high sense of duty towards one's neighbour, enjoined by our Lord. Selfhood—a totally different quality from selfishness-teaches a man how rightly to use all God-given powers for the unfolding of the noble and lovely in his own life; and education carries him still higher, and teaches him to seek to elevate and benefit his neighbour. And in proportion to a man's fine culture will be his reverence for his higher self, and his love for his neighbour; and in the discharge of these obligations is he fulfilling his duties to his Creator. For true culture, as Matthew Arnold has well expressed it, consists in knowing and doing the best things the human mind has conceived or discovered. In conclusion, I ask what have been and are the products of civilisation, viewed in the light which I have sought to illustrate?

Has not civilisation brought a knowledge and perception of the beautiful and the sublime in painting, sculpture, and architecture; in oratory, poetry, and jurisprudence; in science and in Nature? Greek, Roman, Oriental and modern civilisations have contributed these products; and how glorious a prospect comes before the mind as it contemplates the civilisation of the future! Is not modern civilisation bringing a knowledge of the infinite wonders of the universe, the forces which pervade and control it, the marvels of life and the mysteries of death, the potencies of electricity, light and heat, and the splendours of the heavens, and the magnificence of the flora and fauna of the terrestrial globe? Has not civilisation produced a literature which is our richest and divinest possession, the embodiment of the thought and fancy of the greatest minds,, and the records of the wisdom and folly of the race? Has it not brought the emancipation of woman, and made her a social queen; opened up to her new avenues of intellectual toil and worthy occupation, made motherhood sacred, and man chivalric? Has it not effected a dispersion of the radiance of truth, and thereby lifted man into nearer union with the great Heaven-Father? Can we answer that these things have not increased the sum of human happiness? Whence comes the joy of the artist, the power of the musician, the delight of the scientist, the rapture of the poet, the inspiration of the prophet, and that transfiguration of spirit which illumes the true followers of our Lord? Whence comes that sweetest of all happiness, the joys of home, hallowed by a recognition of the Divine in life? Whence, if not from the discoveries of knowledge and of truth rendered only possible through civilisation?

Wide and varied powers are the products of civilisation, and these bring happiness, the capacity to enjoy and to enter into higher and more felicitous states of mind and feeling.

That great evils accompany civilisation in all its special developments in the march of the centuries, I readily admit, but these evils are not civilisation. The origin and existence of evil are profound mysteries, but they are so because the human mind is not sufficiently transcendental to penetrate the purpose of suffering and pain, or the reason of the great struggle going on in every form of life. And it is a question if the enjoyment of the divinest states would be possible without an

experience of their corresponding conditions; for goodness, peace, happiness, light, joy and hope are terms only which correlate with wickedness, unrest, misery, darkness, sorrow, and despair. Revolutions, to an untutored mind contemplating the miseries they entail, must seem unmitigated evils, but a penetrating jurist or statesman can see the principles of action, and look beyond the present troubles to the ultimate benefits to follow-to the "good which is the goal of ill.”

Civilisation may increase anxieties, but it also augments capacities for happiness, and the hard process will bring only a fuller realisation of the joy and blessedness which result from every true self-denial and every upward step.

Civilisation teems with the elements of happiness, and though every individual may be able to command only some few of these elements, owing to the force of circumstance; yet the purest happiness, the bliss of man's own spirit, over these circumstance need have no control. Heaven has placed unlimited power of grace and of growth at every man's command, and the more highly civilised a man becomes, the more elements of felicity will enter into his life, and the nobler will be his relations to God and his fellows.

Let us then give to the conceptions of civilisation and happiness their grand and lofty meaning, and make them our watchwords of conduct; that in the silent hour when we approach the Infinite and the Unknown, and our memories review in long succession the events of the years which are past, we may feel that through these moral evolutions of life, out of our complex being have sprung forth and blossomed the true, the beautiful, and the good.

February, 1884.

A. T. C.

Amor Victor.

OR twelve long months with death we fought;
We battled with him day by day;

At every point of vantage caught
To scare him from our home away.

He came to steal our darling boy.
Alas! unequal proved the fight!
He robbed us of our hope and joy,
And changed our sunshine into night.

Invincible, the Victor smiled;

Smiled at our futile tears and vows;
He touched the pure and undefiled,
And left us but his empty house.

What we call life had passed away,
The spirit from its casket fled;-
He talked with us but yesterday,
To-day, we say that he is dead.

And on his body flowers we strew,
But far the sweetest flower is he.
Reft from the stems on which they grew,
How quickly will their beauty flee.

