1

I thought that I was strong,
Nor needed I to beg for strength Divine ;

So thought I, but ere long
My Lord made weakness of that strength of mine.

He made me weak, to show
My fond heart how it might be strong at length ;

His secret now I know,
For in my weakness He is made my strength.

I thought that I had life ;
My blood flowed warm and quick, my heart beat high ;

Foremost in every strife
For mastery ; who was so proud as I ?

Now indeed am I dead;
Nay, rather, now alive to die no more ;

My death is captive led ;
Christ's life is mine : 'twas death that reigned before.

and a solemn change
Has overspread my world; for now, whene'er

My wandering footsteps range
To haunts that once were lone, my Lord is there.

Yes ;

Oft in the busy street
I hear a voice-I know He passes by ;

And then, O moment sweet,
To me, even to me, He draweth nigh.

I see Him in my joy ;
I see Him when mine eyes with tears are dim;

If the world me annoy,
It cannot touch my life, 'tis hid in Him.

O strangest of things strange,
This sweet death, and this sweeter life of mine ;

This death to chance and change,
Life to the chanceless, changeless, the divine.

What words of earthly lays
Can magnify enough the life thus given ;

Which makes all earthly days
Empty of earth, and earth itself a heaven ?

What better words than these
Which for the great apostle once sufficed ;

The mystery of his peace
To celebrate—“For me to live is Christ !"

Lord Jesus, for this thing I thank Thee, that I now can speak with Paul ;

Nay, I will rather sing, Speech is so poor,—“ Christ is my life, my all.”

X.

LOVE AND DEATH.

A

MONG all Pelican's prose legacies I have as yet

discovered only one passage bearing directly upon the great theme of half the literature of the world. That solitary utterance I produce here, for reasons which will be soon apparent.

There is a period in the growth of love between a man and a woman when parting all at once loses its bitter

I do not mean its sorrow; that is quite a different thing: the word I have used is the only one that can express the meaning I want to convey. Love is the perception of affinity,—but affinity is not union; it is only its necessary condition. Perfect union being the goal which all true love sets before itself, it welcomes all meeting times as means to making the union complete ; and if, when the hour of parting comes, there is something remaining to be done, the eagerness with which another meeting is looked forward to has in it a painful element of impatience and unrest. There is a feeling that the hours have been lost; that something has been missed which might have been attained; and therefore there is added to the sorrow of parting a bitterness, not identical with, but akin to, the bitterness of remorse. But when love is complete, when the union of two natures is perfected, every hour of meeting is a time not of half-painful aspiration, but of blissful satisfaction. The ideal future of love's early days is no longer ideal or future, but real and now. The lover who is thus made happy feels that he has reached the eternal serenity of the table-land upon the mountain-top, where he can wander about for ever in the pure air; whereas, but a few months ago, when he and his beloved were climbing the rugged path together, he found that the height attained in one hour of sweet converse was lost in the week of separation, and the summit, which seemed so near at the hour of parting, was dim in the distance when the meeting time again came round. When the union of two souls has become so complete that absence has no power to diminish its perfectness, then and then only, separation loses not its sorrow but its sting.

I find these sentences scrawled in pencil on one of the fragments of paper in the black box. How better than with them can I begin this chapter which must tell the story of how Love and Death, the great uniter and the great divider, came to Paul Pelican? How better, I say; for I think they show that he had entered into the secret of love; and the man who has once done this is the man who beyond all others is prepared to know that other secret—the great secret of death. The crowd may reject as an ignorant blasphemy the seemingly wild

notion that the man who loves a woman is therefore fitted for that world in which they neither marry nor are given in marriage; but they—unhappily not a crowdwho have entered into the holy place of human love, into its inner sanctuary, know that with that entrance there has for the first time dawned upon them the vision of the Divine love which is beyond vision,—the love which heart cannot conceive but only faintly feel.

It was about the time of the inauguration of his ecclesiastical experiment that Pelican received a letter from one of his friends at Avondale, appealing to him on behalf of a widow lady who, with her daughter, was coming to settle at Brookfield with the hope of supplementing an insignificant annuity by establishing a school for young children. Mrs. Forrest, the letter said, had been the wife of a man of fine powers of mind and heart, devoid only of the mysterious something which brings success. After failing in business, and failing in literature, he had at last hit upon a mechanical invention of some value which he anticipated would prove an open sesame to the treasure-house of fortune. Then came the old, sad story. Having neither wealth nor influence, one of which must be found before general recognition of his work could be obtained, he put himself and his new treasure into the hands of a man who had both; and then, after a few months, awakened from a sweet dream of hope to find himself betrayed. He was no longer a young man—he had fought his long fight with fortune ;