they made their dispositions very prettily, as though they had been following some plan drawn at leisure by an engineer for an academical exercise, without reference to the number of forces engaged on either side. Beyond showing a few cavalry in the plain to the north, the Turks took their time once more, and the Greeks sent down their comparatively few wounded to their rear. Meanwhile, the day after the kriegspiel fight at Pharsalos, the Turks had forced Velestinos Junction, and there was nothing to prevent the invaders from pushing on to the rear of the Domokos position by three or four roads to both the west and the east. The best road, debouching at Xenias Lake, and running from the west of the Pharsalos plain by the valley of the Sophaditikos or Onatonos, presented no difficulties at all except its length, and the Greeks had nothing like the force requisite to even pretend to hold it. As soon as the defeated force from Velestinos had been pushed beyond the lowlying ground by Halmyros, there was nothing to prevent a Turkish advance in force on Lamia within the old boundary, except a position, in itself turnable in every direction, over the Othrys range, no part of which, though dreary enough, is impracticable for resolute infantry. So, as need scarcely be said, the great position of Domokos, like the great position at Pharsalos, was abandoned, though not without a fight which the Turks needlessly forced on in their centre. Thessaly, as handed over to the Greeks in 1881, had been won back by the Turks under German direction in less than four weeks, and the Greek dream of aggrandizement was shattered. Nothing has been said of the composition of the Turkish force which accomplished this, for the simple reason that I have no information for a moment to be trusted further than what my eyes supplied. But taking the Ottomans as I saw them, and filling up the intervening spaces as the ordinary usages of war would suggest, there must have been quite 70,000 men engaged in the invasion, and probably 10,000 more. Though they showed a notable lack of energy, and though their artillery fire was pour rire, yet the fact remains that they rolled up their adversaries in a singularly short time, considering the physical difficulties of the country and the fact that they had to draw the bulk of their supplies over difficult passes behind them. It is not for me to moralize on the result. But this fact appears to be established by the campaign, that no enthusiasm, no public spirit as displayed on the platform, in Parliament, or in the press, can make up for the absence of proper training and for lack of proper numbers in a military undertaking. And the success of Prince Alexander of Battenberg in the Slivnitza-Pirot campaign has no doubt been misleading in its effects upon some ambitious minds. First, the Turks are not Servians, and in the next place, Alexander had studied war intimately and on a great scale, besides being a man of most exceptional ability. At the same time nothing can be more unjust and ungenerous than the outcry in Greece against the crown prince and his staff. The real blame for the defeat of the Greeks is to be found in the rottenness of their political institutions and the influence of politics upon the army, both by giving commissions in the army and the reserve to men who have no training and are disinclined to get it, and by, for causes of temporary popularity, refusing the supplies necessary for a proper training of the men who are nominally on the roll. If the Greek army is to rise from its present Slough of Despond it must be commanded in the interests of the State by or through a king possessed of some real power, which King George has been carefully deprived of in the interests of an unchecked single Chamber; it must learn what firediscipline means, of which it has not the slightest notion at present; it must realize that arms are more than ever nowadays a serious profession, demanding all the powers of the human mind in constant exercise over problems big and small-though in very truth there is nothing so small as to be indispensable-and that there are certain axioms laid down clearly enough in an admirable little book by Lieutenant Mwaipa, a Greek officer trained in France, which are not to be violated with impunity even if a just cause animates the army and fires the nation behind it. CHARLES WILLIAMS. dreaded any attempt to expose them. The only excuse I can offer for lifting even the smallest corner of the veil is that he in so far lifted it himself. For every man requires to express himself in some way, and he more than most. Thoughts, emotions, sorrows, hopes, joys too deep for common utterance, yet too strong and soul-shaking to be safely repressed, sought an outlet. They found it in the pulpit he loved. They found it at the family altar, when, forgetting himself and his out in listeners, he poured himself prayer. They found it, most of all, in cannot his poetry. One help being thankful that it was so, and feeling that it was not only by an inward necessity, but by a blessed law of compensation, that this reserved and acutely sensitive man, who could not work off the ebullitions of his strong nature in any of the usual ways, found a refuge in his pen. Postscript.