our present intellectual faculties, our notions of the external world would be very different from those which we now entertain.

Of all

these yearnings for a sense which would reveal to us something of which we now have strange and unrealized dreams? In the voice of the waves, in the moanings of the wind, who has not heard, if I may use the expression, something which sound did not convey? How often in the glories, the grandeur, or the gloom of scenery, have we felt that there was something which sight could not realize? Poets have in vain endeavoured to embody these vague feelings in words. Byron felt it when he wrote of

"

that vision conveys to us we should not only
be wholly ignorant, but the remotest imagina-
tion could not enter our minds. In the case in
which I suppose, sight would be a thing un-
thought of, unimagined, and unconceived.
But have we any reason to believe that the
senses with which we are now endowed, are
all of which even the physical organization of
our present frame is capable? May not that
frame be capable of being endowed with some
sense as remote from all our present concep-
tions as vision would be from those of a race
who had been from creation blind-a sense
which might alter and correct all our percep-
tions of the external world as completely as
the gift of vision would enlighten and change
the ideas formed of it by the blind? How of-
unwise, then, and how rash is the judgment
which would bring those things which appear
to us the mysteries of religion, to the test of
sense, while we can have no assurance that
these senses give us full information, even of
matters within the region of sense.
It may
be something as trifling as a minute film
across the eye which prevents the development
in our bodily senses of some power of which
we have never dreamed; some power which
would show us that statements which appear
to our ignorance to contradict the evidence of
our senses are only inconsistent with their
imperfect testimony; a power, in the absence
of which we are as incapable of taking in all
that even sense can tell us of the external
world as man admittedly would be in the ab-
sence of sight. We never can be certain that
our senses convey to us all the knowledge
as to the external world which our nature is
fitted, even by this mode of information, to
receive. Plurality of senses is, perhaps, given
us to understand that it cannot be so. But
all the probability is that they do not. In
the few cases of persons born blind, who
subsequently attained the faculty of sight, we
are struck by the accounts they give of in-
describable yearnings after something, which
were satisfied by sight. No doubt this may
have been produced by conversation about
vision; but I cannot help thinking that it was
produced by the existence in the mind of a
mental faculty adapted to receive the ideas of
sight a faculty in the soul which sought its
proper object.

Is it fanciful to say that all of us, in our communings with external nature, have felt

"Those orbs of light,
So wildly, spiritually bright,
Who ever gazed upon their shining,
And turn'd to earth without repining,
Nor long'd for wings to flee away,
And mix with their eternal ray?"

The more philosophic Wordsworth has spoken

"Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Failings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized;
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised."

66

Is not this the feeling that now we see through a glass darkly," the yearning for something for which our nature has capacities, by which we might realize all that we thus dimly feel, and know even as we are known?

"Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither;
Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."

Is it unphilosophical to say that feelings like these are but the voice of our nature telling us that we have faculties that yearn for information from the external world which we might receive from senses yet unknown, and that a slight change in our organization might pour upon our perceptions a flood of light which would irradiate and glorify, and make intelligible them all, and show us that even in these forms which we supposed in our presumption that we fully comprehended, there are visions of beauty which no sense we now enjoy can realize, and which, therefore, our mind never framed-"good things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive."

I now feel how inadequately I have been | have led me astray in believing that the subable to convey to you the interest which such a subject as I have chosen might well excite. I do not think, as I have said in the commencement, that I have been unduly influenced by feelings which naturally arise in my mind from even a remote relationship to Berkeley. Accident has given me other associations in connection with his name. More than thirty years have passed since I became familiar with the manse-house of Berkeley's see, when it was occupied by one who justly recalled the title of his predecessor in another great and good Bishop of Cloyne. It was from the lips of the great astronomer whose discovery of the parallax of the fixed stars made his name famous throughout Europe, that I first heard an explanation of Berkeley's theory, walking on the garden terrace which Berkeley's taste had formed. It was under the roof of the house in which he lived-I believe in the very room in which he studied-that a copy of his works was first placed in my hand; and I was invited to study the theory which denied the existence of the material world by one whose genius had done so much to explain its wonders. I have still a vivid remembrance of being brought by Bishop Brinkley to look at the jars of tar-water discovered at the roots of hedges in the palace gardens, which had been torn up in some improvements, in ignorance of the fact that the trees were planted by the hand of the author of Siris. The name of Berkeley recalls to me memories more sacred still:

ject was one calculated to interest you; and even if this lecture is unworthy to close a series which, up to this day, has been brilliant and successful, I am not sure that you could carry away a last impression more suited to the objects of these meetings than that which must be left by the calm and lustrous dignity of Berkeley's character and mind. Within the range of subjects of these lectures I might easily have found topics more exciting and more popular-subjects which would have cost myself less time and thought in preparation; but I am not sure that I could have found any which would have conveyed a more useful or more attractive lesson. His single-minded love of truth, his large and sincere charity, his deep and reverential piety, his mild and gentle spirit of toleration-these are qualities which all of us may strive to imitate, although it is not given to us to ascend with him to those pure regions of contemplation, in which he saw the human intellect face to face with its Creator; and here, within sight of the university he adorned, and speaking on the soil of the land he loved, I may repeat with a deeper significance the words which, in another country, strangers inscribed upon his tomb. In the kindred feelings of love for our religion and our country all Irishmen may well feel proud that Berkeley lived-that he consecrated a mighty intellect to the defence of those immortal truths upon which are reposed our common hopes-and bequeathed to our common country the splendid inheritance of his genius, his virtue, and his fame:

"The touch of a vanish'd hand,
The sound of a voice that is gone."

Yet I do not think that associations like these

"Si Christianus fueris, si amans patriæ, | Utroque nomine gloriari potes Berkeleium vixisse."1

WILLIAM ALEXANDER-MRS. ALEXANDER.

[The Right Rev. William Alexander, D.D., Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, was born in Londonderry in April, 1824. His father was the Rev. Robert Alexander, rector of Aghadoey. He graduated in Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1847; and in the same year was ordained. After he had passed through various minor ecclesiastical appointments, he was made Dean of Emly in 1863; and in 1867, on the death of Dr. Higgin, was raised to the bishopric of Derry.

Though for many years past Dr. Alexander's muse has been silent, it was as a poet that he first became known in the intellectual world. One cannot read the productions of his youthful pen without deeply regretting that the heavy duties of his office, and his devotion to purely ecclesiastical literature, have weaned him so completely from his first literary love.

1 The reader will find a notice of Bishop Berkeley, with extracts from his writings, in vol. i. p. 205 of the Cabinet. -ED.

It is equally to be regretted that his poems | Told like a prophet, of the sun at hand;
are not to be found collected in accessible form.
The only volume in which his poetic writings
have ever been bound together took the shape
of Specimens, published in obedience to the
demands of a special occasion, and, of course,
now visible to the eye only of research.

And the light flickered, like an angel's sword,
This way and that athwart the dark fiord;
And strangely-coloured fires

Played round magnificent cathedral spires,
Gladly by winter of the glacier built
With fretted shafts, by summer glory-tipped,
And darkness was unmuffled and was ripped
Like crape from heaven's jewelled hilt.
Oh, those grand depths on depths that look like

Dr. Alexander, in 1853, wrote the ode in honour of the late Lord Derby's installation; and, in 1860, gained the Sacred Prize Poem with "The Waters of Babylon." In 1867 he was a candidate for the professorship of poetry in Oxford; he was defeated by Sir F. H. Doyle after a close contest.

Silent as a poet, Dr. Alexander is eminent as a pulpit orator; and there are few preachers of his Church who have such a power of poetic imagery and graceful expression. He is also a frequent contributor to ecclesiastic literature, the most noticeable of his works being Witness of the Psalms to Christ and Christianity, which formed the Bampton Lectures for 1876.

In 1849 Dr. Alexander married Miss Cecil Frances Humphreys, who has since acquired a very wide-spread reputation as an authoress of sacred songs. Her works-Moral Songs, Hymns for Children, and Poems on Old Testament Subjects have passed through forty or fifty editions. We give the best known and most popular of her poems-"The Burial of Moses" the sonorous rhythm of which rises to the height even of the great subject.

Mr. Robert Jocelyn Alexander, the son of those distinguished parents, has already given proof of inheriting their gifts. In 1873 he was the winner of the Newdigate Prize Poem ---his subject being "The Last of the Red Indians." In 1877 he was equally successful| with a Sacred Prize Poem, "Ismail;" and he has also gained the Chancellor's Prize Essay in prose-the subject being, "The Influence of the Schoolmen upon Modern Literature." This work displays great originality of thought, and traces in an ingenious and interesting way some of the notions we usually consider of most modern invention to the now mouldy writings of the forgotten scribes in the old monasteries.]

DEATH OF AN ARCTIC HERO.

BY BISHOP ALEXANDER.

At last an orange band,

Set in a dawn of ashen gray,

To things that winter in that dreadful land

Fate,

Awfully calm and uncompassionate;
Those nights that are but clasps, or rather say,
Bridges of silver flung from day to day;
That vault which deepens up, and endeth never,
That sea of starlit sky,
Broadening and brightening to infinity,
Where nothing trembles, suffers, weeps for ever.
But still the ships were fast in the ice-field,
And while the midnight Arctic sun outwheeled,
Thicker and thicker did Death's shadows fall
On the calm forehead of the Admiral.