In vain we water them with tears;
No tears their fragrance back will bring;
For them no renovating years—

But oh, for him perpetual Spring!

Now victor over Death are we;

Our darling whom we counted lost,

Still lives with us in memory;

Has never from our threshold crossed.

In all things beautiful and fair,
The flowery earth, the starry skies,
His spirit ever hovers there,

Makes all more lovely in our eyes.

Our hearth his presence sanctifies,
He meets and greets us everywhere,
We look, and find with glad surprise
No longer vacant is his chair.

In every mood, in every place,

Sweet thoughts of him our minds engage;
And, when we read, his loving face
Will smile between us and the page.

He comes in visions of the night,
And gives us kisses while we sleep;
Revealing in celestial light,

The home his guardian angels keep.

And though we talk of him with tears,
The tears are now but founts of joy,
For well we know he sees and hears
And he is still our darling boy.

So Love, not Death, the Victor is,
Our child is neither lost nor dead:
He lives with us, and lives in bliss:
We see the halo round his head.

J. A. L.

I

The Recent Sunsets.

Do not know--I have not been a member of the C.L.A. for many months-whether our Magazine ever opens its pages to essays on the weather, or phenomena connected with the skies. But even if it should not have contained anything of the kind before, I claim mine to be an exceptional case. We all have lately been standing at our windows at sunrise or sunset, and have been wondering at the peculiar celestial phenomenon which we saw. For weeks and weeks, the sky assumed at morning and night, an aspect which puzzled everybody, meteorologists included. Different hypotheses were brought forward by different people, and, as usual, persons least qualified to advance opinions, were the most ready to do so, and overcame in the simplest manner a difficulty which baffled all scientific men. That their "explanations" were, as a rule, of the most ridiculous nature, cela va sans dire. A clergyman preaching in a church not 25 miles from Birmingham, solemnly informed his congregation-simple-minded country people, who would believe everything that their minister told them-"that these blood-red skies which we saw above us at morn and night, were nothing but signs of the approaching end of the world." Well, we who live in towns look for the solution of these mysteries to our men of science rather than to clergymen; and so I think that it may interest the

members of the C.L.A. to know, what an authority on the subject of Wetterkunde has to say with regard to these celestial phenomena. Here I may mention that I have not seen this theory advanced in any English paper, and it is this circumstance that causes me to contribute the present article to our Magazine. The authority whom I wish to quote is the learned meteorologist Rudolf Falb, of Vienna, who, in a letter dated from the end of December, to the Neue Freie Presse, writes as follows:

66

To-day I have made an observation that may lead to explain the unusual phenomenon at sunset, that has been witnessed over and over again since the 28th November. When lately taking my daily walk, and having my eyes protected, by means of coloured spectacles, from the excessive light reflected by the snow, I had noticed on very bright days around the sun a large ring, that, with the naked eye, was observable only shortly after sunset. But when I took up such a position that the disc of the sun appeared covered in some way, I could see, with the naked eye, a slight indication of this ring, even by day-light. I noticed then

In our

that the space inside the ring was of a light blue colour, of a lighter hue than the other parts of the sky; and that the ring was brown, inclining to red. My supposition, that it is this ring that causes the unusual evening red, could only yesterday be advanced as a certainty, because until then the unfavourable sky had frustrated an exact observation. Yesterday, however, when a bright day was followed by a clear night, the ring appeared distinctly to the naked eye immediately after sunset, and I could plainly observe the gradual reddening of the same. There were no clouds or mist anywhere. To-day I even succeeded in taking the measurement, if only approximate, of the radius of the ring, which showed that it is about 20 degrees, and so corresponds with the radius of those rings that sometimes produce mock suns, but frequently appear without them. Now, it is well known that the rays of the mock suns appear after sunset above the horizon in a beautiful red colour. case, the redness is arranged in the shape of a bow in a very clear sky after sunset. From this it can be derived with certainty, that at present the atmosphere of our globe is filled permanently and up to a great height with a number of exceedingly delicate ice-particles, every two of which, as is known, form, so to speak, trilateral prisms. For these prisms the minimum of diversion of light is about 23 degrees, which explains, according to the laws of light, both the radius and the red colour of the ring seen after sunset. According to the laws of refraction, cosmetic dust or haze would not produce a ring round the sun, but only a section of a radius of at most 5 degrees, in accordance with the laws of interference. Meteorologists will, therefore, have to turn their attention to the causes and consequences of this constant saturation of the air with ice-particles."

In translating this letter, I have kept as closely as possible to the German original.

G. F. E. RICHARD.