HIS TENDER MERCIES. "The Lord is good to all; and his tender mercies are over all his works."-Ps. cxlv. 9.

Thy grace of life is kind in all.
May I that grace be showing!
And into life diviner yet

May I be always growing,
Until I show thee perfectly

In all that I am being,

Thy holiest beauties brother eyes
In all my life be seeing.

So shall I be a note of thine

So glad and holy singing,-
A bird that in thy love is born,

And through thy love is winging.

In every little beating heart thy grace of life is kind. The gnat of the summer air and the eagle of the crags feel joy in the life that fulfils their being. In the grass and in the star are motions that, could we hear, would sing a song of delight. In me there is gladness as my ruddy streams of life kiss their crystal banks by the grace of thy good

ness.

The life thou givest is full of joy; and, the fuller it is of loving thoughts of thee, the deeper, the holier its joys.

There are, indeed, the things of cruelty in thy world, the shames of sin, the pangs of sickness, the woes of hereditary taint. Discord so often holds the tune of life that it is hard to believe that thou art good, and that thy tender mercies are over all thy works. The heart is alienated from thee, and cannot realize thee loving and good, no more than muddy streams can mirror the stars. The heart is evil, and cannot realize thy goodness which is as constant as thy

sun.

The heart is unkind, and cannot realize that thou art full of compassion, and givest thy tender mercies as the skies give rain, as the blossoms give fragrance. The heart that is full of cruelty must think all thy graciousness cruel, even as the eye that is sore feels the dear sun as a torment. Yet, even with thy beautiful gift of life perverted, how gracious it is! With all the evils that haunt thy earth, how wonderfully good and glad is this world turning in its beauty of the seasons, and ministering so bountifully unto all life! In spite of my own evils I know that there is good in me, that that good is the true being, and by it I am sure that thou art good, and that goodness is the truth of thy universe. And so, in spite of what appears of shadow, in spite

of what I suffer of evil, I take up the refrain that thou art good to all, and that thy tender mercies are over all thy works. And, surely, my song sings true to the heart of thy purpose still at its tasks of creation!

Thou brimmest to the full what cups of joy thy creatures drink. Thou givest them the beating heart, the wing, the song, the tones of dear content that vocalize the day into some hymn of peace. Thy sun is warm for all. Thy winds for all do blow. Thou givest each its food; and, surely, thou somehow makest death not to be all unkind. Some grace amid its shadows must appear, as rays of stars give beauty to the night. Thou givest love to all, the love they have for those that give them answering love.

We feel that

""Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all."

It has been good for us to be together at the feast of life, although at last it is farewell and journey in the dark. The lights are tender while we stay within their beams.

And so I sing on, what is not always a song of sight, but what in so many of life's dark experiences can be but a hymn of faith. I sing on the dear refrain which hath comfort in it like a mother's voice. The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works. Thou delightest to live in thy universe. I am partaker of that glad life. Thou art eternal, and of thy eternity I am some part.

From my evil I would take refuge in thy goodness until I shall know in every pulse of my perfecting being that thou art good. From all this selfishness which makes me so unkind, may I flee into the fulness of thy tender mercies, and so wilt thou be fulfilling thyself in me a kindness to all these whom I touch with any hand of influence! In me be good to all! In me let thy tender mercies be over thy works! May not a single heart beat in sorrow because that I am unkind,-no heart of beast or bird or man! Shape me forth into a word of blessing. Fashion my life into a loving kind ness, until I shall realize to many the gracious truth that grows diviner and diviner in each experience we have in thy love,-the truth that the Lord indeed is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works.

PASTOR QUIet.

NIGHT THOUGHTS.

Our night thoughts are our great thoughts,
When distractions of the day,
Little griefs and fleeting pleasures,
From our sight have slipped away.
In that calm and shadowed hour

Just before we go to sleep,

From the silence and the moonshine

Float bright thoughts we fain would keep

Ever near us; but the daylight

Frightens fancy with the glare

Of real facts, and dreams are banished
While we breathe the morning air.

