Distinctions nice, when grave or comic mood,
Or mingled humors, terse and new, elude
Common perception, as earth's smallest things
To size and form the vesting hoar-frost brings,
That seemed as if some secret voice, to clear
The ravelled meaning, whispered in thine ear,
And thou hadst e'en with him communion kept,
Who hath so long in Stratford's chancel slept;
Whose lines, where nature's brightest traces shine,
Alone were worthy deemed of powers like thine; -
They who have heard all this, have proved full well
Of soul-exciting sound the mightiest spell.

But though time's lengthened shadows o'er thee glide,
And pomp of regal state is cast aside,

Think not the glory of thy course is spent,
There's moonlight radiance to thy evening lent,
That to the mental world can never fade,
Till all who saw thee, in the grave are laid.
Thy graceful form still moves in nightly dreams,
And what thou wast, to the lulled sleeper seems;
While feverish fancy oft doth fondly trace
Within her curtained couch thy wondrous face.
Yea; and to many a wight, bereft and lone,
In musing hours, though all to thee unknown,
Soothing his earthly course of good and ill,
With all thy potent charm, thou actest still.
And now in crowded room or rich saloon,
Thy stately presence recognized, how soon
On thee the glance of many an eye is cast,
In grateful memory of pleasures past!
Pleased to behold thee, with becoming grace,
Take, as befits thee well, an honored place;
Where blest by many a heart, long mayst thou stand,
Among the virtuous matrons of our land!

A SCOTCH SONG.

THE gowan glitters on the sward,
The lavrock 's in the sky,
And collie on my plaid keeps ward,
And time is passing by.

Oh no! sad and slow

And lengthened on the ground,
The shadow of our trysting bush
It wears so slowly round!

My sheep-bell tinkles frae the west,
My lambs are bleating near,
But still the sound that I lo'e best,
Alack! I canna' hear.

Oh no! sad and slow,

The shadow lingers still,
And like a lanely ghaist I stand
And croon upon the hill.

I hear below the water roar,
The mill wi' clacking din,
And Lucky scolding frae her door,
To ca' the bairnies in.

Oh no! sad and slow,

These are na' sounds for me,
The shadow of our trysting bush,
It creeps sa' drearily!

I coft yestreen, frae Chapman Tam,
A snood of bonny blue,

And promised when our trysting cam',

To tie it round her brow.

Oh no! sad and slow,

The mark it winna' pass;

The shadow of that weary thorn
Is tethered on the grass.

Oh, now I see her on the way,
She's past the witch's knowe,
She's climbing up the Browny's brae,
My heart is in a lowe!

Oh no! 't is no' so,

'Tis glam'rie I have seen;

The shadow of that hawthorn bush
Will move na' mair till e'en.

My book o' grace I'll try to read,
Though conn'd wi' little skill,
When collie barks I'll raise my head,

And find her on the hill.

Oh no! sad and slow,

The time will ne'er be gane,

The shadow of the trysting bush
Is fixed like ony stane.

ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR.

BALFOUR, ARTHUR JAMES, an English conservative politician and writer, was born July 25, 1848, and was educated at Eton and at Cambridge. He was private secretary to his uncle, the Marquis of Salisbury, when the latter was Secretary of Foreign Affairs (1878-80). Up to 1878 he was known only as a brilliant young scholar, but in that year he was employed on the special mission of Lords Beaconsfield and Salisbury to Berlin. From 1887 to 1891 he was Chief Secretary for Ireland. After the death of W. H. Smith he became the leader of the House of Commons, and again leader of the House in 1895. Besides many magazine articles and several encyclopædia articles on music, he is known as the author of "Defence of Philosophic Doubt" (1879), "Essays and Addresses" (1893), and the volume on "Golf" in the Badminton series. "The Foundations of Belief: Being Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology," was published in 1895.

NATURALISM AND ETHICS.

I.