-So far I had written when details of the fighting at Domokos reached me. The Turkish plan of attack was exactly as I had anticipated, and, if it was not successful from the right, that was because the Greeks had there placed the Italian or Garibaldian Volunteers of the Foreign Legion, who were only going up as I was obliged by ill-health to come away. The only real fighting at Pharsalos was made on behalf of the Greeks by a couple of scratch companies of the British, French, and Italians who had up to that time arrived, and were by that time pretty well disgusted with what they had seen. So the duty of rolling back the Ottoman right fell to the redshirted battalions. That the Greeks fought so well as they did shows at once they have improved and how much they needed improving. They were just beginning to know what they Resting upon my soul with sweet and should have known at first. It was a mistake on the part of the Turks to attack Domokos Pass in any force in front. Their turning movements were quite sufficient to compel the evacuation of the position; and their blunder enabled the Greek army to save its honor by a sort of a stand at last. C. W. From The Sunday Magazine. In accordance with my father's express desire, no memoir of him has been written. Those who knew him well can only conjecture the reasons for this wish. As regarded personal feelings and experiences, no man was ever more reticent, and he may have "Lie there, my pen!" he wrote, when nearing the shore: Thou art the lute with which I sang my sadness, When sadness like a cloud begirt my way; Thou art the harp whose strings gave out my gladness, When burst the sunshine of a happier day, silent ray.1 And yet he did not, SO far as is known, discover this power very early in life, nor did he begin to write either as a means of self-expression, or with any dream of winning poetic fame. His first hymns were written for his Sabbath School children, in the days when, as assistant to the Rev. Dr. Lewis of South Leith, he walked daily from his mother's house, down Leith Walk, engrossed in his work, and revolving plans for increasing its efficiency. Almost every child in his large Sabbath School was known to him by name, face, and circumstances. Searching for simple hymns to fasten the truth upon these young minds in direct and easily remembered lan 1 My Old Letters. Prelude. guage, and finding few-for the children's paradise of literature was not yet-he sat down to write them. He himself did not know which was the first of these hymns, but certainly, "I lay my sins on Jesus," "Holy Father, hear my cry," and his morning hymn for a child going to school belonged to the period which closed with his call to Kelso in 1837. It was in the quiet of Kelso that the largest number and perhaps the best and sweetest of Doctor Bonar's hymns were written. In many of them-for instance, "I was a wand'ring sheep," "All that I was, my sin, my guilt," "Not what these hands have done"-he simply reached the usefulness at which he aimed; but in others he rose into true poetry; witness what is perhaps his simplest, yet most perfect effort, "I heard the voice of Jesus say," or, his Christian worker's hymn, "Go, labor on, spend and be spent," or his communion hymn, "Here, oh my Lord," or yet again that which was his own favorite of all he had written,— When the weary, seeking rest But let me turn from this aspect of Doctor Bonar's poetry, to speak of it as an expression of himself. So much of this is there in some places that one might almost weave a biographical sketch from it. I miss the dear paternal dwelling, And again, I thank Thee for a holy ancestry;2 I thank Thee for a true and noble creed, For wisdom, poetry, and gentle song; I thank the love that kept my life from sin, Even when my heart was far from God and truth, That gave me, for a lifetime's heritage, Words like these call up visions of the large, merry, united family of boys and girls that filled the roomy house which still stands, in Paterson's Court, Old Broughton. Poor as the neighborhood is now, a bit of the old garden is left with an old pear-tree in it. But then, the house stood nearly alone in its garden, on the northern limit of Edinburgh, and from it green fields and hedges sloped away to the sea. The father of Horatius Bonar (James Bonar, solicitor) used to take his summer walk and bathe before breakfast, from six to eight in the morning, having, we are told, first secured time for quiet reading and prayer by rising at four. In these walks his boys were his constant companions, until his sudden death, when my father was eleven years old. His mother long survived. To her during his residence at Kelso, he wrote, every Friday night, a letter containing some original meditation, to 2 From a hymn beginning "I look along the past," vol. iii. "Hymns of Faith and Hope." cheer and comfort her; and of her he So hidden from our sorrowing eyes, sang: As yon clear star Of the deep sky, and star that never sets, Midnight's lone darling, so was she to me.1 ""Tis thus we press the hand and part," was his farewell to his first flock at Leith; and it was not the last called forth by the sorrow of parting or of death. Looking back, I think that parting was a much more acute sorrow to him than to most; even a temporary separation from one of his family he could hardly bear. He may have had few very intimate friends, but to them he clung in life or in memory with every fibre of his being. To the very last this was so. His last