And that other world, the dream world,
We think vague and far away,

When we rise to give a welcome
To the smiling princess, Day.

Our night thoughts are our great thoughts. From the shadowed hours of pain

Thoughts arise in clear distinctness,
Life's grand meaning is made plain.
In the night of storm and trouble,
Crusts of snow slip from the soul.
In the quiet midnight hour,
Dreams of beauty brightest roll.

Let us keep our night thoughts with us,
As we do the work of Day;

Let the dreams from shadows floating Be our guides through sunshine's way. Then perchance our very gladness Will be brightened by the light

Of the memory of those visions Which came to us at night.

vate homes of both rich and poor, habitually used liquor of some kind. I know that in our high-priced hotels in this country the wine lists are long, and find many patrons. But I am sure not so many as in England. At English railway eating-places it seemed to me that, as a rule, there was more liquor called for than food. It certainly is not so with us.

In England changes take place more slowly than here. We are younger as a people. Our ways are not so fixed. We do not send our roots back into so distant a past. Hence it is not strange if a larger part of the people over there cling to the habits and customs of a hundred years ago, when practically everybody of both countries drank.

An illustration of this is found in the great public schools, like Rugby, Harrow, and Eton, and in the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, where old drinking customs are clung to with great tenacity.

At one of the great schools for boys the practice still continues of giving the boys a supper of meat and beer. And no boy is allowed to substitute milk for his beer without a special order from the physician. At Oxford and Cambridge nearly all the colleges have their wine cellars, some of them large, expensive, and ostentatious; and drinking practices very widely prevail, which we in this country would think shocking.

One particularly discouraging aspect of the situation in England is found in the fact that so many women drink. At hotels and in private homes I could not see but that women drank essentially as freely as men. And, what startled me still more, I saw in London and the other great cities women thronging the saloons, gin-palaces, and public drinking-places in nearly as great numbers as men. Of course, as the result of this, the whole moral tone of society is let down. Children learn drinking habits from their mothers as well as from their fathers; and the influence of the home is not an offset, as with us, to that of the public drinking-place.

I think the temperance cause has relatively less support from religion in England than with us. Certain it is that drinking customs have more ecclesiastical countenance there than here. The nonconformist

churches are quite generally on the side of temperance, though by no means wholly so. There is also an important temperance element in the Established Church. But, take the establishment as a whole, its influence seems to be on the side of the liquor interests. A state church in the nature of the case stands for conservatism; and conservatism in England means no interference with the drinking customs that have come down from the past. It is widely felt that the establishment is an obstacle in the way of temperance reform, and a distinct bulwark of drink. In the last general election, which resulted in so decisive a Tory victory, it was notorious, and commented on all up and down the land, that, in order to carry the day at the polls, the Church made common cause not only with the liquor interests of the country, but with the gambling interests also. Religion, morals, public virtue, temperance, everything, had to be sacrified to the necessity of keeping power in the hands of the Church.

I repeatedly heard it said that the cathedral towns, where the church influence is the strongest, are relatively the most retrogressive, immoral, and drunken cities in England. In Canterbury, the seat of the English primate, the first ecclesiastical city in the realm, the liquor interest is particularly strong; and the temperance cause has had a particularly hard time in trying to overcome the combined opposition of the ecclesiastics and the publicans.

Certain it is, the great curse of England is her drink. One sees this everywhere.

One day, riding with a wealthy London manufacturer who had a thousand men in his employ, the conversation led to the subject of the condition of the British working

men.

There

comes have nothing to fall back upon, and, when they grow old or lose their health, become paupers. And what is true of my workmen is true of the English workmen generally. Everywhere their greatest enemy is drink." My own observations convinced me that this gentleman was right.

