remember the tenor of the last words of Dr. Adam, of the High School, Edinburgh, as recorded (however variously) by Scott and Lord Cockburn and others. It was in his bed-chamber, and in the forenoon, that he died; and finding that he could not see, the old schoolmaster, believing himself in the familiar school-room, exclaimed, "It is getting dark, boys; we must put off the rest till to-morrow." It was the darkness of death. And to the living, to-morrow, above all, that to-morrow, never comes. M. de Lescure, dying of the wounds he had received at the battle of Chollet, awaited with his usual serenity the advent of his last hour. "Open the windows," said he to his wife, who was watching by his bedside, "is it clear?" "Yes,” she said, "the sun is shining." "I have, then," replied the dying general, "a veil before my eyes." A veil that no man could raise. Chateaubriand, in describing the last hours of his sister, Madame de Beaumont-the Lucile of his " Memoires d'outretombe"-incidentally relates that "she begged of me to open the window. . . A ray of sunshine rested upon her bed, and seemed to rejoice her spirit." The same circumstance is related of the dying Emperor Alexander. So it is of Dr. Channing. Karl Ludwig Sand, on the scaffold, begged that the bandage over his eyes might be so placed that he could, until his last moment, see the light. And it was so. Turner's biographer tells us that almost at the very hour of the old painter's death, his landlady wheeled his chair to the window, that he might see the sunshine he had loved so much, mantling the river, and glowing on the sails of the passing boats. "The old painter died with the winter-morning sun shining upon his face, as he was lying in his bed. The attendant drew up the window-blind, and the morning sun shone on the dying artistthe sun he had so often beheld with such love and such veneration," and painted, at sundry times and in divers manners, with such force. Rousseau's wish, when in a dying state, to be carried into the open air, that he might have "a parting look at the glorious orb of day," is referred to by one of the many biographers of Robert Burns, in recording that poet's remark one beautiful evening, when the sun was shining brightly through the casement. The hand of death was then upon him, and a young friend rose to let down the window-blinds, fearing the light might be too much for him. Burns thanked her, with a look of great benignity, but prayed her to let the sun shine on: "he will not shine long for me." Tender and true is the pathos in one of Mrs. Richard Trench's letters, touching the death of her endeared child, Bessy, where we read: "The last phrase she uttered, except those expressive of her latest wants and pain, was a desire the window-curtain might be withdrawn, that she might look at the stars." Sunlight or starlight, it is light we cherish, and that cherishes us. Light from the first, light to the last. Happy, if the light we cherish is the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. Another set of variations on the same theme will form the section next ensuing. WISHED-FOR DAY. ACTS xxvii. 29. T was in a ship of Alexandria, sailing into Italy, when sail it was during a voyage which Paul, a passenger, foresaw and foretold would be with hurt and much damage, not only of the lading and ship, but also of lives two hundred threescore and sixteen; it was after there had arisen against the ship a tempestuous wind called Euroclydon, before which the vessel became a helpless drift; then it was that the crew and passengers, exceedingly tossed with the tempest, and not comforted-except the apostle, gave up, with the same exception, all hope of escape, and gloomily awaited the bitter end. On the third day they cast out the tackling of the ship. And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest lay on them, all hope that they should be saved was then taken away. The fourteenth night was come, and they were driven up and down in Adria, and about midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country, and sounded once and again, and found reason to fear lest they should have fallen upon rocks. So they cast four anchors out of the stern, and wished for the day-ηὔχοντο ἡμέραν γενέσθαι. If 'tis double death to die in sight of shore, as Shakspeare says, it is also, or nearly, double death to die in the dark. Some would almost say, Surely the bitterness of death is past, if light be vouchsafed to the dying, and so the shadows flee away. Well can they understand a pregnant symbolism in that incident of patriarchal days, when a deep sleep fell upon Abram as the` sun was going down; and, lo, a horror of a great darkness fell upon him. With something of a shuddering sympathy can they connect the fact that, on the day whence all Good Fridays take their name, there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour, with