Now AND AFTERWARDS.

"Two hands upon the breast,
And labor's done;

Two pale feet crossed in rest-
The race is won;

Two eyes with coin-weights shut,

And all tears cease;

Two lips where grief is mute,

Anger at peace; '—

So pray we oftentimes, mourning our lot;
God in his kindness answereth not.

"Two hands to work addrest,

Aye for his praise;
Two feet that never rest

Walking his ways;

Two eyes that look above

Through all their tears;
Two lips still breathing love,

Not wrath, nor fears;'

So pray we afterwards, low on our knees;
Pardon those erring prayers! Father, hear these!"

GEORGE MACDONALD.

From ROBERT FALCONER.

"Eh! you were a bonny lass when I married you. But gin I were up, see gin I wadna gie ye a new goon, an' that wad be something to make ye like yersel' again. I'm affronted wi' mysel' 'at I hae been sic a brute o' a man to ye. But ye maun forgie me noo; for I do belien Gie me anither kiss, lass. God

i' my hert 'at the Lord's forgi'en me. be praised, and many thanks to you. Ye micht hae run awa frae me long or noo, an' a body wad hae said ye did richt. Robert, play a spring."

"What'll I play then, Sandy?" asked Robert.

"Play "The Lan' o' the Leal,' or 'My Nannie's Awa',' or something o' that kin'. I'll be leal to ye noo, Bell. An' we winna pree o' the whiskey nae mair, lass."

Robert struck in with the "Land o' the Leal." When he had played it over two or three times, he laid the fiddle in its place and departed. Bell sat on the bedside, stroking the rosiny hand of her husband, the

rhinoceros hide of which was yet delicate enough to let the love through to his heart. After this, the soutar never called his fiddle his auld wife.

From SEABOARD PARISH.

What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything He gives you to do, you must do as well as you can, and that is the best possible preparation for what He may want you to do next. If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next. And I do not believe that those who follow this rule are ever left floundering on the sea-deserted sands of inaction, unable to find water enough to swim in.

PROFESSOR HUXLEY.

Men of science do not pledge themselves to creeds; they are bound by articles of no sort; there is not a single belief that it is not a bounden duty with them to hold with a light hand, and to part with it cheerfully the moment it is really proved to be contrary to any fact, great or small.

PROFESSOR TYNDALL.

From ADDRESS DELIVERED AT BELFAST IN 1874.

The rigidity of old conceptions has been relaxed, the public mind being rendered gradually tolerant of the idea that not for six thousand, nor for sixty thousand, nor for six thousand thousand, but for æons embracing untold millions of years, this earth has been the theatre of life and death. The riddle of the rocks has been read by the geologist and palæontologist, from sub-cambrian depths to the deposits thickening over the sea-bottoms of to-day. And upon the leaves of that stone book are, as you know, stamped the characters plainer and surer than those formed by the ink of history.

CANON FARRAR.

From a DISCOURSE ON THE UNVEILING OF THE RALEIGH WINDOW, May 14, 1882.

Our lives would be better, our thoughts nobler, our hearts larger, our faith more real, our words more charitable, if we would, once for all, learn the lesson of the Law and the Prophets, which is not to glide along the razor's edge of scholastic dogmas, nor to wear formulas threadbare by conventional iteration, but to love God, and to do good to our

neighbor. Which is best, to diffuse the grandeur and sacredness of faith over the whole of daily life, or to regard all but a fraction of life as irredeemably secular? Which is best, to specialize Sundays with servile rigorism, or to diffuse the spirit of Sunday over days which we too often devote to meanness and Mammon? Which is best, to surround places, gestures, garments with a mechanical sanctity, or by holy lives to make the floor of a cottage as sacred as the rocks of Sinai, and the commonest events hallowed as the rounds of the ladder on which the angels trod?

SYLLABUS.

Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837.

There has been a perceptible change in popular literature within the last fifty years.

Prose literature is more in demand than poetry.

Poetry, the highest form of human expression, does not necessarily decline as civilization advances.

There have been fashions-freaks-in both prose and poetry. The Eu phuism of Elizabeth's time is an example, the rhymed couplet of Dryden's and Pope's time, the pre-Raphaelite æsthetic school of the present,

etc.

Among the Victorian poets, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, and Robert Browning hold highest rank.

Other poets of this period, popular before 1850, are Bryan Waller Procter ("Barry Cornwall"), Eliza Cook, Mrs. Norton, R. M. Milnes, Charles Swain, Charles Mackay, Charles Kingsley, etc.

Those who have become more prominent since 1850 are Matthew Arnold, Edwin Arnold, Gerald Massey, Coventry Patmore, Adelaide Anne Procter, Lord Lytton (" Owen Meredith "), Jean Ingelow, William Morris, Rossetti, and Swinburne. Writers still later are E. W. Gosse, Austin Dobson, and Philip Bourke Marston.

Scottish poets of the time are David Macbeth Moir, Thomas Aird, William Edmondstone Aytoun, Robert Buchanan.

The Novel has taken the place of the Drama.

Four novelists since Sir Walter Scott stand out with especial prominence -Charlotte Bronté, Dickens, Thackeray, and "George Eliot."

Other novelists, some of whom might rank as high, are Bulwer, Mrs. Craik, Charles Reade, George MacDonald, William Black, Miss Thackeray. With the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species, 1859, a new era in the literature of science began.

Scientists besides Darwin are Huxley, Tyndall, Owen, Wallace, etc.

James Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer are prominent philosophical writers.

Theologians of the time are Dean Stanley, Dean Alford, Archbishop Trench, Archbishop Manning, J. T. D. Maurice, Norman Macleod, James Martineau, F. W. Farrar.

Later historians of the nineteenth century treat history in a more philosophical manner than the earlier historians.

Buckle and Lecky are philosophic historians.

Froude and Kinglake belong rather to the romantic school of historians. Grote wrote a history of Greece.

Freeman, Green, and Justin McCarthy are late historians of England. Among biographers are William Hepworth Dixon, John Forster, David Masson, Agnes Strickland, George Henry Lewes.

Among miscellaneous writers are John Ruskin, Mrs. Jameson, Harriet Martineau, Gladstone, and others.

A

1620-1775.

MERICAN Literature, unlike that of any other nation,

has no traditional ancestry. No mythical heroes and demi-gods overshadow its far beginnings. No epic poem, with the feats of fabulous heroes, has come down to us as an inheritance from American ancestors. All is clear, definite, and sharply outlined. We have a history, but no traditions. It is the fast-decaying aborigines who have their legendary Hiawatha, Mudgekeewis, Minnehaha, and Nokomis. The English tongue on American soil has given utterance to the beautiful Indian legend. The only myths and traditions that we can claim had their origin in the earliest English tongue, in the earliest home of the English people. Ours is the old poem of Beowulf, sung more than a thousand years ago in Angle-land and Saxe-land, and afterwards repeated by our Anglo-Saxon forefathers in England, the home of their adoption. Every other nation has had its early epic, or early lyrical or allegorical poem. But noble lives are grander than epic poems, and the deeds of a valiant ancestry are more glorious than their written thoughts.

Theology and not mythology occupied the minds of our American forefathers, and our literary inheritance from them is prose. Religious persecution having driven to the unprejudiced shores