I was never in a city where there seemed to be so much drinking. Certainly, I was never in one where the drinking was so bold, so open, so common to both men and women, so objectionable on account of the strong liquors used, and so productive of drunkenness as in London. And it is worse on Sunday, especially Sunday night, than at any other time. Instead of requiring the drinking-places to close all day Sunday, as is usual in this country, London and the large cities of Great Britain generally simply require them to close during the regular hours of church service, morning and evening. The rest of the day they are open, and doing a great business. Returning home from church on Sunday evenings, on foot or riding on the top of an omnibus, I usually passed scores, or, if I had far to go, hundreds and hundreds of brilliantly lighted and attractive drinking-places, filled to the doors with drinking men and women. The condition of things in our own American cities is bad enough, Heaven knows; but I think it is not quite so bad as in England.

In many places on the Continent there is fully as much drinking as in London. But there is this difference: Englishmen, as a rule, drink stronger liquors than the Germans, the French, or the Italians, and thus are somewhat more likely to be made drunk. This, then, is the dark side of the temperance question in England.

I am glad to say there is another side. Even English conservatism can be made to give way. It is slowly yielding before the growing intelligence and the higher ideals of personal and social life that are being lifted up in our time. The temperance cause is making slow but sure progress among the English people. The England painted by Dickens, in which everybody drank, and nobody was ashamed of it or thought anything better, has passed away. The number of total abstainers steadily increases. Drunkenness is looked upon as a

that in circles where drinking is still fashionable there is much more care taken to confine it within the bounds of moderation. At banquets now, or dinners, public or private, where wines are served, one may turn over his glass and refuse all, and not be looked upon as odd or made to feel uncomfortable. This would not have been the case twenty-five or thirty years ago.

This liberty to be independent is a great step gained. In this respect England is much ahead of the Continent. On the Continent the custom of liquor-drinking is still very tyrannical; and there are many places where to refuse to drink would be thought very strange, if not unpardonably rude.

The English churches are more and more taking up the matter of temperance, as something which they have no right to be indifferent to.

I found quite a strong movement in some quarters - some theologically very orthodox quarters to banish fermented wine from the communion table at the Lord's Supper, and to introduce in place of it unfermented wine; that is, the fresh juice of the grape or the juice of raisins. And I found some strong advocates of the substitution of water for wine, as being more in harmony with the spirit of the gospel than the use of anything that can intoxicate or create an appetite for intoxicants.

Temperance organizations of many kinds are growing in England. Temperance meetings and great temperance conventions are becoming more and more common. While I was there, a great National Temperance Congress was held in Chester, with the distinguished medical writer, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, in the chair, and addresses from many physicians, clergymen, educators, and public men of note and influence from various parts of the British Islands.

During my stay in England I visited the famous manufacturing town of Soltaire, near Bradford, in Yorkshire, where no liquor shops are allowed, and consequently where there are no paupers, no jails, no policemen, and no quarrels. There are other similar villages and towns. Naturally, they are proving "cities set upon a hill, whose light cannot be hid." Their influence is extending far and wide; and in hundreds of other places men are asking, "Why should not we, too, banish liquor, and thus

rid ourselves of the burden of crime, pauperism, and misery that is so heavy?"

Within the past twenty years or so there has been a wide-spread movement in England for the establishment of temperance hotels and temperance restaurants and coffee-houses where the working people can get refreshments of all kinds, well prepared and at low prices, and free from all temptations to drink. These temperance hotels or inns can now be found in nearly all towns of any size. And the coffee-houses and temperance restaurants are also multiplying: in London there are hundreds of them. It is easy to see that these establishments mean a great deal for temperance in England.

The same questions that are agitating us here those of total abstinence, moderate drinking, temperance education of the young, license, high and low, local option, prohibition, municipal control, State control-are all before the people of England, seeking a solution there as in this country. The English people are more slow to move than we. But, when they do become aroused and really take hold of a matter, they are not likely to turn back or stop till they have accomplished what they set out for. I have faith to believe, therefore, that the temperance reform will not stop where it is in Great Britain.

The Liberal government two years ago introduced into Parliament a Local Option Bill, which was believed to be a very important step in advance. The result was a defeat. But it was much that a great political party should propose such a measure as a part of its national policy. It means that the people are waking up. Such defeats are simply forerunners of victories to come later.

