glades sparkled with dew-drops, vanishing even as he watched them, and the blue sky, pale at the horizon and soaring upward into intensity of colour, filled his soul like the sweep of some mighty chord, and carried his thoughts into the Infinite.

No echo met his ear from the voice of his fellow-men, no song or shout from the fishing boats that lay with furled sails far out at sea, and the fields through which he passed were in the beauty of their bloom; no sound of the mower's scythe was as yet heard among them. He lingered long amidst the soft harmony of breeze and song, while the sunbeams pointed at him through the branches, and butterflies and glittering insects rose from the wild flowers among which he trod.

And when he entered again the quiet coolness of his chamber, through all its hush he heard a sound, as men see pictures though their eyes are shut, and his spirit conceived a mighty hymn of praise, that should be written for the ears of all mankind and endure for ages to come. "For, O mortal men!" he said, "these are your teachers, the winds and waves and voices of the woods; when will ye give ear to them? When will ye join their chorus? Are not ye dead, for ye have gone down into silence? Or if ye give utterance to your voices it is only in harsh discord or in wild lament, which deafens your ears to the sweetness of nature's music. So ye can have no share in the strain that my soul longs to work out to perfection. And yet why should I blame you? Sorrow and suffering have no music, and sorrow and suffering are the portion of all here. Happy he who seeks solitude as I have sought it, and communes only with the voice of nature when in the outgoings of the morning and the evening she praises Thee, O GOD!"

Hour after hour was spent in eager labour; night and day his soul was like a chamber with open windows letting in every murmur, scent, and sound, so attentive was he to receive every inspiration, that might add to the beauty of his work. And at length the mighty chorus was his own; not existing in the dim world of imagination, but wrought out into abiding form for ever. True, there was no evidence of its existence when the last chord died away on the throbbing breath of the organ, except in the closely written sheet of paper, which a moment's anger or inadvertence might have irrevocably destroyed.

"Very frail and insignificant art thou for such a trust," said the

musician, as his eye wandered critically up and down the pages, “and yet how many of GOD's messengers are as unconscious of the mighty truth which their existence sets forth! Do the autumn leaves know that they warn us of our mortality, or the spring buds that they are pledges of life raised from the grave? Yet by every footworn road and on every pathless waste, the green things of the earth rise up before us, leaning forward to meet our gaze, standing in our very way, like the angel before the self-willed prophet of old, and little do we heed their presence. Heedlessly we pass by, scattering lingering blossoms with every step, or crushing the early primrose; bent on our designs, or filled with our passing cares, but forgetful that earth has prepared a grave for us, nor caring that heaven should prepare a home."

Ere he laid his work aside, Berthold once more woke its music from the organ; but he often paused with an unsatisfied look and a cloud upon his brow. He had missed something in that strain, and he knew not wherein he had failed.

That evening found him far away upon the sea.

His boat floated

on a stream of sunlight, the sea was calm, and not a sound reached him from the distant shore, on whose outline his eye dwelt as a soul may look backward to the earth while passing into the infinite light of Heaven.

Now and then a sea-gull passed over head, its broad wings showing dark against the golden sky and flashing into sudden brilliancy as it whirled away towards the darkening east. The sun descended with unclouded majesty into the bosom of the purple ocean, leaving for awhile a long belt of light on the horizon, and a flush of crimson in the upper air, one moment warm and bright, the next changed to the soft grey of twilight. And Berthold, as he watched the setting sun, called to mind that deep sleep which fell on the first created man. "Solemn," thought he, “must have been the watch that nature held, and mute with expectant awe, when the eldest born of humanity, with all the light of his perfection shining from his brow, sank under the mysterious influence of sleep, so near akin to death." Single as the sun must he have stood, lord of all the beauties of GOD's Creation, and a shadow must have fallen on all things when the light of his presence was even for a season withdrawn.

A throng of clouds had been slowly gathering in the east; suddenly

they were parted, and the moon in the fulness of her beauty looked forth. Through the evening air now deepening into violet hue she rose in her glory, higher and higher until her beams touched the windstirred waves, and crowned their heads with diamonds.

"Fair as Eve in her primal purity!" murmured the musician as he watched her soaring through the sky. "Fair as Eve when she came forth at her Maker's call in the still hour when Adam slept, created to be a help meet for him, to reflect his radiance, to follow his footsteps, to fill up with her sweet presence the seeming incompleteness of his being."

The scattered clouds were to his eyes like a crowd of attendant angels, hovering round her path, lingering in her light and rejoicing in the beauty of her new being, as it were pointing ever onward; onward to the west where the sun had sunk, the lord and light of the Creation. Then, while the light of love burned with a fuller glory from her brow, the angels spread their white wings and passed away, vanishing into the depth of Heaven.

The sail was spread again, and the little boat, that had long rocked idly on the water, now made its way swiftly to the shore, meeting the moonlight and waking a rippling song from the waves as they parted with a starry flash beneath the keel.

