number three is the root of the number nine; seeing that without the interposition of any other number, being multiplied merely by itself, it produceth nine, as we manifestly perceive that three times three are nine. Thus, three being of itself the efficient of nine, and the Great Efficient of Miracles being of Himself Three Persons (to wit, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), which being Three are also One, this lady was accompanied by the number nine to the end that men might clearly perceive her to be a nine, that is, a miracle, whose only root is the Holy Trinity. It may be that a more subtle person would find for this thing a reason of greater subtlety; but such is the reason that I find, and that liketh me best.'

That was Dante's world; the modern poet has inherited a new heaven and a new earth. The firmament which canopied the earth has been rent asunder, disclosing the illimitable abyss. The sun and the moon and the stars do not lighten us alone; our planet is only one of those particles of silver or golden dust which sprinkle infinite space. Dante's theatre, whereon the high drama of the universe was being transacted, has been shatteredshattered as utterly as the classic stage of Olympus. How can the modern poets evade the difficulties which this mighty revolution forces upon their attention? Birth, death, immortality-what do they mean; what language do they speak; what is the secret which they hide? If heaven be not above us, if the earth be not the centre of the universe, on which the regards of its Maker

and of his angels are fixed, must not the whole medieval creed break down? This spiritual and intellectual strife finds, perhaps, its finest expression in In Memoriam. 'My friend has been taken from me, and I am haunted by a spectral doubt that I shall be his mate no more. Here, at least, we are parted for ever; my paths are in the fields I know, and his in undiscovered lands. What, then, lies behind death? Shall we retain our individuality, or shall we remerge into the general soul? I trust that I shall know him when we meet, if only upon the last and farthest height; surely he will clasp my hand and say, Farewell, we lose ourselves in light." Or is death indeed the end of all? Shall man

Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?

Or will good be the final goal of ill? Will God refuse to destroy one life that he has made?

So runs my dream; but what am I? An infant crying in the night; An infant crying for the light; And with no language but a cry.' These, and such as these, are the questions which assail the modern poet, and which introduce an element of unrest and agitation into his work which did not disturb the the serene security of Dante.

Nor is this all. The world which is (or, to speak more accurately, the feeling with which men regard it) as well as that which is to come, has undergone a change. Dante could hold no communion with the storm. He did not seek for sympathy from winds or waves, from sunsets or sunrises, from the purple moorland or the windy bent. think there are not more than two allusions to natural forms in a poem which was written in the Val d'Arno. He speaks in one place of those long hours 'wherein the stars above wake and keep watch;' and in another, he says, as I have seen snow fall

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among the rain, so was there talk mingled with sighs.' That is all. The modern poet, on the other hand, maintains a close and intimate fellowship with nature. She is a witness to his wrongs; she shares his sufferings; he appeals to her as the Hebrew poet appealed: 'Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!' In In Memoriam each mood of nature, the most delicate, the most capricious, the most subtle, reflects some mood of sorrow. Arthur will sleep better beneath the clover sod that takes the sunshine and the rains than in the sailor's vast and wandering grave,

And from his ashes may be made

The violet of his native land.

The world is calm, and the poet is comforted; the winds begin to rise, whirling away the last red leaf, and blowing the rooks about the sky, and he can scarcely brook the strain 'that makes the barren branches loud.' He droops when the dim dawn rises in storm and rain; but his trouble cannot live with April days, nor his sadness in the summer moons. Every aspect of nature recalls the friend who has left him.

Thy voice is on the rolling air:

I hear thee where the waters run: Thou standest in the rising sun, And in the setting thou art fair. This close and intense sympathy is, as a feature of European thought, characteristically modern; and in In Memoriam the whole glory and sadness of nature stream across the page which is dedicated to an unforgotten friendship, and occupied with the figure of a lost friend.

I have said that these memorial poems close with a note of victory. To a certain extent this is true; but an earthly muse cannot long maintain the imaginative altitude of

Isaiah. 'The sun shall no more be thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee; but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. Thy sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw herself; for the Lord shall be thy everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.' Hers is at best a fugitive and trembling flight. We believe-help thou our unbelief-that the departed soul has been received into thy kingdom.' Then comes the keen reaction of nature, the lamentable protest of the affections. It may be as you say; her pure spirit may have rejoined the redeemed in heaven:

But in dear words of human speech
We two communicate no more.