Oh, Admiral! thou hadst a shrine
Of silver, not from any earthly mine,
Of silver ice divine-

A sacrament, but not of bread and wine.

Thou hadst the Book, the stars, in whose broad skies

The love, which whoso loveth, never dies.
Are truths, and silences, and mysteries-

Brave hearts! he cannot stay:

Only at home ye will be sure to say
How he hath wrought, and sought, and found—

found what?

The bourne whence traveller returneth not!-
Ah, no! 'tis only that his spirit high
Hath gone upon a new discovery,
A marvellous passage on a sea unbounded,
Blown by God's gentle breath;

But that the white sail of his soul hath rounded
The promontory-Death!

How shall we bury him?
Where shall we leave the old man lying?
With music in the distance dying—dying,
Among the arches of the Abbey grand and dim,
And comrades of the sea should bear the pall;
And the great organ should let rise and fall
The requiem of Mozart, the Dead March in Saul—

There if we might, we would bury him;

Then, silence all!

And yet far grandlier will we bury him.
Strike the ship-bell slowly-slowly-slowly!
Sailors! trail the colours half-mast high;
Leave him in the face of God most holy,
Underneath the vault of Arctic sky.
Let the long, long darkness wrap him round,
By the long sunlight be his forehead crown'd.
For cathedral panes ablaze with stories,
For the tapers in the nave and choir,

Noiselessly, as the spring-time her crown of verdure weaves,

This was the truest warrior that ever buckled sword;

And all the trees on all the hills open their thou- This the most gifted poet that ever breathed a sand leaves;

word;

So, without sound of music, or voice of them that And never earth's philosopher traced with his golden pen,

wept,

Silently down from the mountain's crown, the On the deathless page, truths half so sage as he great procession swept. wrote down for men.

Perchance the bald old eagle, on gray Beth-Peor's And had he not high honour,-the hill-side for a height,

pall?

Out of his lonely eyrie, looked on the wondrous To lie in state, while angels wait, with stars for

sight;

tapers tall?

Perchance the lion stalking still shuns that hal- | And the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes, over lowed spot, his bier to wave!

For, beast and bird have seen and heard that And God's own hand, in that lonely land, to lay which man knoweth not! him in the grave!

But when the Warrior dieth, his comrades in the

In that strange grave without a name,-whence his uncoffined clay

war,

With arms reversed and muffled drum, follow his Shall break again, O wondrous thought! before funeral car; the judgment-day,

They show the banners taken, they tell his battles And stand, with glory wrapt around, on the hills he never trod,

won,

And after him lead his masterless steed, while And speak of the strife that won our life, with the peals the minute-gun. incarnate Son of God.

Amid the noblest of the land we lay the Sage to O lonely grave in Moab's land! O dark Beth-Peor's hill!

rest,

And give the Bard an honoured place, with costly Speak to these curious hearts of ours, and teach marble drest,them to be still.

In the great minster transept, where lights like God hath his mysteries of grace, ways that we cannot tell;

glories fall,

And the organ rings, and the sweet choir sings, He hides them deep, like the hidden sleep of him along the emblazoned wall. he loved so well!

FRANCIS DAVIS.

[Francis Davis, "the Belfast Man," was born | but twelve years old, and was consigned by in Ballincollig, county Cork, on March 7, 1810. his father to the care of a rich but miserly His father, formerly a respectable farmer, had relative, from whom he well earned board and through folly enlisted in the army, and his shelter. In the meantime his father died, and mother, descended from a Highland Scotch the boy, unable longer to endure the hard family, was a woman of great intellectual and treatment of his guardian, was received by a moral strength. To her the boy owed the small farmer, who eked out a scanty subsisfirst development of his natural gifts, and in tence by working at the loom. Francis, her he was to a great extent compensated for anxious to free himself from the galling dethe loss of those social advantages caused by the pendence which he had endured, soon became unfortunate position of his other parent. In a skilled weaver. He then settled in Belfast, the deepest poverty she inspired her son with and "as the weaver plied his shuttle, wove he a love for noble thoughts in verse, and to her too the mystic rhyme." The agitation for may be attributed that manly independence Catholic Emancipation provided the youthful and truthful character which have distin-poet with a theme for many songs and ballads, guished Mr. Davis throughout his long life. which were sung in the streets of Irish towns, Of this best of friends he was bereaved when and did undoubted service to the cause.