beautiful designs, he says, which look all confusion until you either inspect them from the right point of view, or make use of some kind of glass or mirror as the medium of observation. In the same manner the apparent deformities of our fractional side-views, resolve themselves into harmonious unity when the eye is directed aright.

Dr. Johnson was in an unwontedly placid and benignant frame of mind, by Boswell's account, when the two stood together, one serene autumn night, in Dr. Taylor's garden, and the sage delivered himself, in meditative mood, of this noteworthy surmise: "Sir," said he, "I do not imagine that all things will be made clear to us immediately after death, but that the ways of Providence will be explained to us very gradually." Be that as it may, few could have been found more ready than the melancholic Johnson to agree that meanwhile, until the day star arise and the shadows flee away,

"The ways of Heaven are dark and intricate,
Puzzled in mazes, and perplexed with errors:
Our understanding traces them in vain,
Lost and bewildered in the fruitless search;
Nor sees with how much art the windings run,
Nor where the regular confusion ends."

It was at a time of national and household tribulation, when darkness that might be felt seemed to encompass altar and hearth, that Joseph de Maistre wrote to a friend in trouble : "Be it enough for us to know, that for everything there is a reason with which we shall one day become acquainted; let us not weary ourselves with seeking out the why and the wherefore, even when possibly they might be discerned." He would have his correspondent bear in mind that the epithet "very good" is a necessary adjunct to "very great;" and that is sufficient. The inference is self-evident, that under the sway of the Being who combines in himself those two qualities—the très-bon and the très-grand-all the evils we either suffer or witness must needs be acts of justice or means of reformation equally indispensable. In the declared love of God to man, M. de Maistre found a general solution of all the enigmas that

can offend (scandaliser, in the New Testament sense of putting a stumbling-block in the way of) our ignorance. "Fixed to one little point of time and space, we are insane enough to refer all to this point; and in so doing we are at once blameworthy and absurd." If De Maistre's collation of the très-bon with the trèsgrand resembles the lines of Drummond's hymn beginning, "O King, whose greatness none can comprehend, Whose boundless goodness doth to all extend,"

so is the scope of his argument at one with what follows:

"Here, where, as in a mirror, we but see
Shadows of shadows, atoms of Thy might,

Still owly-eyed when staring on Thy light.”

What we call this life of men on earth, as Mr. Browning's island-poet has it, is, as he finds much reason to conceive,

"Intended to be viewed eventually

As a great whole, not analysed to parts,
But each part having reference to all."*

Pope's well-worked line is of perpetual application,

"'Tis but a part we see, and not the whole."

So is the avowal of the present laureate :

"I see in part

That all, as in some work of art,

Is toil co-operant to an end."

To us, as Sir Benjamin Brodie remarks, in one of his psychological discussions, the universe presents itself as an assemblage of heterogeneous phenomena, some of which we can reduce to laws of limited operation, while others stand by themselves, bearing no evident relation to anything besides. We may well, he thinks, suppose that there are in the universe beings of a superior intelligence, and possessed of a greater range of observation, who are sufficiently "behind the scenes" to be able to contemplate all the immense variety of material phenomena as the result of one great general law. Their standpoint may

* 66 Cleon," by Robert Browning.

enable them to see a Cosmos, a world of order, where to lower intelligences Chaos alone is discernible, a world comparatively without form and void, with darkness upon the face of its deep. And as with the physical, so with the metaphysical. the material, so with the moral.

"Experience, like a pale musician, holds

A dulcimer of patience in his hand;
Whence harmonies we cannot understand
Of God's will in the worlds, the strain unfolds
In sad perplexed minors.

"We murmur-'Where is any certain tune

Of measured music, in such notes as these? '—
But angels leaning from their golden seat,

Are not so minded! their fine ear hath won

The issue of completed* cadences,—

As with

And, smiling down the stars, they whisper-Sweet."+

RULING THE WAVES.