That it is enormously difficult to rise above this weakness of nature, universal experience testifies. To mortal eyes, the way that leads through the valley of the shadow of death is dim and perilous. Among the illustrations to the Pilgrim's Progress, designed by that great and noble painter, David_Scott,* a series of three are devoted to Christian's passage through the valley. A veiled figure, wearing a kingly crown, broods over the abyss, and casts a deep shadow upon the narrow path. Into the impenetrable shade the pilgrim, with head bent low, slowly advances, his shield upraised, and his sword drawn. Next we catch a glimpse of him amid the thick vapours, contending with ugly phantoms and evil shapes. Then at sunrise Christian looks back on the valley.' He is weary and faint, and worn; his armour is battered; his shield is rent. But he is safe; that hideous dream in

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the dark is past; like a man recovered from sickness, he breathes in strength with eager haste; and in the light of golden day, seated upon the breezy mountain summit, he looks back upon the dismal valley. Then, as the sunrise broadened upon the hills, Christian said, 'He hath turned the shadow of death into the morning.' (Amos v. 8.) The sense of happy release is expressed with admirable fidelity in the toil-worn yet sinewy frame, in the weary yet joyful face. This wonderful sketch is worth a hundred discourses. We cannot penetrate the thick gloom; but to the open eyes of the dead, the shadow of death is turned into the morning.' So spake the Hebrew poet; the English poet, has put a like hope into different words,—

Did he who thus inscribed this wall,
Not read, or not believe St. Paul,
Who says there is, where'er it stands,
Another house not made with hands?
Or may we gather from his words,
That house is not a House of Lords?'

Then our talk wandered away, and when it returned, I found that we were speculating where the domus ultima of each of us should be placed. 'Bury me by the brackenbush that grows on yonder lily lee,' the Doctor murmured, in the words of the great ballad. I fancied that I should like to be planted under the old oak in the Chase - the Lovers' Oak, they call it; but Letty declared that she must lie within hearing of the sea,—

Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood.

'Ay,' replied the Captain, Letty is a true tar. For myself, I would fain hear the night-wind rattle through the rigging. There is a green knowe beyond the Suitor's Seat; a man that's laid there gets a grand out-look across the sea, o' moonlight nights.'

But at this point the Doctor interfered, declaring that such speculations were unprofitable, and that it was well, when the brains were out, the man should die. As soon as he was done with his body it would become a matter of perfect indifference to him how it was disposed of. Then he added,

'Unless you are prepared to fire St. Paul's, or write the Odyssey, or paint the Transfiguration, or buy the Times newspaper, it is useless to strive with oblivion. Much better give up the battle, at once and for ever. When I look on tombstones and immortelles, and all such rubbish, I am reminded of the unlucky people who are struggling to keep themselves respectable. It is of no

use.

The water rises above their heads. Do what they will, they are sinking step by step. Why not rather be thankful for release? The heart-burn is cooled, the throbbing is quieted, at last; let us lie down gratefully, and be forgotten.'

Here he was interrupted by the dinner-bell.

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plied to the character of different nations by examining the ideas current among them concerning a future state, and noting the precise nature of the paradise they desired, and of the hell they feared. That undiscovered country' of whose shores all our boasted science leaves us as ignorant as the Chaldean patriarch of old, has yet in all ages offered an irresistible attraction for the human imagination, and the genius of each successive race has bequeathed to us a picture wherein unconsciously it has reflected many of its own lights and shadows. Those varied diglyphs of heaven and hell preserved for us in history form, in fact, a gallery wherein with great advantage we may study the thoughts and feelings of the distant or bygone families of man to whom they originally belonged. We cannot obtain a better insight into any mind than by the knowledge of the objects it most earnestly desires or vehemently deprecates. Hope and fear, the positive and the negative poles of the soul, when we have once ascertained them, cannot fail to teach us at least the bearings of its voyage over the ocean of life.

In the present paper we do not hope to discuss the subject with the learning which its due treatment would demand, and still less intend to raise any theological debates concerning the veracity of this or that particular doctrine. Our only ambition will be to point out some of the obvious deductions to be made concerning the character of a few of the greater nations of the world from the ideas commonly attributed to them concerning a future existence. Perhaps the subject may be found sufficiently interesting for some one more qualified to deal with it, to develop it more worthily hereafter.