The best minds of England are more and more arraying themselves against the tyranny and curse of drink, and committing themselves to the temperance movement.

Gladstone long ago declared in the House of Commons that drink is the cause of greater evils than the historic scourges of war, pestilence, and famine combined.

Chamberlain, second in influence to no political leader in England to-day, has told the English people that temperance reform is at the bottom of all political, social, and religious progress.

Archdeacon Farrar, the most distinguished living preacher of the English Church, has been for years advocating temperance with the zeal of a Wesley and the eloquence of a Whitefield.

John Ruskin, the greatest and most honored living writer in England, tells his countrymen that "drunkenness is not only the cause of crime, it is crime; and the encouragement of drunkenness for the sake of profit on the sale of drink is one of the most criminal methods of assassination for money ever adopted by the bravoes of any age or country."

When the leaders of thought in a land like England come to the point where they believe and say such things as these, it means that the people are going to follow, and that the cause of temperance is certain to advance.

COVENTRY PATMORE, THE POET OF LOVE.*

The Saturday Review of London urged Patmore for the laureateship; and the Dial of Chicago thinks that, after it became evident that neither William Morris nor Swin

burne would be willing to occupy the post, "there was probably no other English poet among the living so deserving of the appointment." And yet, beside such poets as Morris and Swinburne and Watson and Edwin Arnold, to say nothing of Tennyson and the Brownings, Patmore's name, at the time of his death last November, was a comparatively unknown one to the present generation on this side of the sea.

There is not much to tell about his life.

He was born in 1823, in Woodford, England, the son of a well-known editor. His full baptismal name was Coventry Kearsey Deighton Patmore. He published his first volume of poems at the age of twenty-one, and three years later became assistant librarian in the British Museum, where he remained for twenty years. After leaving the Museum, he settled at Hastings, where he purchased a large estate, built a Catholic church, and remained until his death. His best known work, "The Angel in the House," first appeared in 1854, was revised

From extracts given in the Literary Digest Feb. 27, 1897.

and enlarged repeatedly, and not until 1878 did it assume its final form. His next best known work, "The Unknown Eros," developed in somewhat the same way, the "Odes" out of which it grew being issued in private form in 1868, and "The Unknown Eros" appearing twenty years later.

The following descriptive touch of Patmore is given by the Westminster Gazette:—

Visitors to him sometimes felt as in the presence of a contemporary of Dante, Calderon, or of the Troubadours, not of a nineteenth-century gentleman. Of gigantic stature, attenuated, erect, that singular form clad in black velvet, and mediæval Partly, perhaps, on such account the good head, seldom passed unnoticed in a crowd. folk of Hastings keenly regretted his departure. From his beautiful Georgian house in the old town the poet, as we have said, migrated a year or two ago to one equally beautiful over against the Isle of Wight, an ideal residence for one of his turn of mind. There, surrounded by gracious home influences, the poet spent his last days in happiness and peace. He had, it is to be hoped, a Boswell at hand to jot down his brilliant table-talk. You had only to start him with a suggestive question, and his remarks ran on in unbroken stream. He was an inimitable story-teller, and as excellent a listener enough, it was in the modern novel that to the clever things of others. Curiously Coventry Patmore found literary recreation. "I could name a hundred novels, each perfect in its way," he said, "as perfect of its kind as Paradise Lost."

From many reviews of his work we select the following one, by the Dial, one by Edmund Gosse, and one by Mrs. Meynell. First the Dial's :

The enjoyment of Patmore's work, although very deep when once attained to, is to a certain extent the result of an acquired taste. It takes some effort and some power of penetration to discern the whole subtlety of his thought and the whole beauty of his imagination. He is, too, very uneven; and the reader who, at the start, chances upon certain pages in which baldness and triviality seem to reign supreme, may well be hastily conclude that the poet has no mes repelled from further examination, and too sage for his ear. Suppose, for example, that the following lines first arrest the reader's eye:—

"While thus I grieved, and kissed her glove, My man brought in her note to say,

Papa had bid her send his love,

And would I dine with them next day?"