Came an uncertain flash of troubled light,
Which brought forgotten scenes to mind again;
Or, to distempered fancy's view, restored
The faces of the lost, the lovely, the adored."

In sickness and weariness of heart, he questions the schools of philosophy, of what follows after death, and their answers leave him in deeper gloom than before. Then he passionately appeals to the powers of nature, the wind, the ocean, and the night, but these also give

no answer.

66

Night answered not: and, sad, I gazed to heaven.
No clouds were there and, to its azure arch,

A thousand starry hosts their light had given.
Awe-struck, I viewed their proud and solemn march,
As silently they gathered in the field

Above me, flashing like a polished shield.

'Ye Holy Watchers of the midnight gloom :
Ye, whom a strange and secret power doth bind
Unto the destiny of man; to whom

His words and deeds are manifest: : ye kind
And gentle beings, who present his vows

Before the throne of Jove, to you a mortal bows.

You, the benign and powerful, you guide

The weary wanderer through the desert vast;
And, o'er the lonely bark which roams the wide
And trackless deep, a tranquil lustre cast:
Hear, then, my prayer. Above, below, around,
Where have the dead a place of resting found?'

They looked upon me with their piercing eyes,
As if to search each sealed and inward thought.

They looked. But, wafted from the burning skies,
No answer to my listening soul was brought.
They looked with such a pure unearthly light,
That, all abashed, I shrank before their sight.”

Then he prays for oblivion, and at length his prayer is answered. Amidst gloom and tempest, a spirit offers him a draught of Lethè water, and he drinks greedily, as Eve ate of the forbidden tree. But the ease from memories of bitter grief is dearly purchased by the death of hope, the loss of sympathy, the utter loneliness of a heart which could not rejoice in another's joy, or grieve in another's sorrow.

"My mind was as a smooth unruffled lake,
In turns reflecting all that passeth by :
Which doth its ever-varying colour take

From rocks, or woods, or mountains, or the sky;
Sullied by every cloud which o'er it fleets,
Troubled by every wind which on it beats,

Lit by the sunbeams of each golden noon
To rapture and to glory, and at night
Tinged by the softer splendours of the moon
With a more tender and a lovelier light;
A mirror, where the present well is seen,
But not a trace discerned of what hath been.

But, when, with their fierce joyaunce, they passed by,
I was most wretched. Memory had no grief

Or joy for me. O, e'en a cause to sigh
Unto my spirit would have brought relief!
But I was sad. Nathless, I did not know,

Wherefore my glee and mirth had turned to woe.

It was a self-consuming of the heart,
A very searing of the soul and brain.
I walked among men, as one apart,
Unconscious of the pleasure or the pain,
Who, by no gentle tie to others twined,
Counts but the throbbings of his own dark mind.

Whene'er I crossed them in their festive hours,
Startled they gazed on me and shrank away :
As he, who sees a figure, crowned with flowers,
And glittering gaudily in quaint array,

Seated at some high feast; unveils its head;
And shrinks in horror back, to find it of the dead."

Lonely and desolate, indeed, must the heart of a heathen have been, when the dearest ties of earth were all suddenly rent and torn away by the stroke of death. Where there was no direct light from heaven, we may well imagine how earnestly nature would be questioned by wearied spirits, to learn the secret of life and death, and tell the soul of her immortality. But, without the gospel, even nature herself is an enigma and an inexplicable mystery. Her lessons appear to contradict each other. If she speak of goodness, free, immeasurable goodness, in the azure sky, the sun, and the bright sunshine, her moonlight speaks also of deep sadness, and storms and tempests are a voice of wrath, awful and alarming to breasts that bear within them the deep consciousness of sin. The secret lesson, which one part of nature unfolds, appears to be contradicted by another. The stars are bright and everlasting, but the leaves wither and fade away. The waves of the river flow on in perpetual change, but the river itself remains from age to age, and outlasts the fleeting generations

of mankind. The scroll is covered with hieroglyphics, but who shall decypher the mysterious inscription? No wonder that, in hours of sorrow and misery, the soul of many a heathen should have been weary of these dim guesses after immortality, and have been ready to long for Lethe water, and a perpetual oblivion of its former being.

And yet oblivion is not the cure which the spirit naturally desires, even in its deepest sorrow. The redemption for which she secretly, though blindly craves, is of another and a higher kind. In moments of stupor or madness, despair may hurry her to the edge of this precipice, and make her almost desire to lay down her very being, and like Cassandra, to strip herself of the ensigns of her dignity with her own hand. But when she draws near to the brink, and looks down, there will be a recoil, with shuddering, from that fearful and unnatural vacuity. And hence there is a deep response in the heart to the words which our poet has ventured to put into the mouth of a fallen spirit, in the realm of hopeless misery

"And that must end us; that must be our cure,

To be no more! Sad cure! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
These thoughts that wander through eternity."

Blessed be God! there is another and a better way of escape from the gloom of heathen sorrow, which the word of God reveals to us. We are no longer left to hope for annihilation as a refuge from bitter despair, and to long again for memory, however burdened with sorrow, rather than pine in that dreary loneliness of blank oblivion, which borders on nothingness itself. There is a way now open, whereby the memory of past guilt may be turned itself into a healing medicine, to

teach humility and patience; and the memory of bereavements, otherwise unsupportable, a motive for more earnest hope, and help to raise the heart above the shadows of time into the lasting realities of the world to come. The same voice which awakens all nature, and makes ocean and night, the rivers and the stars, echo its own message of immortality and life, can also heal the bitter waters of earthly sorrow, like those of Marah, casting the tree of life into the midst of them, till they become a salutary and life-giving stream. We may rove far and wide, like the wanderer in our poem; we may visit, in thought, if not by actual travel, all the scenes of romance or historic fame, Thebes, Persepolis, Palmyra and Babylon, the harbours of Tyre, and the sunny fields of Italy, or the Eastern desert. But all these will avail little, to heal the heart's hidden sorrows. It is only when we draw near to the sanctuary of God, and enter the borders of the good land of Divine promise, that the spirit can find rest from its wanderings, and ease from its heart-deep miseries. There, and there only, is balm to be found. The "fount of tears" must continue to flow, till we leave the haunts of heathenism and earthliness, like Ruth of old, to come under the shadow of His wings, who is the strength and portion of all them that trust in Him. Happy are they whose experience of sorrow has closed, like that of the wanderer, not under the blank and dreamy stupor of forgetfulness, but with the bright hope of a better land.

"No more, forlorn

I roam and desolate. Thou hast shewn me peace,
And bad my doubts and fears and longings cease.

Long have we lived together since that time:
And, day by day, fresh beams of light have burst