The first fact which strikes us in examining the various ideas which have prevailed of a future life is the great difference in the degree of interest wherewith the subject has

been regarded. In some nations, as among the ancient Egyptians, it actually appears to have assumed the foreground of thought. Men and women seem to have lived constantly with a view to the degree of honour which should be bestowed upon their mummies on earth, and to the favour with which Osiris might correspondingly treat their spirits in the interval between death and the resurrection. The most stupendous of all the enormous piles with which they loaded the valley of the Nile, the oldest and the grandest of all human works, was only a sepulchre-the great Pyramid of Ghiza. On the other

hand, among the Israelites, the whole subject of another life was thrown completely into the background for ages; and though in possession of their whole matchless literature, we are left in doubt whether the noblest minds among them even believed that there was any future for the human soul, or 'any knowledge, or device, or wisdom in the grave.' The absence, or at the least the coldness of this faith, in a race so deep-hearted, so pre-eminently religious, has been at all times a phenomenon so difficult of explanation as to suggest even such strange hypotheses as that of Bishop Warburton; and our surprise is further increased by the discoveries of late Egyptian archæologists tending to show how many details of their cultus the Israelites adopted from their taskmasters, while this one foremost and all-pervading idea they seem to have utterly ignored. Even among nations kindred in race and in creed, the difference concerning all things relating to death and immortality have manifestly been extreme. The Ninevites in all their various monuments have left us no trace of their ideas concerning the dead, while their neighbours the Babylonians attached that care to the rites of sepulture, which betokens strong belief in another life. To this day the indifference, not to say levity, of the

Italians contrasts strangely with the tenderness and sentiment of the Germans, both Romanist and Protestant, as displayed in their cemeteries.

As a general rule, we might perhaps affirm, even in the presence of the striking exceptions above named, that there exists a relation between the greatness and civilization of each race and the strength of its consciousness of an immortal life. As we descend in the scale among half-civilized and savage tribes, the belief seems to take less and less place in their thoughts. We do not indeed reach (unless in some semi-simious race like the tree-dwellers of Ceylon) any creatures in human shape who are utterly devoid of the belief that death is not the end-all' of a man. Short of conditions of degradation equivalent to idiotcy, there is always some notion of future wants and future employments. According to Lyell's most interesting statements concerning the human remains found in the cavern at St. Acheul, even in the earliest dawn of humanity, when the dwarf and narrow-fronted fathers of the world lived in strange fraternity with the mammoth and the cave-bear-in those far-off untold millenniumseven then the dead were buried with the weapons and the food which the disembodied spirit might desireeven then it was true that it was 'the creed of the human race that the soul of a man never dies.'

And as we advance onward in history, and turn from the primeval tribes of the past, and the savage races still lingering in Polynesian islands or American forests, to the nobler branches of the great human family, we find continually the faith in immortality becoming clearer and more vivid as we proceed. No better evidence for the universality of that consciousness can be found than in the fact that it was certainly experienced most strongly by the three nations of antiquity whose respective types of religion and civilization were most widely distinct, and possessed the best claims to being indigenous in their fardistant localities. The Brahmins,

the Egyptians, and the Druidical Celts, each believed in the life to come, and the literature of the Hindoo, saturated with the idea of future rewards and punishments; the stupendous monuments of the Egyptian, recording for all time his hope of resurrection; and the testimony of their Roman conquerors to the amazing faith in immortality which nerved the disciple of the Druid, all remain to prove the vigour with which each grasped the common faith. Yet that the Brahmin took it from the Egyptian, or the Egyptian from the Druid, who will believe? Even if we admit the unlikely assumption of a prehistoric communication having existed between the races, we shall find nothing to militate against the originality of the faith. Such communications have no results when the natural consciousness of immortality is feeble in the race which should receive instruction. As we have already seen in the case of the Jews, a people may live four hundred years in bondage to the most deeply-believing nation, and may adopt from it all manner of minor opinions and ceremonies, and yet at the end remain apparently exceptions in the whole human race in the absence of belief in immortality corresponding to their general mental and religious development.

Among the causes which appear to affect the vividness of the consciousness of a future existence, one of the most powerful is the comparative strength of the converse sentiment, namely, the consciousness of the present life, with its enjoyments and sorrows. When this latter consciousness is extremely intense, it appears, if not to exclude the other, at least to throw it into the shade. More precisely speaking, if a man's consciousness of the present life be of that external and sensuous kind which takes him much out of his own self-consciousness, then he will rarely be inclined to push forward into the unseen future any strong forecast of his own individuality. If, on the other hand, his consciousness be of that profounder and more inward sort which leads to intense self-con