removed him from the range of their control, so that, "notwithstanding all his independence, the profound loyalty of his soul was henceforth baulked of its healthful necessities." He felt himself with a pang to be cast unnaturally free of restraint"that lawful, sweet restraint, . . . to which the tender dutifulness so seldom wanting to great genius naturally clings."* Habits of instant and mechanical obedience are affirmed by Sir Henry Taylor to be those that give rest to the child, and spare its health and temper. Men are but children of a larger growth; and though as regards obedience to a Father which is in heaven, "mechanical" obedience may not be the word, yet is cheerfully implicit obedience the thing; obedience is the privilege of the child.

"For obedience is nobler than freedom. What's free?

The vexed straw on the wind, the frothed spume on the sea.

Another type of mind, deficient in the higher attributes of independence, is often feverishly eager to sink its sense of individual responsibility by seeking what is called rest in the Church." Dr. Bungener represents his Julian, when committed to the Bastile, as rather rejoicing at than terrified by the despotism of the hand laid upon him; and in the same way, on taking holy orders, he, being "subdued in heart, enslaved in mind, tired of being his own master, only to create his own torments," flatters himself that he gives the Church complete power over his faculties at the same time that he gives her plenary power over his actions.

To the baser sort, remarks Sir James Stephen, no yoke is so galling as that of self control, no deliverance so welcome as that of being handsomely rid of free agency. "With such men mental slavery readily becomes a habit, a fashion, and a pride. To the abject many the abdication of selfgovernment is a willing sacrifice."

One of our acutest essayists on social subjects comments on the readiness of a man to exult in the fact that he has done something which he cannot undo, and has pledged himself to a course from which he cannot draw back, as more commonly the sign of a weak than of a strong nature. "The comfort of plunging right into the stream is unspeakable to anybody who has been accustomed to stand shivering and irresolute on the bank." When a person of this sort, it is justly observed, has brought himself to take the plunge, his exultation and fearlessness are wonderful: the knowledge that the Rubicon is crossed, and the die cast, seems to relieve him from the necessity of further resolution. "He has set in motion a machine which will of itself wind off results and consequences for him without more ado on his own part; and this is an order of release from the demands of circumstances upon his will, for which he cannot be too thankful."

The great ocean itself, as it rolls and it swells,

In the bonds of a boundless obedience dwells."

The next section takes up the same theme under another heading, and with a fresh set of variations.

IT

THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM.

ST. MATTHEW xi. 29, 30.

T is in tones of winning promise and invitation that men are offered the wearing of Christ's yoke. Let all who are weary and heavy laden come to Him: come, that they may take His yoke upon them. There is a seeming paradox in the invitation. Should not the weary be invited by promised freedom from all yoke-bearing? Should not the heavy-laden be attracted by a pledge of entire immunity from burdens grievous to be borne, whether heavy or light? Not so. Christ's yoke is easy, but it is a yoke. The burden he imposes is light, but a burden of some sort He does impose. Being made free from sin, men become the servants-servitors, slaves even, dovλot, of righteousness. But in so being made. free from sin, and becoming servants, doulou, to God, they have their fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. And the yoke of privilege promised by Christ differs from the irksome bonds and rigid constraint of scribes and rabbis ; a yoke which, says St. Peter, neither we nor our fathers were able to bear, inasmuch as it implies and involves a purely spiritual service-that we should serve (dovλeve) in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. "If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." Keble says of men, in the "Christian Year," that,

"Freely they own, or heedless prove,

The curse of lawless hearts, the joy of self-control."

The joy of self-control. For what Wordsworth expressively calls "unchartered freedom," as revelled in by those who

ignore a holy and happy-making law of duty, is not in the long run, a boon, but a bane. True, that, as Cowper has it,

"'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower

Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,

And we are weeds without it. All constraint,
Except what wisdom lays on evil men,

Is evil."

But the constraint that sweetens liberty is excepted; the control that enfranchises from servitude to self, and exalts to a liberty which monarchs cannot grant: ""Tis liberty of heart, derived from Heaven," "and held by charter;" "a clean escape from tyrannizing lust." "Grace makes the slave a freeman;" for "He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves beside." Byron was drawing on his own bitter experience when he wrote the lines,

"Lord of himself-that heritage of woe,

That fearful empire which the human breast
But holds to rob the heart within of rest."

