Twenty summers o'er my head! When my brain was fired with drink, Where my blood hath stained the sward. On Egypt's plains I lost my sight, THE SPIRIT-VOICE. IN our nature there are circles of being inward, deep is the principle of adoration; feelings profound, wanderings of melodious joy, outborne from the consciousness-the growing consciousness of our connection with the eternal; generated by waves of spiritual life, outflowing from divinity and diffusing themselves over our being out from these, powers connecting us with humanity, social, brotherly; whence love, compassion, and tenderness flow out farther still, powers taking connisance of beauty, light and shade, colours variegated, and all the forms of material things: and out from all these, and surrounding all these, are powers of sensation, the last link of our connection with the universe. nature is one, although the circles of life are many. Travelling up and down in it is a voice, unceasingly uttering itself, sounding through the whole of our being, from the interior of our spiritual constitution to the outskirts of our physical organisation: coming forth from a power-a living power, hidden in the depths of the soul, beneath its foundations. In this power we rest; from it we draw life. It meets us at every step, in every feeling. in every Our thought, in every act: we are wholly encompassed by it. Beyond it we never can go ; retire from it we find impossible: it is within and without, beneath and above, near and afar. It desires to diffuse itself throughout our nature, to fill every circle of our being; beginning in our deepest and inmost parts, and spreading up through and out through our frame, leaving not the least fibre of physical organisation unanimated by its life. It is an exhaustless fountain an inextinguishable light-an indestructible power. It is love and joy-purity and peace-harmony and melody-beauty and grace; it is courage and fortitude-manliness and strength; all perfecting, creative. The voice ever uttered by this living power, has been heard in all nations, by every rational soul; hitherto faintly, sometimes more, sometimes less distinct. The moment a soul hears its utterance, it acknowledges its authority. When it speaks through a man, the thrill passes over humanity. Eighteen hundred years ago, it spoke through one with an awful sublimity, its tones richly laden with a musical joy; humanity heard the voice and was refreshed; felt itself more divine than its consciousness had hitherto attested that voice spoken from a great depth, with a germ of the eternal in it, continues still to be heard, waxing louder and more sublime, inspiring the benevolent with courage-the upright with a love of purity; whispering hope into the ear of the despondent and down-cast-giving strength to the feeble and oppressed—and a balm to the wounded; making the heart of the oppressor quail with fear-arresting the criminal in his career, and annihilating the life of corruption; opening up a bright future in this world, and bearing humanity on towards the land of life, purity and peace. And humanity, subject to illusions and delusions and vain wanderings, becomes more eager to hear the voice. It has listened, and listens still; it has heard, and hears more; it obeys as it hears. Following its every act of obedience, it becomes finer toned ;-and by the action and reaction of obedience and its results, its progression proceeds the channels of its being become sounder, purer and more properly positioned, and truth flows in as if in streams—the change in its being has caused a change to come over nature; and so finely touched is its inward parts, it "hears the beating of nature's heart," and God in the soul holds communion with God in nature. This change stealing in upon a soul brings along with it high 66 appreciations of the capabilities of humanity. Hitherto it seemed a thing of no value;" but now its dignity, its greatness, and the design of God in reference to it are all-absorbing. This conviction constitutes its dedication to God and humanity; and the "unbounded prospect" of a ceaseless on-going, is to it a source of unfailing inspiration; it feels the hand of God actively at work inweaving divinity into the texture of its being; and seeing its own divinity in every other one, its salutation is, Brother, we are one in nature, let us bow before the Highest, that God may become one in us." Such an one has tasted of the water of life and can never die. 66 It is souls such as this, with their heads in the heavens, that mediate between God and man: they are prophets to the race. They stand as channels through which the divine Spirit-Voice uttereth its inspirations in the ears of mankind: and, when through these the senses of the soul are awakened to it, the fountains of the deep break up; the Spirit-Voice finds an echo in its constitution; and in its turn it becomes an oracle for God. Throughout all being the Spirit-Voice is one-its aim one; yet be it remembered that in its thousand-fold manifestation, the condition of the soul determines the form of its expression. It may be seen far through, somehow or other, at the bottom of hate-it is full expressed in love; it also lives covered and enshrouded beneath selfish accumulation-it appears in broad noon in acts of benevolence in despondency and hope-in repose and activityin punishment and reward this voice is; humanity in its lowest condition is not without it; it may be heard by it as but the faintest echo, but the time comes when it shall speak, and the broad heavens reverberate the sound. There is no up-going with despair, so let us ever hope. Expressions of discontent are heard; seen, are commotions, dread upheavings on the earth: 'tis humanity-humanity labouring to be delivered. That hollow, grumbling sound which passes heavily behind the mountains is the echo of its complaint-it reaches the ear of God--and from his throne streams down light on the path of life the angel of love in the distance beckons humanity onthe invitation embraced, it plants one foot in the Future and shall shortly bid adieu to the old world for ever. D. H. A HISTORY FOR YOUNG ENGLAND.