home in China, it is, as he says, "weary, wan, and ghost-like, twenty thousand miles from home." He "leans his head against the wall, and silent tears steal down his wan cheeks."

Too ill to see the Holy Land, he "sails by the shore with unspeakable sorrow." At Constantinople he can only "look from his sick pillow at its minarets," though even then he pens lines which forecast the future of Europe, and the fate of the false faiths of the East. True, he came home again, while the sturdy Kingsley laid him down to sleep at Lebanon's base, and Haven, with all his ruddy bloom, fell at last of African fever. Yet Thomson only occasionally burst into the blaze of his former splendors. The "iron wheel" was too much for his texture, as it threw him round a circuit that year of forty thousand miles, he meanwhile attempting to regulate its power, so affecting to itinerant families and churches, for all of whom he suffered much, vicariously. It was too ponderous for his fine nature. It was like an angel at a drive-wheel. God gives us men to whose touch it answers with mighty rhythm. But reverence did not check Ezekiel's cry when he saw the wheel of vision. As we look on Thomson, and then on what racked him, we too can but cry, "O, wheel!" When he died, there seemed a tone of self-reproach in the sorrow of the Church. It was fit there should be heart-searching. All felt the force of that fine lament of one of his successors, when he cried, "We ne'er shall see his like again!

We here touch the inscrutable. His powers may find better play in the unseen world than here; but heaven is rich, and earth would seem to be too poor to rob herself so soon.

As author, his career was more largely potential than actual. A cutting shows the grain of a gem. Pollok's "Course of Time," Kirk White's "Star of Bethlehem," Thomson's "Close Thought," are such cuttings. What if his life had not been deflected from its course till now! Addison nor Irving ever wrote a purer English, and both with less force and fire. Count the monosyllables in one of his pages, and it is doubtful if you will find so many on any other outside the New Testament. Why are his essays not more in the hands of our youth? Is it because they bear our denominational imprint? It is something that duplicate copies of his writings must be kept in the library of the Ohio Wesleyan University to supply the demand

of readers, and that they must be oftener rebound than any other volumes in the collection.

He had great versatility. He delivered two lectures before the California Conference some years ago. Men who had lived for a dozen years on the Pacific slope were amazed at the wonders of their country never before thought of. The attention of scholars and civil officers was arrested by their accuracy. How he prepared them, no one knew; the only account his wife could give was, that "they were composed while riding over the plains and mountains in the stage-coach.”

At Constantinople, too ill to go ashore, he wrote a chapter, ten years in advance, depicting the outcome as it occurred at the Berlin Congress under the dictation of Bismarck and Disraeli.

There are no so-called poems from his pen. But the blood of the English poet Thomson ran in his veins, and diffused a poetic fire through his prose. A friend watched by his bed during a fever. One night he dreamed of controversy with an angel, who arraigned our race for meanness. Thomson, as spokesman, answered in verse, some of which he repeated when awake. One stanza ran thus:

"I am too an angel made,

And round this head a sphere is laid
Which is not less than heaven."

There is no volume from him on systematic divinity, unless there be among his unpublished writings. But his lectures on "Evidences" show that he had power to answer skepticism and to fascinate into faith with his subtle reason and clear diction. He never wrote out an elaborate argument after the manner of "Butler's Analogy." But the boys often longed for a “translation of Butler by Thomson." Had he turned his hand to such work as a "History of Rationalism," so charmingly accomplished by another mitered college head, he could have made that track blaze. Had he entered the field where Raymond has gone shining through, or where Cocker's stalwart form has marched, there too he could have excelled. His intellect was at home with such minds as Kant, Sir William Hamilton, and Plato. They did not go beyond his depth nor above his flight. And if there be any finer quality to such minds as Emerson, Carlyle, and Goethe, he could look them in the eye even

measure, for rather to that rank was he born. At times the trend of his thought, the far sweep of his vision, and the track of light on which he leaves our lower heavens, suggest the question, which of the prophets had he been if he had lived in Bible times-Elijah, Paul, or John?

When fifty years of age he was called from his presidency, and his studies amid academic scenes, to sit four years on a tripod, like an angel tending a spit. Six years more he went round with the great "wheel." Fifty and four and six are sixty. Then he left us for the upper skies fourteen years ago.

