well of Montaigne: "Merely to live, merely to muse over this spectacle of the world, simply to feel, even if the thing felt be agony, and to reflect on the pain, and on how it may best be borne-this is enough for Henley." Mr Henley marks in a special degree the reaction from the melancholy temperament diffused through English thought in the generation that has just passed away. Increased knowledge seemed to have brought with it only bitterness. The old faiths and the old ideals were gone, and with them seemed to go all the meaning of life. The more man learned of his destiny, the more desperate it appeared. The paroxysm of that despair is over, and we can listen hopefully to those who like Mr Henley are exhorting us to face our destiny undaunted. If our life is but as the snuff of a candle that goes out, how much more exquisitely should we feel the preciousness of this short-lived boon! If life is a burden, full of misery and weariness, should we not be thankful for the prospect of a Great Release? He does not shut his eyes to the evil that exists. He does not take refuge in a futile common-place, that "all things are working for the best." But it is, he says, at least the privilege of each man to make the best of his own lot. The hotter the fire, the brighter the martyr's crown! Only this crown can not, must not, be anything more than the consciousness of his own martyrdom. Mr Henley's 'over-word' is not of a kind to be proclaimed from University pulpits, to find a welcome in country rectories. It is a word spoken to those who walk in rough places of the earth. It is meant for those who suffer, who labour, who fight, and its burden, like the song of Leo, is that whatever happens, we must never be afraid. Religions and policies and ideals all have their appointed date, but when, while mankind still continues to inherit this earth, and to call itself by the name of Man, will there cease to be force in this man's message, that is so simple and so true ? Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, Beyond this place of wrath and tears. Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the captain of my soul. J. A. N. AN ECHO OF W. E. HENLEY. The nightingale has a lyre of gold, The lark's is a clarion call, And the blackbird plays but a box-wood flute, For his song is all of the joy of life, The glow-worm has a shining face, W. E. H. The grasshopper stands on both his legs, For his chirp is all of the heat of life, And we, in the rainy weather, Have wondered much in our passion's pain How he puts his legs together. W. A. C. IN BEHALF OF FRESHMEN. HAVE but vague recollections of the feelings and aspirations of this variety of my species, for since I myself emerged from Freshmanhood is a very long time. Ever so many years ago I became a Bachelor, and now have left that state behind me too. By the way, the tale of my fall may be of sufficient interest to merit insertion here. I met Sarah for the first time, in the train, on a journey from Cambridge to the North. She had with her a little girl, whose face was quite the sweetest I had ever seen. Framed in waving golden hair, the smooth square forehead, the pensive blue eyes with their long lashes, and the tender unconscious lips struck the most casual beholder, and filled me with a desire to be permitted to buy sweets for the loveable little possessor of so many charms. This was Evelyn, Sarah's daughter, for Sarah was a widow. We had not glided many miles, when Evelyn, who had been looking from the window, touched her mother's arm with a tender caress and asked some childish question. With a frown, Sarah twitched her arm away and told the child not to bother. Evelyn shrank back, all her trusting nature hurt at the rebuff she had sustained from her ill-favoured mother. I ought to have known better; I had read Calverley; I knew that "hearts may "be hard though lips are coral" (besides which Sarah's lips are not coral), yet I then and there resolved to marry Sarah (if possible), in order that her poor child should have at least a kind step-father, who would protect her VOL. XVIII. H from the harshness of her mother, evidently a selfish and unsympathetic woman. As our way led through Bletchley, there was ample opportunity to become known to each other; we discovered that we had mutual acquaintances—and, to be brief, were married a few weeks later. This was several years ago, and I may add that of all the dear kind sympathetic wives that our unworthy sex ever led to the altar Sarah is an easy first. The happy economy of my household contains only one flaw, the serenity of our lives is only marred by one cloud the incorrigible pertness of that odious little Evelyn. She is perpetually showing off' her precocity and continually asking ridiculous questions. Wherever we three go, or if there are a hundred in the party, Evelyn imagines that she is the only important personage there and that the rest are hired for her amusement. No one has a chance of ignoring her if she is within a hundred yards. She interrupts the most interesting tête-à-tête with her imperative interrogatories, and has incurred the enmity of every mother of daughters of our acquaintance. If we are driving (say) to Windsor, not a house do we pass, not a chimney do we sight, but we have to answer the question, 'Is that Windsor?' When she was up here once, in the May week, she aked no less than five times in two days if the Lady Margaret Boathouse was King's College Chapel. In this kind of behaviour did she persist, in spite of all our representations and persuasions. I endured the trial for many months. Then, one day, I took her out in a boat, ostensibly for a row (pronounced roe). There was a half-hundred weight and a coil of cord in the I rowed to the very middle of Putney reach and there rested on the full tide. "Evelyn," I said, panting from my exertions, "just out there, about two yards from us, you will see a tiny stickle-back scarcely bigger than the needle of my pocket compass. Do you imagine that that stickle-back knows where he is? I will guarantee that he has never known where he was since he was hatched. Consider that the tide changes everything, twice every day. Land-marks are things unknown to him; small irregularities are utterly evanescent and his eye cannot distinguish large ones. He probably doesn't know the difference between Craven Steps and Chiswick Eyot; Gravesend and Sirius are for him equi-distant; nay, it is quite possible that he is so ignorant as not to know even that he is a stickle-back. He only knows that he exists; he can't tell why; and yet do you deny that he is happy? See him making ripples, all by himself, with his very own nose!" I was just coming to the moral of my whole discourse, moreover my heart was rapidly. softening within me, when she slowly turned upon me those wide enquiring eyes and asked, "Pa, has a stickle-back got a liver?” I suppose that to ask questions is a sign of civilisation. A friend of mine tells me that the sentence indicative was invented some months before the sentence interrogative. He often wants to tell me lots of other things on the same subject, but I won't let him. If the books are wrong, it is not worth while going wrong with them. Elementary facts are all I want. I can construct my own theories. . Man, then, first of all made remarks*; then he issued commands; then perhaps he asked easy questions about common objects; then he invented the subjunctive mood; then he propounded subtle questions about interiors, such as Evelyn's concerning the stickleback's liver; and now in the age of Greece and New Zealand we have got into the habit of Searching an infinite Where, Dreamfully wandering, Ceaselessly pondering, What is the Wherefore of men. Now it is rude to make remarks. attainment. Quæ fuerint artes, vitia sunt. Once it was man's only lingual |