Now the long, long wonder ends;
Yet ye weep, my erring friends,
While the man whom ye call dead,
In unspoken bliss, instead,

Lives and loves you; lost, 'tis true,
By such light as shines for you,
But in light ye cannot see

Of unfulfilled felicity,

In enlarging paradise,

Lives a life that never dies.

6. Farewell, friends! Yet not farewell:
Where I am, ye too shall dwell.
I am gone before your face,
A moment's time, a little space.
When ye come where I have stepped,
Ye will wonder why ye wept.

Ye will know, by wise love taught,
That here is all, and there is naught.
Weep awhile, if ye are fain;
Sunshine still must follow rain;
Only not at death, for death,
Now I know, is that first breath

Which our souls draw when we enter
Life, which is, of all life, centre.

7. Be ye certain, all seems love

Viewed from Allah's throne above.
Be ye stout of heart, and come

Bravely onward to your home.
La Allah illa Allah! yea,

Thou love divine! Thou love alway!

II.-The Magic Moon.

1.

What stands upon the highland? What walks across the rise,

As though a starry island were sinking down the skies? What makes the trees so golden? What decks the mountain-side,

Like a veil of silver folden round the white brow of a bride?

The magic moon is breaking, like a conqueror from the east,

The waiting world awaking to a golden fairy feast.

2.

She works, with touch ethereal, by changes strange to see,
The cypress, so funereal, to a lightsome fairy tree;
Black rocks to marble turning, like palaces of kings;
On ruined windows burning a festal glory flings;

The desert halls uplighting, while falling shadows glance,
Like courtly crowds uniting for the banquet or the dance.

3.

With ivory wand she numbers the stars along the sky,
And breaks the billows' slumbers with a love-glance of her

eye;

Along the corn-fields dances, brings bloom upon the sheaf; From tree to tree she glances, and touches leaf by leaf; Wakes birds that sleep in shadows; through their halfclosed eyelids gleams,

With her white torch through the meadows lights the shy deer to the streams.

The magic moon is waking, like a conqueror from the east, And the joyous world partaking of her golden fairy feast! Ernest Jones.

This piece is full of figurative expressions. Let the pupil point them out and explain them.

CHAPTER XXXI.-SIR WALTER SCOTT.-1771-1832.

I.—Biographical.

1. Sir Walter Scott was a literary prodigy. Fifty octavo volumes scarcely make a complete edition of his writings, and yet he was twenty-five years old before he published his first work. It is estimated that he earned with his pen nearly two and a quarter millions of dollars.

2. Scott was born in Edinburgh. His father, who was a lawyer, bred him to the same profession, and young Scott employed his leisure hours in reading tales of the Border and of chivalry. At the age of fifty-five his publishers failed, involving him in an enormous debt. In the same year he lost his wife, a beautiful woman of French descent.

3. With wonderful fortitude he set himself the task of paying his creditors in full, and, though he did not live to secure their release, his purpose was achieved soon after his death, through the sale of his works. In one year he is said to have earned ninety thousand dollars by writing the Life of Napoleon. In the last six years of his life he published no less than thirty-eight volumes, besides essays for the Reviews. These works comprise novels, tales, poems, and histories. Under this prodigious strain Scott broke down, and early in his sixty-second year, after a vain search for health on the Continent, he died a paralytic.

4. Scott's ambition in life was to found a family that might vie with the ancient Border names that he venerated. For this purpose he purchased an estate on the river Tweed, and built a mansion which was a curious combination of feudal towers and modern drawing-rooms. To this estate he gave the name of Abbotsford. His house was typical of his mind and his writings, and is thus described by Taine:-"It was a castle with a tall tower at either end, sundry zigzagged gables, a myriad of indentations and parapets, most fantastic water-spouts, labelled windows, and stones carved with heraldries innumerable."

The apartments were filled with sideboards and carved chests adorned with "cuirasses, helmets, and swords of every order."

5. For long years Scott kept open house there, so to speak, trying to revive old feudal life with all its customs and its display, dispensing free and joyous hospitality to all comers, and, above all, to relatives, friends, and neighbors. Abbotsford was both antique and modern; its furniture was feudal, but its life was that of the eighteenth century. An ill-dressed country squire of the time of George the Fourth filled his imagination and talk with the forms of romance and chivalry. The same admixture is found in his writings. The dress, speech, and surroundings of his characters are feudal or antique, while their manners are modern.

6. Scott's verse is animated with action and incident. Of his prose, Chateaubriand said, "The novelist has set about writing historical romances, and the historian romantic histories." Yet Scott's writings were a great boon to an age which the influence of Burns and Cowper had not then emancipated from the stiff formalism, grandiloquence, and artificiality of Pope's imitators. They fill the imagination with romantic ideas; they refresh the mind with descriptions of real though outgrown life; they awaken sentiments of joyous amiability; and they are free from every debasing element. With all his verbosity, and rapidity and carelessness of composition, Scott is emphatically a picturesque author. His reputation began with The Lay of the Last Minstrel, published in his thirty-second year, in which an old Border minstrel is represented as relating, in romantic stanzas, the wild legends of his country. The following is a part of the description of

II. The Aged Minstrel.

1. The way was long, the wind was cold,
The minstrel was infirm and old;

His withered cheek, and tresses gray,
Seemed to have known a better day;
The harp, his sole remaining joy,
Was carried by an orphan boy.
The last of all the bards was he,
Who sung of Border chivalry;
For, well-a-day! their date was fled,
His tuneful brethren all were dead;
And he, neglected and oppressed,
Wished to be with them, and at rest.

2. No more, on prancing palfrey borne,
He carolled, light as lark at morn;
No longer, courted and caressed,
High placed in hall, a welcome guest,
He poured, to lord and lady gay,

The unpremeditated lay:

Old times were changed, old manners gone,
A stranger filled the Stuart's throne;

The bigots of the iron time

Had called his harmless art a crime.
A wandering harper, scorned and poor,
He begged his bread from door to door,
And tuned, to please a peasant's ear,
The harp a king had loved to hear.

3. Amid the strings his fingers strayed,
And an uncertain warbling made,
And oft he shook his hoary head;
But when he caught the measure wild,
The old man raised his face and smiled;
And lightened up his faded eye
With all a poet's ecstasy!

In varying cadence, soft or strong,
He swept the sounding chords along:
The present scene, the future lot,
His toils, his wants, were all forgot;