It is four and thirty years since the current of his life was turned. His associates in the faculty are all still alive. The world is growing richer from their ripened wisdom. What if Thomson had been here to fulfill the promise of his early years during this quarter century? Within that time of life most great men do their best for the world. Before his great career began, the Duke of Marlborough had come to an age when most men retire. But that finished the dread of the French armies and of Louis XIV. at Blenheim. Von Moltke went into Paris to see the final downfall of the Napoleons behind a white beard. Michael Angelo spanned St. Peter's with its heaven-like dome after his eightieth year. Within the same last stage of life Asbury, Wesley, Humboldt, Herschel, Grotius, Dorner, Neander, Bryant, Emerson, and Longfellow have given their golden harvest to the world. The last named, with genius enriched by years, has well sung:

"Nothing is too late

Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.

Cato learned Greek at eighty,

Sophocles wrote his grand Edipus,

And Simonides bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,

When each had numbered more than fourscore years.

And Theophrastes at fourscore and ten

Had but begun his characters of men.

Chaucer at Woodstock, with the nightingales,

At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales.

Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,

Completed Faust when eighty years were past."

When men cross voluntarily an imaginary "dead line," it partakes of cowardice or suicide. When we send them over, it is murder. Let us have no dead line, which God never drew! The last catastrophe had been coming on since the sickness

on the Red Sea.

Never did the pallor, which then settled on his face, leave it. To self-forgetful and too considerate of others, his weakness revealed itself only to his intimates. In the spring of 1870 he left his home in Evanston to attend the Kentucky and Virginia Conferences. On the steamer for Wheeling he was taken with a chill. He was promptly removed from the boat to the Grant House. The proprietors and alarmed friends did all that was possible to rescue his life and then to solace his dying. He rapidly sank, and after five days died, ere his family, alarmed by a telegram, could reach him. It is said that a telegram was delayed, by his desire, to keep the Sabbath day holy.

The remains were carried to Delaware and laid in the church where his eloquence and sanctity had done so much to awaken the young university into life. Friends and faculty, students and citizens, were one in their grief. Among others came the blacks in groups, mournfully and softly, looking into the beautiful classic features of him whose lips had so eloquently pleaded the cause of their race.

A year later this writer, a transient guest at the Grant House, Wheeling, was assigned the room iu which he died. Here were the walls which heard his dying words. Here was the Bible from which, by his request, were read to him those words: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." Here were realized the words of his poet friend Curry, so dear to him:

"In the far-off haven,

When shadowy seas are past,
By angel hands its quivering sails
Shall all be furled at last."

Shortly before him Kingsley had gone from the foot of Lebanon in a foreign land-each from a stranger's couch. And not very long afterward the last survivor of the three together chosen and consecrated to the episcopacy, Dr. Clark, was united with his colleagues in the "general assembly and church of the first-born." They were lovely in life, and in their death they were not long divided.

ART. II.-THE FRANCO-CHINESE IMBROGLIO.

Tonkin; or, "France in the Far East." By C. B. NORMAN, late Captain Bengal Staff Corps and 90th Light Infantry. London: Chapman & Hall. 1884. Tungking. By WILLIAM MESNY, Major-General in the Imperial Chinese Army. London: Sampson, Low & Co. 1884.

Les Francais au Tonkin, 1787-1883. Hippolyte Gautier. Paris: Challamel Ainė. 1884.

FRANCE and China are not, geographically, more antipodal on the surface of the round world than are the first and third of the volumes above enumerated. The French view is, of course, rose-colored; the British green, with more than occasional ebullitions of national spite and jealousy. Both volumes cover the hundred years of French negotiations and occupation in Further India. Recent events have called the attention of the world to this remote and hitherto obscure quarter of the globe. In his Preface, written at the close of 1883, Captain Norman says: "Within the last few months France has been deluged by a shower of books bearing on the Tonkin question." After having "perused almost every scrap of writing that has ap peared on the subject," the captain has embodied, in a volume of three hundred and fifty pages, the "true history of the Tonkin question," and, that he "may not be accused of gar bled translations," has given the "actual text of all his authorities," making his book about one fourth French, in dress, thereby improving its quality with those who understand the Gallic tongue, but lessening its value with all other readers.

As we write, no work has yet appeared on the Tonkin mat ter in this hemisphere, and only straggling copies of those published abroad have found their way to our book-stores and public libraries. Paragraphs in news columns, of telegramic brevity, have chronicled the movements of the French navy in the waters of the far East; and it has been known, as part of the current intelligence of the times, that France had dispute and conflict with some semi-civilized Asiatic tribes, but exactly what, or where, has been of too little interest to excite special curiosity or to enlist sustained attention. In August last the thunders of a naval bombardment that annihilated one fourth of the floating armament of China in ten minutes, in front of the arsenal in the river Min, aroused a general inquiry as to