And Berthold sang at the helm, fragments of a sweet melody that framed itself at last into such a hymn of joy as might have rung from the lips of Eve, standing in her gladness and wonder amidst the fresh loveliness of Eden. The voice of woman unfallen, unconscious of the very existence of evil, without one dissonant note or one faltering accent, triumphing in the single joy of existence, might well blend with the grand harmonies of nature, and rising upward join the song of angels with a strain not less meet than theirs to wake the echoes of Heaven.

"And such a strain shall enrich my Hymn of Praise," murmured the musician, one that shall awake in every human heart a longing for the fair existence our race has forfeited, and that shall find its echo in the rare utterances of pure joy that flit over this mournful earth; in the child's laugh, and the marriage song, and the first shout of exultation when a great work is complete."

His way on leaving the shore led him along the edge of the cliff, past the gates of a garden. While climbing the last step cut in the cliff side, he paused and turned for another look at the ocean, so

dreamlike in its moonlit beauty, so unlike itself in the glare of noonday or the fury of a storm, and with a sigh as if he left a purer world behind, Berthold turned from it and hastened forward. Still the sweet measure of his own song rose in low tones from his lips, and while be passed under the sombre shadow of the fir trees that stretched their boughs over the garden wall, his mind's eye was yet dwelling on the dazzling dance of the waters, and the silver foam-wreaths that they left behind as they ebbed away over the golden sands.

He stopped suddenly, for a woman's form was before him standing at the garden gate and leaning out into the moonlight, as if the hush of the night air had a blessing for her. Her hands hung unclosed and quiet, as the hands of the dead which can neither work nor sustain any longer, and need be clasped in prayer no more.

At the sound of Berthold's steps she turned towards him out of light into the shadow, and he knew her face well, though the shadow of a life-long grief had fallen upon her since last they met. He knew the smile that trembled on her lips, not the less sweet, though it woke but seldom now; and the gentle voice that gave him greeting he knew as the same that once rang out broken but with song and laughter. He had seen her a bride in his boyhood, not long ago to him, but very long ago to her, for we count life's length not by its years but by its sorrows; a bride rich in all this world could give, and richer still in love and hopes. Now he beheld one who had laid husband and child in the grave, and had risen up to face her life alone. He knew well the tale of her bereavement; how one stormy autumn evening her husband had gone down to the shore where the breakers were rolling madly over the low sunk rocks, and amid the blinding spray and the roar of wind and wave the villagers were watching a fisherman's boat, struggling to make its way round the headland and elude the fierce grasp of those terrible breakers. Vainly for they seized their prey and dragged it to destruction on the fatal lee shore. Knee deep in surge, a strong form stood, last of a chain of vigorous men, and one by one the helpless crew were snatched from the seething waters, but even as the cry, "saved!" rang in his ears, a mighty wave struck him down upon the sharp rocks, and he who had left his home in the beauty of his strength an hour before was carried thither again, to die after a few hours' agony.

“Berthold," said the mourner, in reply to his faltering words of sympathy, "it was the one thought that rose above pain and parting,

Thank GOD they are saved.' Pleadingly he said it, Berthold, as if he would ask me to thank GOD for those whom he had rescued, as if he would lift up my spirit into praise ere it could sink back into despair."

"Lonely ?" she said, answering again his words of pity, "hopeless? no, my life's work is laid out before me, and I have come back to dwell among mine own people. Those last words, Berthold, his last words. are not only my treasure, but my hope, for I shall hear them again on the eternal shore. I shall hear them," she repeated with the steadfast energy of one whose future is the possible, not the inevitable.

'Wild lives these poor men lead, dark lives, many of them, dark as a moonless night; but I will carry light among them, I will guide them unto the light of GOD. Reckless men and untaught boys, whose lives he saved for this life, shall be saved for the life eternal, saved from the eternal dying. I have held in my empty arms this night, Berthold, a little one born on the night of that rescue, and think you that child and many another shall be left to walk on the perilous cliffpath of life with never a hand to warn or guide it? And shall I be lonely, hopeless ?" She spoke the terrible words slowly and fearlessly, as if listening to the answer they woke from her inner life.

Presently she turned away, bidding the friend of her youth farewell. Berthold lingered a moment at the gate to look at her passing along the garden path, through the moonlight and the shadows. On either side of her, tall starry lilies gleamed from the darkness, and petals red and white fell from the wide-blown roses, and on the still and richly scented air a ringdove, roused by their voices, gave forth her deep full notes of perfect content. The peace and beauty of Eden seemed to surround that figure, clad in her dark robes of woe; recalling to the musician's mind with a strange contrast his former train of thought and the fragments of Eve's triumphant song of joy.

"I have much to learn," he said, as he passed onwards, a new sound haunting him in those words of steadfast praise and hope that had arisen out of the very shadow of death: "much to learn ere I can complete my Hymn of Praise." And as he passed through the quiet meadows, and heard the browsing flocks upon the hill side, and lifted his eyes to the clustering stars, he thought of the outburst of harmony that gladdened those of old who kept the night watches among their sheep; of the angel voice that had told of a SAVIOUR Who came not to divest men of sorrow, but to share it with them ;