Imlac, the sage, describes, in "Rasselas " the placid flow of life enjoyed by a devout brotherhood, whose "time is regularly distributed; one duty succeeds another, so that they are not left open to the distraction of unguided choice, nor lost in the shades of listless inactivity. There is a certain task to be performed at an appropriated hour," and the constraint is to them a pledge of happiness, hallowed as it is with a Divine sanction, and promissory of "an ampler ether, a diviner air" to come, in which they shall breathe more freely, and inhale more deeply, the breath of life.

Freedom is not the being free to do nothing, or to do just what one likes, and when, and how, without why or wherefore. La liberté n'est pas oisiveté, says La Bruyère; and then he proceeds to say what liberty is: "C'est le choix de travail et de l'exercice: être libre, en un mot, n'est pas ne rien faire, c'est être seul arbitre de ce qu'on fait, ou de ce qu'on ne fait point. Quel bien en ce sens que la liberté !" But how much worthier of that note of admiration the gospel definitions, explicit or implicit, of ce que c'est la liberté !

There is a touching suggestiveness in what Frederick Perthes says in a letter after the death of his wife. All his doings and plannings for four and twenty years past had been solely, he declares, in reference to her. "But now all this is over. I am no longer bound; I can do what I will, and next to the yearning after her, I am most oppressed in my solitude by the consciousness of freedom." Fain would he be in those dear bonds again; to apply a passage in one of Shakspeare's minor poems, he

"In her fillet still would bide,

And, true to bondage, would not break from thence."

Or as Ferdinand says of Miranda, in the "Tempest,"

"All corners else o' the earth

Let liberty make use of; space enough

Have I in such a prison."

In this sense may be applied in earnest what Butler writes in sport, of an independent spirit who

"Disdains control, and yet can be

Nowhere, but in a prison, free."

So the sculptor in Hawthorne's tale of "Transformation," intent on winning winsome Hilda for his own, "would try if it were possible to take this shy, yet frank and innocently fearless creature captive, and imprison her in his heart, and make her sensible of a larger freedom there than in all the world besides." "I have read somewhere," says a simple maiden in one of Lord Lytton's fictions, "that the slave is gay in his holiday from toil; if you free him, the gaiety vanishes, and he cares no more for the dance under the palm-tree." Don Alphonse, in Madame de Rémusat's "Lettres Espagnoles," writes to his sister an account of the courtiers' embarrassment on being released by the king from ceremonial attendance, and allowed to do each one as he liked. "L'improvisation en tout est chose assez difficile, et particulièrement celle de la liberté. Il faut que je confesse que nous n'avons su que faire de la nôtre." The moral of the fable may be read

in Landor's lines, supposed to be indited by the caged nightingales so tenderly tended by Agapenthe, and brought to Athens for her from Thessaly, and who bid the reader think not

"That we would gladly fly again

To gloomy wood or windy plain.
Certain we are we ne'er should find
A care so provident, so kind.

O may you prove, as well as we,
That e'en in Athens there may be

A sweeter thing than liberty."

Apply, again, to the general subject the special fact, by way of illustration, that restrictions and shackles are essential to rhythmic writing, and voluntary thraldom the natural condition of poetry. The Chevalier de la Faye, in his "Apology for the supposed difficulties of rhyme in our Cisalpine dialects (one Italian poet being "distinguishable among his fellowcaptives by the light aërial nature of his fetters,") suggests an ingenious parallel to the jets d'eau that ornament the gardens of the Tuileries, Versailles, and St. Cloud, in a copy of verses which have been thus Englished by Father Prout :

"From the rhyme's restrictive rigour

Thought derives its impulse oft,
Genius draws new strength and vigour,
Fancy springs and shoots aloft.
So, in leaden conduits pent,
Mounts the liquid element,

By pressure forced to climb :

And he who feared the rule's restraint

Finds but a friendly ministrant

In Reason's helpmate, Rhyme."

:

Pithy and pertinent too are Mr. Coventry Patmore's lines on those who

"Live by law, not like the fool,

But like the bard, who freely sings

In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule,

And finds in them, not bonds, but wings."

They who so live are in every sense the happier, without an