* What a pitie is it to see a proper gentleman to have such a crick in his neck that he cannot look backward. Yet no better is he who cannot see behind him the actions which long since were performed. History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or grey hairs; privileging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof. Yea, it not onely maketh things past, present; but inableth one to make a rationall conjecture of things to come. For this world affordeth no new accidents, but in the same sense wherein we call it a new moon; which is the old one in another shape, and yet no other than what had been formerly. Old actions return again, furbished over with some new and different circumstances.-FULLER. CHAPTER THE TENTH. RICHARD THE FIRST, SURNAMED THE LION-HEART. 1189-1199. RICHARD, the eldest surviving son of Henry Plantagenet, held the duchy of Acquitaine and ruled it with an iron sceptre, at the time of his father's death. Fourteen days after that event, on the 20th July, 1189, he received the title of Duke of Normandy; but it was not until the day of his coronation in the palace of Westminster, on the 3rd of the following September, that the title of English King was conceded to ‘Duke Richard.' There had however been no disposition to question his succession; and in the interim, by his appointment, his mother Eleanor had been released from her captivity and invested with the powers of Regent, which she seems to have exercised prusently. We are told by contemporary writers that she made a deries of state progresses; released prisoners unlawfully confined; pardoned offences against the crown; restrained forest severities; reversed outlawries on common fame; by proclamation ordered all freemen to swear allegiance to Duke Richard and obedience to his laws; and everywhere distributed alms, in her own name and that of her son, for the soul of the husband and father whose heart they had broken. As the body of the old king was borne from the pleasant town of Chinon on the Loire, the Windsor of our Norman princes, to the sad old abbey of Fontevraud, their favourite place of burial, * Continued from p. 565, Vol. II. Earl Richard met the procession and accompanied it to the great church. As the funeral rite went on, and the knightly mourner stood by his father's body, the dead face was uncovered and blood burst from the nostrils. This miracle, which the chroniclers carefully relate, very strongly marks the feeling of the time. It was the body of the dead bleeding in the presence of its murderer. Richard shuddered; fell in prayer before the altar; and after the space of a paternoster left the church, never to return to it till borne there in the pride of manhood to a grave at his father's feet. It was he who had thrice refused to sheathe the sword he had drawn against his parent; it was he at whose bidding, when his brothers Henry and Geoffrey had made ample submission, the unnatural strife arose again. For on none of the princes had the old king's discountenance of the martial tendencies of his age fallen so heavily as on Richard. While yet in boyhood, his personal prowess was the favourite theme of the poetry of his time; and as years passed on, high above the most noted warriors of Normandy and England towered the haughty crest of the youthful Count of Poitou. With a body incapable of fatigue, and a heart inaccessible to fear, he lived but in the tournament or battle; and there was not a tilting ground in Europe he had not visited as a private adventurer, and borne off its prize of valour. The chroniclers err who ascribe his departure for the Crusades to remorse for his father's death. With the passionate spirit of enterprise that distinguished him, he had publicly taken the Cross some months before that event; which only served to confirm his resolve. The succession to the throne had brought with it no sense of duties or responsibilities. The confidential counsellors who bore tidings of his approach to claim his English crown, were: charged with projects to drain the resources of England for no purpose more closely connected with its government, than the recovery of Jerusalem and the punishment of Soldan Saladin. It has been seen that he did not receive the kingly title till he had passed through the Form of his coronation. The thoughtful reader will discover in that circumstance; in the popular measures with which Eleanor thought it prudent to grace his accession; and in the description I shall now briefly give of the coronation ceremonial itself (of which his is the most ancient preserved in formal records); ample confirmation of what has before been urged against the false impression of too many histories. Norman princes did not, by the mere physical right of conquest, govern a conquered people. They were not serfs or slaves who These |