Gentiles was no speaker at all, or, at best, a bad one. They called his speech contemptible. His bodily presence, they said, was weak; and here the men of Lystra so far agreed with them that they gave to Barnabas the implied superiority of imposing figure and mien. Altogether, the Pauline physique was very poorly thought of at Corinth. "His bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible." "Rude in speech" he admits himself to be, let the oral defect have been what it may, organic or otherwise. But, on the other hand, his letters, they were free to own, were weighty and powerful.' If he could not dazzle them by his speaking, he could "terrify them by letters." They felt his power as a penman, however much they might despise him as an orator. His epistles carried weight, if his orations did not.

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Whether they depreciated or not the spoken words of him whom the world accounts a great preacher on Mars' hill, and whose rhetoric almost persuaded King Agrippa to become a

Christian, he might have cited great names in holy writ of selfasserted short-comers in the power of speech. "I am not eloquent," protested Moses, the man of God, "but slow of speech, and of a slow tongue." "Behold, I cannot speak," pleaded Jeremiah, when ordained a prophet unto the nations, "for I am a child.'

There can be no doubt, observes M. Jules Simon, that the true worth of many choice spirits (esprits d'élite) will for ever remain undiscovered, because the faculty of free and facile expression has been denied them. "Notez," says Michelet, "qu'un effet trop fréquent des grands travaux, des grands efforts, c'est de faire perdre la parole. Qui agit ou crée, jase peu." As a rule, according to Rousseau, people who know little talk much, and they who know a good deal are comparatively slow of speech. A small stock of ideas is more easily managed, and sooner displayed, as Smollett has it, than a great quantity crowded together. His Matthew Bramble enunciates and enforces the not very novel proposition, that “ a man may be very instructive upon paper, and exceedingly dull in common discourse." Many an example might be offered of some more or less eminent statesman or influential legislator, who was yet "no orator"—like the Lord Arlington of Clarendon's History, who "had not the gift of speaking," and whose “talent was in private." Biographers of the celebrated (second) Earl of Sunderland lay stress on the fact that all his success in political life was achieved without the faculty of public speaking: he scarcely ever opened his lips to express more than a simple assent or dissent either in Parliament or at the meetings of the Cabinet. "Honest Lord Althorp" he resembled not at all in point of honesty and consistency, nor perhaps in anything else except defective power of speaking; but then in Lord Althorp's case, and because of his recognized honesty, a few sentences from him are said to have been more than equivalent to eloquent orations from less consistent statesmen.* Alison

* "Lord Castlereagh was a very tiresome, involved, and obscure speaker. Lord Althorp was without any power of oratory; yet I never heard two men who had more influence in the House of Commons. Thus Lord