laws to harm us; the laws themselves harm us when we break them, and get in their way." Is not this a nobler view of God than orthodox theologians give us? His style was remarkable for its clearness, simplicity, easyflowing grace. Short and simple sentences, speaking to the hearts and intellects of his many readers, coming from his own great sympathetic nature, made all he wrote popular and intelligible. There is a short explanation in one of his works of the way in which lakes are formed, which is as favourable a specimen of his style as any I know. In "Good Words," for 1869, are two articles, one on "Thrift," the other on "The Two Breaths," even more remarkable. Every line conveys a great truth; every sentence teaches something of importance; and all clothed in such simple, eloquent words, that these articles might well serve as models to lecturers on scientific and social subjects. He detested wealth and luxury-at least, the excess of the former, and the worship of the latter. Perhaps he was too hard on those poor creatures who have to wring from the iron grasp of the hard-hearted the little comforts of life. Perhaps he, who always had enough and to spare, could hardly sympathise sufficiently for the poor, who, at the end of years of struggling, see a competence before them, and force their way on towards it; straining every nerve, letting all else slip from them, sacrificing life, health, hope, in the long and fatal pursuit. But poverty is a dreadful thing, as bad as luxury; it means, in England, misery. This is not a climate, nor is this a state of society in which man can live on a handful of grain and a little fruit. Here, something more is needed, and poverty, as those who have experienced it know to their cost, means sorrow and bitterness. The eager love of riches he could not tolerate. He felt burning indignation for the corruption, the heartlessness, the affectation of the age, and well he might; but perhaps, he did not make sufficient allowance for the circumstances in which men now live, and the temptations to which they are exposed. He had a true poetic soul! Great poetic genius he had not of the kind which seeks expression in verse; but though he could not write stirring poems in verse, all his works are great prose poems. Like Chalmers, in his magnificent astronomical discourses, he poured out his full heart in the praise of God, in the description of His mighty works. In Kingsley, England lost one of the greatest poets of the century. And yet some of his enemies said he was not a good or a wise man. He was an atheist; he sought to set class against class; he made the poor discontented; he had strange views of disease; he thought too much of the works, too little of the words of God; he was wanting in reverence; he was, in short, they said, a lover of pleasure, who thought everything of present enjoyment, nothing, or next to nothing, of the great future. Yes, truly he was all this, and more than this, if by an atheist is meant one who ever lives as in the presence of God his Father. He was a firebrand, if that means a man who felt deeply for the sorrows of rich and poor; and longed, with all his heart and soul, that the day might come when the curse of penury, the canker of luxury, might never more afflict the land. Yes, he made the poor discontented, but only by trying to rouse them to a new and better life, and urging them on to fresh exertion. His were strange views of disease, if by that is meant that he looked upon God as man's Father, the Lord and Giver of Life, the Friend of the poor, the Helper of the fallen. He thought too much of the works of his Maker-in the opinion of those who see in them nothing but lifeless wood and stone-but he saw the finger of his Master fashioning them and directing all their movements; he saw God everywhere, and in all, for his was a noble and reverent pantheism, which confesses that in all and above all moves the Spirit of the mighty Creator. Reverence he had not, if that means that he felt that all men were his brothers, that it was his duty to learn and investigate all the days of his life, so that he might the more fully understaud the claims of his fellow-men, the majesty of his Maker, the perfection of His splendid works. Yes, too, he thought much of the present, for the present to him was the beginning of the life eternal; he thought much of good health, of enjoyment, for he knew that the best and surest way of honouring God was to understand Him, to love Him, to take what He sends with a grateful heart, to bear and use sorrow cheerfully, adversity calmly, pleasure temperately, for all come from God for man's higher good. But Good he was, if ever man was good. Not his the sickly goodness of those, who while they might work are content languidly to wait. Not his the goodness of him who, wrapped in his robe of self-contentment and self-love, calmly gazes on but does not assist the combatants in the mighty and terrible struggle of life. his the goodness of the man full of sympathy, full of love, of tenderness; his the goodness, finding vent in fervour of language, luxuriance of description, in great and noble thoughts, in sweet and soothing words: his great nobleness made him feel for all mankind. His death was a great loss to England. It is out of the question ever to expect many such as he. He towered far above his fellows, and carried them up with himself; all cannot be leaders, but it is not always that there are such leaders as he. Close together went four great men from the ranks of the worthies of England. William Sterndale Bennett, Charles Lyell, and last, though not least, Charles Kingsley and Arthur Helps. Where will England find others to take their places; where will she look for recruits to fill up the vacancies which in four years have swept away nearly all the heads of the scientific, literary, and religious world in this country? Perhaps