that other fact that about the ninth hour there was heard a wailing cry, whose echo reverberates through all space and time, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? Ever memorable in classical lore is the supplication of the Greek warrior in Homer, not to die in the dark. Let him see his foe, and see his end, however imminent, however inevitable. King Edward II., in Christopher Marlowe's historical tragedy, left alone in the Berkeley Castle dungeon with Lightborn, a murderer, exclaims : "I see my tragedy written in thy brows; Frequent in historical narrative are instances like that of Labedoyère, who when brought out to be shot, refused to have his eyes bandaged, and looking straight at the levelled muskets, exclaimed in a loud voice, Fire, my friends!" Marshal Ney, a week or two later, also refused to have his eyes bandaged. "For five-and-twenty years," he said, "I have been 66 accustomed to face the balls of the enemy." Then taking off his hat with his left hand, and placing his right upon his heart, he too said in a loud voice, fronting the soldiers, "My comrades, fire on me." Murat fell in a like manner, after a like request, but gazing to the last on a medallion which contained portraits of his wife and four children. What mainly tends to pile up the agony of Goisvintha, in the historical romance of "Antonina," when alone in the vaults with the madman Ulpius, is the distracting absence of light. "Bewildered and daunted by the darkness and mystery around her, she vainly strained her eyes to look through the obscurity, as Ulpius drew her on into the recess. Suddenly he heard her pause, as if panic-stricken in the darkness, and her voice ascended to him, groaning, 'Light! light! oh, where is the light?"" She is held forth at this crisis, as a terrible evidence of the debasing power of crime, as she now stands, enfeebled by the weight of her own avenging guilt, and “by the agency of darkness, whose perils the innocent and the weak have been known to brave." It is only your melodramatic villain that flings forth his flourish in the style of Velasquez in "Braganza,"-addressing the duke, his judge : "Yes, in your gloomiest dungeons plunge me down. No more these loathing eyes shall see that sun Whose irksome beams light up thy pageant triumph." And thus Sir Walter Scott has full warranty for proving the exceptional courage of his captive Englishman, when subjected to a midnight trial in the vaults of the Vehmgericht, by showing him unappalled by even the utter darkness of that terrible court. "Even in these agitating circumstances, the mind of the undaunted Englishman remained unshaken, and his eyelid did not quiver nor his heart beat quicker, though he seemed, according to the expression of Scripture, to be a pilgrim in the valley of the shadow of death, beset by numerous snares, and encompassed by total darkness, where light was most necessary for safety." It is only in an oblique sense that what Euripides says is true, of the coward being very valiant in the dark— ἐν ὄρφνῃ δραπέτης μέγα σθένει. Dr. Croly applies the Homeric prayer of Ajax to an incident in the long war with France, when twenty-seven thousand British were eager, under Abercrombie and the Duke of York, to attack the French lines, and at the first tap of the drum a general cheer was given from all the columns. But the day, we read, had scarcely broke when a dense fog fell suddenly upon the whole horizon, and rendered movement almost impossible. "Nothing could exceed the vexation of the army at this impediment, and if our soldiers had ever heard of Homer there would have been many a repetition of his warrior's prayer, that 'live or die, it might be in the light of day.'" One is reminded of the lines in Racine :— It has been observed of a certain railway catastrophe, where the crash and collision occurred in a tunnel-in that very place which nobody, even on ordinary occasions, passes through without a slight shudder and an undefined dread of some such disaster as the one in question—that "Ajax's prayer has been muttered by many who never heard of Ajax; and if we are to die, it is at least a mitigation of the hour of fate when it overtakes us in daylight." In tracing, psychologically, the development within us of the sense of awe, Professor Newman attributes to the gloom of night (deadly night, as Homer terms it), more universally perhaps than to any other phenomenon, the first awakening of an uneasy sense of vastness. A young child, as he says, accustomed to survey the narrow limits of a lighted room, wakes in the night, and is frightened at the dim vacancy. "No nurse's tales about spectres are needed to make the darkness awful." Nor, he adds, is it from fear of any human or material enemy : it is the negation, the unknown, the unlimited, which excites and alarms; and sometimes the more if mingled with glimpses of light. |