PSALM CXIV. 1-5; ST. MARK iv. 39.

HEN Israel went out of Egypt, it was under the

W

guidance of One whose hand being mighty to save, the sea saw it, and fled; Jordan was driven back. "What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? thou Jordan, that thou wast driven back?" The trembling was at the presence of Him who hath placed the sand for the bound of the sea, by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it; and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it. The commotion, the fleeing, the driving back, was at the bidding of Him

Completed. Finis coronat opus. Children and fools, it has been observed, should not see a work that is half done, they not having the sense to make out what the artist is designing. "The whole of this world that we see, is a work half done; and thence fools are apt to find fault with Providence."-ARCHBISHOP WHATELY.

Sonnets, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "Perplexed Music."

who, and who alone, can say to the sea, Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.

The men of Galilee marvelled when, at the storm that once arose on their sea, and the ship was in jeopardy, there arose One who rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm. What manner of man was this, that even the winds and the sea obeyed Him?

What manner of man? Be it legend or history, the story of royal Cnut on the seashore, forbidding, at his flatterers' instigation, or by his own desire to rebuke their folly-forbidding the farther approach of the incoming tide, is pregnant with instruction on this head. The royal Dane might be a man of men, but the surging waves were not obedient unto his voice. King though he was, the tide was responseless as deaf adder to any charming of his, charmed he never so wisely, enjoined he never so straitly. What manner of man, then, but the Son of man? What manner of king but the King of kings?

The Dane might have enforced the lesson on his parasites by such a strain as that of a defeated monarch in Shakspeare:

"Farewell king!

Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,

Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while :

I live with bread, like you, feel want, taste grief,
Need friends :-subjected thus,

How can you say to me I am a king?"

A king, that is, in their sense of right Divine, and Divine extent. So with poor, mad, discrowned Lear, drenched in that terrible storm on the heath, and remembering soft speeches of cozening courtiership, only of yesterday too. "When the rain came to wet me, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found them, there I smelt them out. Go to, they are not men of their words: they told me I was everything; 'tis a lie, I am not ague-proof." Mark, again, from the opening scene of the

"Tempest," the rough, blunt, uncivil words with which the boatswain cuts short the addresses of his royal passengers :

"Hence! What care these roarers [the waves] for the name of king? To cabin silence: trouble us not.

"Gonzalo. Good; yet remember whom thou hast aboard.

"Boatswain. None that I love more than myself. You are a counsellor ; if you can command these elements to a silence, and work the peace of the present [instant], we will not hand a rope more use your authority. If you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if so it hap. Cheerily, good hearts. Out of our way, I say!"

Of Antiochus Epiphanes, and his pride that had a fall, it is written in the book of Maccabees: "And thus he that a little afore thought he might command the waves of the sea (so proud was he beyond the condition of man), and weigh the high mountains in a balance, was now cast on the ground."

An elder king than Cnut, and not a wiser, not only lashed the winds that blew contrary to his will, but bound the sea with fetters, after a sort :

"Ipsum compedibus qui vinxerat Ennosigæum."

Much good it did him: witness his return from his great expedition, in a poor skiff, wind-tossed across waves red with the blood of his slaughtered host, cruentis fluctibus. The stars in their courses once fought against Sisera, and the fettered waves were little more propitious to speed the for tunes of Xerxes. He might have spared his chains. At any rate he lost his army. Archdeacon Hare practically applied the extravagance of the Great King, as they of Persia were styled, in designating the present (or, rather, what was to him the present) as an age when men will scoff at the madness of Xerxes, yet themselves try to fling their chains over the everrolling, irrepressible ocean of thought; nay, they will scoop out a mimic sea in their pleasure-ground, he goes on to say, and make it ripple and bubble, and spout up prettily into the air, and then fancy that they are taming the Atlantic; which, however, keeps advancing upon them, until it sweeps them. away with their toys.