bereavement happened when he himself was on the bed from which he never rose. To an involuntary expression of wonder at the sharp suffering it seemed to cost him, the time being so short, he answered: "Oh, you little know, you little know, a friendship of eighty years broken." His very strong belief in resurrection and in the coming glory of earth, and the body, led him to regard death as in a peculiar way the fruit of the curse, the enemy of God and man, a thing that ought not to have happened but for sin. The death of a little child was to him an unnatural and awful event which it needed all his strong faith and hope to bear him up under. Often have we seen him, like David, pleading passionately for life while the child was yet alive, hardly when the child was dead, to gain David's calm, but rather to have his sorrow transmuted into the still more passionate looking for reunion. He was thus stricken five times over, and those he lost were not all infants. The flowers of spring have come and gone; Bright were their blossoms, brief their stay; They shone and they were shone upon, 1 My Old Letters, Book x. Our young, sweet spring-bloom buried lies; One blast of earth swept o'er the flower, It died, the blossom of an hour. This seems the first of these songs of sorrow. Then follow, "Lucy," "He died to live, for Jesus died," "The farewell is complete," "O, early saved!" And to some early friend: Thou art in heaven, and I am still on earth; 'Tis years, long years since we were parted here; I still a wanderer, amid grief and fear, And our eyes looked into each other's depths. In this way-as he himself would have said, quoting from another-was "the heart of the minister formed within him;" for, he always said, a minister needs to suffer and learn for his people as well as for himself. Thus he became the author of the "Night of weeping," and the "Morning of joy." Thus he learned to sympathize and comfort, and thus, above all, did the vivid hope of the future grow stronger and stronger within him. There is a note of "other-worldliness" in all his poetry. He was all his life, in. very peculiar way, home-sick for heaven, "The land of which I dream," as he has called it. a Brother, we shall meet and rest It is difficult to give any account of the genesis of the large bulk of the hymns, as the author seldom noted it. Α His views on unfulfilled prophecy were no theories. "The blessed hope" of the perhaps immediate return of the Lord, to receive the kingdom of the renewed holy earth, was the hope and stay, the pivot and motive power of his life. His own attitude continually was as of one who waited for his Lord. In very many practical ways he refused to let this world gain power over him, or to seek such things as success, or fame, or money. He took these things when they came to him, and made use of them, or freely gave away-that was all. When remonstrated with for not retaining the copyright of his numerous works, he replied: "I will not entangle myself; a minister should be free from worldly care." This was all the more singular, as he had a capital business head, and when advising others used to say: "By training I am almost a banker." But for himself he refused not only to accumulate even to let matters dwell long in his pieces thus written contain nothing thoughts. original or striking. It is still more difficult for me to give any appreciation of my father's poetry. I stand too near my subject. But, I think I may say, he might have stood higher as a poet had he written less. He never wrote in slovenly or unrhythmical English, but he was almost too ready to answer all appeals. hymn to comfort a mourner, to please a child, to suit a particular case, to be sung to a given tune or on some special occasion, was constantly wanted.. Some of these efforts urged on him from without were eminently successful, some less so, and to this I attribute somewhat of the monotony of the third volume of his poems. Then, one feels, he did not always write with the public in view. As years went on he got into the habit of thinking in verse, of transcribing, translating, or imicating anything that struck him. It has but helped others, even when the Many hymns on the subject of the Second Advent, or the last days, or the new earth, will occur at once to my readers-too many to attempt to citeand few of his poems on any subject close without at least one swift upward glance. Many, too, might be entitled, as are some psalms, "Maschil" "For Instruction;" for instance, "Begin the day with God," "Great truths are dearly bought," "Thou must be true thyself, if thou the truth wouldst teach." I have heard him speak with something like impatience of some popular hymns which, he said, merely expressed emotion, and fastened truth on the mind. He, certainly, has seldom been guilty of this. no His convictions were intensely fixed and assured; perfect intellectual clearness appeared to him a thing earnestly to be desired, and he was so constituted as to believe it attainable. One almost starts, in this day of doubts, to hear him utter, I ask a perfect creed. I should like to mention a few char has acteristics to which I think Doctor I hear the words of love, I see the mighty sacrifice, Those who knew him best recognize the constant attitude of his soul in these words, simple as they are. Or, take his consecration hymn, "The cry from the depths:" |