among the men who have been stirred into life by the words and examples of those whose loss we deplore. In all time of need let us hope that competent leaders will arise to guide the destinies of the nation, to lead the people onwards. While losing them let us not forget that, in the long and checkered history of the past, guides and leaders have arisen whenever the necessity for them was great. May England in her hours of necessity and adversity always be able to count, in every walk of life, upon intellects as broad, hearts as true as those for which we honour many of the departed, among whom it is our sorrow now to have to number those great teachers and friends of rich and poor-Charles Kingsley and Sir Arthur Helps. APRIL. A PRIL sweet month of sunshine and of showers, M. A. BAINES. VISIT TO THE ISLE OF AMSTERDAM. WHAT can sound better, or, rather, what can read better, than the description of a civilian's first outset in India? So early in life to commence with a salary of nearly fifty pounds a month! To begin as a grandee, to have all the prestige of one of the élite of birth and station and an ample fortune to carry one through all the concomitant requirements. In no other profession, except the guardsman's or the attache is a high position at once attained, unless, indeed, circumstances may render a youth far above pecuniary considerations. But, usually, a somewhat long apprenticeship of privation and need is almost a certain prospect in the novitiate of any profession. It is so with the tyro in the civil service, the clergyman, the soldier, and the sailor; and, if not so with the guardsman and the attaché, it is because, in truth, the first is half a soldier and half an independent, stylish gentleman, and the second, from his position and fashionable connections, one of those favoured members of the community whose interests require to be cared for. But this springing at once into a very handsome emolument, beginning with a salary such as I have mentioned, to progress eventually to great riches, is a career which to one commencing without means of his own awaits only the East Indian civilian. Then, on the other hand, as a set off, there is the exile, the frightful climate, the nature of employment, repulsive from its rigidly exacting a most intimate acquaintance with the natives of India, with their habits, their language, their laws, their interests, and their policy. More than this, if a young man does not enter into all these with energy and determination, if his mind is not wholly in the business, if he does not wed himself to all that appertains to the sultry soil of India, he is as unfit for a civilian as Achilles was for holding the distaff, or a disbeliever in Scripture is for the office of a bishop. All these considerations suggested themselves to William Sharman's friends, when they heard he had got over the preliminary examinations at Haileybury College; but, hoping for the best, and losing sight of the drawbacks of such a life to bear in mind its advantages, his father and mother saw him embark at Portsmouth, and bade him a long farewell, previous to his departure for Calcutta. With regard to the voyage out, and the several incidents of his arrival, his location at the writer's buildings,bis many expenses, and his acquaintances with Anglo-Indians, I should despair of finding topics to engage our attention. The occupation and to most English the mode of life which he entered upon would not be interesting to most people. Even to explain their nature would require long details, besides a glossary of native words, as most of the characters which bear a prominent part in Indian life have titles which find no synonym in any European language. But he went through the course of life-such as it was-was jockeyed by the racing men, victimised by the gambling-men, chaffed by the fast men, sneered at by the unprincipled men, joked with by the idle men, and having been cringed to most servilely, bowed to most profoundly, salaamed to most humbly, and fleeced most largely by the natives, he got through the ordeal of the writer's buildings. He passed a tolerably-respectable examination in Persian and Hindostanee, and proceeded to the upper provinces, where he enacted the part of magistrate and judge over a province nearly as large as Great Britain. After a lapse of some years he was obliged to return home sick, having been so recommended by his doctors. All considerations, both of his business, his health, his ambition, his present occupation, or his hopes, were completely swallowed up in his absorbing wish for home. The effect of the voyage upon his health was what is usually produced by sea air. After he had been out at sea for a month, he was much better than he had ever been since the time he had first set foot in India, and long before he had reached the harbour, to which the vessel was bound, he had almost forgotten the sickness altogether. A man can picture to his fancy, in some measure, the sensations which a person who had left a gloomy prison would feel, and, his sense of pleasure in pursuing his course in the full tide of his enjoyment, unwatched, unimpeded, and subject only to the control of his own will; or, he might even take as the truth the situation so often brought before us by novelists of the present day, viz., of a convict slipping his chains according to Ouida's conception, or filing them as Lever's hero did, and escaping by swimming in the deep, and being taken up by some friendly skiff, and finding himself scot-free, and once more a disenthralled denizen of the earth. In a minor degree, akin to such sensations, are those of him who has been a long time in India, and who re-visits his native country after a long sea voyage. To a sanguine temperament it is quite ecstatic, the scenes, the civilisation, the refinement, and the beauty of the women above all, fraught as if with enchant ment. |