THE two subjects on which the professors of every creed, theological and anti-theological, seem least anxious to differ, are the general substance of the Moral Law, and the character of the sentiments with which it should be regarded. That it is worthy of all reverence; that in its main principles it is immutable and eternal; that it demands our ungrudging submission; and that we owe it not merely obedience, but lovethese are commonplaces which the preachers of all schools vie with each other in proclaiming. And they are certainly right. Morality is more than a bare code of laws, than a catalogue raisonné of things to be done and left undone. Were it otherwise we must change something more important than the mere customary language of exhortation. The old ideals of the world. would have to be uprooted, and no new ones could spring up and flourish in their stead; the very soil on which they grew would be sterilized, and the phrases in which all that has hitherto been regarded as best and noblest in human life has been

expressed, nay the words "best" and "noblest" themselves would become as foolish and unmeaning as the incantation of a forgotten superstition.

This unanimity, familiar though it be, is surely very remarkable. And it is the more remarkable because the unanimity prevails only as to conclusions, and is accompanied by the widest divergence of opinion with regard to the premises on which these conclusions are supposed to be founded. Nothing but habit could blind us to the strangeness of the fact that the man who believes that morality is based on a priori principles and the man who believes it to be based on the commands of God, the mystic not less than the evolutionist, should be pretty well at one both as to what morality teaches, and as to the sentiments with which its teaching should be regarded.

It is not my business in this place to examine the Philosophy of Morals, or to find an answer to the charge which this suspicious harmony of opinion among various schools of moralists appears to suggest, namely, that in their speculations they have taken current morality for granted, and have squared their proofs to their conclusions and not their conclusions to their proofs. I desire now rather to direct the reader's attention to certain questions relating to the origin of ethical systems, not to their justification; to the natural history of morals, not to its philosophy; to the place which the Moral Law occupies in the general chain of causes and effects, not to the nature of its claim on the unquestioning obedience of mankind. I am aware, of course, that many persons have been and are of opinion that these two sets of questions are not merely related but identical; that the valid ity of a command depends only on the source from which it springs; and that in the investigation into the character and authority of this source consists the principal business of the moral philosopher. I am not concerned here to controvert this theory, though as thus stated I do not agree with it. It will be sufficient if I lay down two propositions of a much less dubious. character: (1) that, practically, human beings being what they are, no moral code can be effective which does not inspire, in those who are asked to obey it, emotions of reverence, and (2) that practically the capacity of any code to excite this or any other elevated emotion cannot be wholly independent of the origin from which those who accept that code suppose it to

emanate.

Now what, according to the naturalistic creed, is the origin of the generally accepted, or indeed of any other possible moral law? What position does it occupy in the great web of interdependent phenomena by which the knowable "Whole" is on this hypothesis constituted? The answer is plain: as life is but a petty episode in the history of the Universe; as feeling is an attribute of only a fraction of things that live; so moral sentiments and the apprehension of moral rules are found in but an insignificant minority of things that feel. They are not, so to speak, among the necessities of nature; no great spaces are marked out for their accommodation; were they to vanish to-morrow, the great machine would move on with no noticeable variation; the sum of realities would not suffer sensible diminution; the organic world itself would scarcely mark the change. A few highly developed mammals, and chiefest among these man, would lose instincts and beliefs which have proved of considerable value in the struggle for existence, if not between individuals, at least between tribes and species. But put it at the highest, we can say no more than that there would be a great diminution of human happiness, that civilization would become difficult or impossible, and that the "higher" races might even succumb and disappear.

These are considerations which to the "higher " races themselves may seem not unimportant, however trifling to the universe at large. But let it be noted that every one of these propositions can be asserted with equal or greater assurance of all the bodily appetites, and of many of the vulgarest forms of desire and ambition. On most of the processes, indeed, by which consciousness and life are maintained in the individual and perpetuated in the race, we are never consulted; of their intimate character we are for the most part totally ignorant, and no one is in any case asked to consider them with any other emotion than that of enlightened curiosity. But in the few and simple instances in which our co-operation is required, it is obtained through the stimulus supplied by appetite and disgust, pleasure and pain, instinct, reason, and morality; and it is hard to see, on the naturalistic hypothesis, whence any one of these various natural agents is to derive a dignity or a consideration not shared by all the others, why morality should be put above appetite, or reason above pleasure.

It may perhaps be replied that the sentiments with which we choose to regard any set of actions or motives do not re