and in the wood-smell is some opiate vapor which gives delicious dreams without somnolence. Spruce, which is fragrant with resinous aroma, is also the liveliest of woods, often making a miniature Fourth of July on the hearth, with its snapping and crackling and popping fireworks.

Magical, brilliant, and various are the effects and exploits of the open fire. It fastens its fascinations on the new-born baby and the whitehaired grandsire. One young mother hoped that when the earliest intelligent gaze, the first really attentive and seeing look, should come into her first-born's face, it might fix itself on her own face. One evening when she was rocking him in her lap before the fire, a burning log broke and fell with a great burst of sparks, startling the baby. Then for the first time the soul peeped out in what seemed a perceiving look of wonder and delight. The eager mother, who had waited for the coming of that look of awareness, put her jealous face nearer his to appropriate that look to herself, but the little face turned from her kiss; the fascinated infant eyes were held by the burst of sparks at which he gazed and smiled. Happily unaware he was that "man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward." The open fire which fixed the baby's gaze talked articulately as with lambent tongues of flame to the young mother's gray-haired father, whose easy-chair was next to her low rocker. Watching the fiery fountain that spirted upward from the fallen

log, he meditated on Job's saying that, as surely as "the sparks, the children of the burning coals, lift up to fly," so surely is man's lot a troubled one. Seeing on the wall behind them the wavering shadows of three generations, the old man's experienced and sober mind recalled the saying of Edmund Burke, "What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue!"-an exclamation uttered when the great Irish statesman and orator, mourning the loss of his son, felt that he would not, in that desolate hour, ❝give a peck of spoiled wheat for all the empty honors of the world." That passage in Job about the upflying sparks had its meaning altered and improved by a Bible-wise English cobbler, whose fine spiritual insight, by simply changing the place of the period, made it read: "Man is born to trouble. (Therefore) as the sparks fly upward I would seek unto God and unto God would I commit my cause." If only all higher critics were as intelligent and useful as that pious country shoemaker! John Oxenham's verses on the "Sacrament of Fire" are not out of place here:

"Kneel always when you light a fire!
Kneel reverently, and thankful be

For God's unfailing charity,

And on the ascending flame inspire
A little prayer, that shall upbear
The incense of your thankfulness

For this sweet grace

Of warmth and light!

For here again is sacrifice

For your delight.

"Within the wood,

That lived a joyous life

Through sunny days and rainy days

And winter storms and strife;

Within the coal,

Where forests lie entombed,

Oak, elm, and chestnut, beech, and red
pine bole;

God shrined his sunshine, and enwombed
For you these stores of light and heat,
Your life-joys to complete.

These all have died that you might live;

Yours now the high prerogative

To loose their long captivities,

And through these new activities

A wider life to give.

"Kneel always when you light a fire!

Kneel reverently,

And grateful be

For God's unfailing charity!"

"Around our habitation be Thou a wall of light" is the inscription on the terra-cotta chimney piece above the fireplace in the central hall of the Pine Tree Inn at Lakehurst, where, in fact, this idyll of the open fire started. Those words from an old hymn are possibly an echo of the divine promise of protection given the Holy City in Zechariah's time: "I will be unto her a wall of fire round about." . . . On the façade of the twenty-seventh psalm, that temple of peace, are chiseled and gilded these words of quietness and assurance: "The Lord is my light and my salvation."

The Lady of Hollyhock House at Oneida,

N. Y., thinks a good fireplace inscription to focus the attention of the house upon would be the revised text of a verse in the thirty-seventh psalm: "Fret not-it tendeth only to evil-doing."

On the frozen body of a missionary to the far north a bit of paper was found on which his numbed fingers had written, in triumph of spirit over flesh, "It is not cold where Christ is." One Christian missionary home inscribed in letters of gold above the radiant light and warmth of its open fire that agraphon of Jesus preserved by Origen: "He who is near Me is near the fire.”

VISIBLE VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING

THIS is not a literary criticism from a college chair of English literature, but an estimate of values from the standpoint of practical life; no academic discussion, but a report of one man's experience with Browning while harnessed to the load of daily labor, in touch with human nature and human needs, as known and felt in actual life. No fair survey of English literature in the Victorian age can fail to recognize Robert Browning as one of the most potent intellectual and religious forces of his time; and no liberally educated person can afford to be unacquainted with the products of his genius. We submit a few reasons which make it profitable to cultivate acquaintance with this poet.

I. If anybody wants initial mental impulse to set his mind going, Browning furnishes it. Thackeray said that he wrote when he sat down to write; that as soon as he got his nose to the desk his ideas came. When G. H. Lewes was telling Huxley that he never had any difficulty in getting into the full swing of composition, saying: "I never hesitate. I get up steam at once. In short, I boil at a low temperature”; Huxley, whose experience was different, said, "But that implies a vacuum in the upper re