his whole being, must be real too. passage from a later writer : 66 And here is a parallel 'Yes, this life is the war of the False and the True, Ay, the world but a frivolous phantasm seems, And dare we be indifferent? Hence, and be mute, With man's awful Maker." THE HARAN TAKEN: TERAH LEFT. GENESIS xi. 28. HERE is a pathetic significance in what to the unobserving reader might seem a dry record of decease, commonplace among other commonplaces, in the fact mentioned concerning the house of Terah, the father of Abraham, —that “Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees." It is, as Canon Melvill says, like an inversion of the natural order, when we see parents performing the last office to their children we feel it natural that children should close the eyes, and shroud the limbs of fathers and mothers, but unnatural that fathers and mothers should perform these sad duties for children. "Haran should have followed Terah, and not Terah Haran." A great French moralist, in his exposition of the sublime intensity of a father's love, goes on to say of the tie, the lien, which unites devoted parent to endeared child, " Et la nature brise ce lien. Elle jette au tombeau cette vie qui commence, et condamne le père à rester vivant." A tender poet of our day was writing from such an experience—not in his case an isolated one-when bewailing the gem of his hearth, his household pride, who, could love have saved from death, would have found a father's love, and a mother's, stronger than death: Humbly we bow to Fate's decree; Yet had we hoped that Time should see Les funérailles des fils, says another French author, sont toujours contre la nature quand les parents y assistent. How often Edmund Burke harps on that tremulously vibrating string, in reference to the master-grief which overshadowed his closing period of life! In a letter to Dr. Lawrence, he expresses his thankfulness to God for dismissing him "so gently from life," and being sent, he adds, "to follow those who in course ought to have followed me." In his famous letter to the Duke of Bedford, the bereaved old man utters the lament: "I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity, are in the place of ancestors." Shakspeare had anticipated the thought, and the expression of the thought, when he made old Lucretius exclaim : "If in the child the father's image lies, Where shall I live, now Lucrece is unlived? If children predecease progenitors, We are their offspring, and they none of ours." So again he makes Capulet cry out, at the loss of his daughter Juliet, "O thou untaught! what manners is in this, to press before thy father to a grave!" Writing to a kinsman on the birth of a son, Burke gives utterance to the wish," May he live to be the staff of your age, and to close your eyes in peace; instead of, like me, reversing the order of nature, and having the melancholy office to close his." And to his "dear little niece," Mary, he thus writes after the birth of her son (Thomas Haviland Burke) : 66 May you see your son a support to your old age; and at a very long day may he close your eyes, not as I have done those of your admirable cousin." His progeny may never be his posterity, muses Sir Thomas Browne in his meditations on man : "he may go out of the world less related than he came into it; and considering the frequent mortality in friends and relations, in such a term of time, he may pass away divers years in sorrow and black habits, and leave none to mourn for himself; orbity may be his inheritance." Bitterly Mohammed bewailed the death of his four sons by Kadijah, who died in their infancy; and especially that of one by Maria the Egyptian; for not only was this fatal to his hopes of founding an hereditary religious dynasty, but it affected hist claims to pre-eminent favour with God. "Al-as Ebn Wayel, who was so cruel and so daring as to insult him on the loss of his favourite boy, was accursed of heaven, and a special Sura (the 108th) was revealed to console the Prophet." Bitterly Saint Stephen, the first king of Hungary, bewailed the loss of his promising son Emeric-the first of a series of shocks that hastened his own end. Like the desolate sire in Scott's poem who Réné of Anjou, in surviving his male offspring, was the last representative of his race. Southey observes that Pauli in domo præter se nemo superest, is a reflection passing melancholy in the speech of Paulus Æmilius; and applying it to his own emphatically good physician, he says, that the speedy extinction of his family in his own person was often in the Doctor's mind, and that he would sometimes touch upon it, to dear friends, in moods of autumnal feeling. Michelet's record of the death of Charles le Bel, who leaving only a daughter, was succeeded by a cousin, closes with the reminder, "All that fine family of princes who had sat near their father at the council of Vienne, was extinct. In the popular belief, the curse of Boniface had taken effect." So with Alexander III. of Scotland, whose eldest son died soon after his marriage, leaving no issue, and whose second son died while a boy; other bereavements followed, and the king came to feel in fact as the patriarch felt by anticipation, that to be bereaved of one's children, was bereavement indeed. King James V., in like manner the survivor of both his sons, died a broken-hearted man. Laelio Torelli, the Florentine statesman and man of letters, survived all his children. Shakspeare lost his only son some twenty years before his own decease. Vincentio Scamozzi, the architect, who died the same year as Shakspeare, caused no little talk at the time, by the very singular will he left, betokening a most extraordinary solicitude for the perpetuation of his name, as he had the grief of outliving his offspring. Sir Francis Vere's three sons and two daughters all died before him. It was accounted a signal calamity in the career of that true nobleman, the Duke of Ormond, that he outlived "the nobleminded Ossory," worthy son of such a sire. "The feeble wrap the athletic in his shroud; and weeping fathers build their children's tomb." Young's is that truism; and Pope's is the cognate query, "Say, was it virtue, more though Heaven ne'er gave, lamented Digby, sunk thee to the grave? "Tell me, if virtue made the son expire, Why, full of days and honours, lives the sire?" Passing in his Meditations from single persons to families, Marcus Antoninus refers to that of the Pompeys, for one instance, as wholly extinct. "This man was the last of his house," he says, is not an uncommon inscription upon a monument. As with Homer's Phænops, in feeble age, who lost his joy and hope in young Xanthus and Thoön : "Vast was his wealth, and these the only heirs Of all his labours, and a life of cares. Cold death o'ertakes them in their blooming years, And leaves the father unavailing tears. To strangers now descends his heapy store, Who on his staff is this? we ask with Ossian; who is this whose head is white with age, whose eyes are red with tears, who quakes at every step? "It is thy father, O Morar!" dead and gone Morar: "the father of no son but thee. Weep, thou father of Morar; weep, but thy son heareth thee not. Deep is the sleep of the dead-low their pillow of dust." This flies sure to the old man's heart, says Schiller's Illo of the elder Piccolomini, "He has his whole life long Fretted and toil'd to raise his ancient house Peter the Great, whether guilty or not of putting to death his elder son, Alexis, was inconsolable for the loss of the only remaining one. It was the fate of Queen Anne to lose, at twelve years of age, the hopeful young prince who alone survived of all her very many children. Samuel Richardson was the saddened survivor of all his five sons and a daughter. The celebrated Dutch philosopher and mathematician, 'Sgravesande, who, by the way, was born within the same year with Richardson, lost his two sons within eight days of each other, and is honoured for the Christian resignation with which he bore the sharp trial. Sir John Vanbrugh lost his only son at the battle of Tournay. Bishop Warburton died not long after his only son, who was carried off by a decline in the springtide of life. It is of a distinguished Swiss littérateur, who died in his prime, that Sainte-Beuve somewhere says que sa destinée tranchée avant l'heure a pourtant été complète, si un père octogénaire ne lui survivait. “I ought to have gone before him : I wonder he went so young,” wails the aged mother in Mr. Tennyson's poem, all whose children have gone before her, she is so old. The gathering sorrows which clouded the latter years of |