tifully illustrates its spirit than the subservience in which the most imperative arrangements of their narrowly limited lives were held to the changes which might admit their greatest luxury and indulgence the presence and society of friends.

"We were seven months at Barmouth. What memories arise of grave and tender talk during sunset strolls along the quiet sands, while the distant Carnarvonshire mountains stood out lilac against a 'daffodil sky' of glad morning rambles, after morning work, over hills gorgeous with furze and heather; or rapid pacing up and down the bridge, watching the flowing or the ebbing rush of the tide! We had a good many brief visits from different friends during the summer, but we were much alone too. The winter found us in Edinburgh."

"In the January of 1868 we left Edinburgh for our dear Newton Place, and some of our kind friends thought it an injudicious move. But even in winter we enjoyed it thoroughly; perhaps never more than then, when mighty winds swooping down from Scawfell tossed and twisted our protecting trees and shook the walls of our dwelling as they passed us by, or when heavy rains had turned our meadow into a lake, and flooded roads shut us most completely in. To the happy, storm is as exhilarating as sunshine, and I used to liken our secluded life to a full glass of cham pagne, into which drop the merest trifle, it effervesces anew. A book, a magazine, sent by a friend, a parcel from the London library, the arrival of proof to correct, etc., still more, any natural spectacle northern lights, frost-work, falling snow- anything, everything, was pleasurable excitement. On such winter evenings my husband would often take me from room to room of our dwelling' to show me' the moon, or moonlit clouds, or the starlight splendor in different parts of the sky. And after standing long in silence together gazing at the silent stars, he would turn from their oppressive magnificence with such words as these: 'Love must be better than hate in all worlds!' So much was certain. While thus alone, from the first hour of rising. when I could hear him 'singing, dancing to himself,' to the winding up of our evening by some game of chess or cards, all was conscious enjoyment. I cannot convey to those who did not know him, or knew him but slightly, the variety of his playfulness, the delicate humor that gave charm and freshness to 'every day's most quiet need by sun and candlelight.' I suppose it required a heart like his, 'moored to something ineffable, supreme,' and an entire absence from personal anxieties, enmities, ambitions. I only know that this 'spirit of joy' that he felt and diffused was, as far as my experience goes, unique, and no sketch of his character that did not lay stress upon it could be in any degree complete.

--

6

"This year, 1868, our Annus Mirabilis,' as he sometimes called it, was the most social of all our years. For several months we had a

succession of dear friends, some of them eminently congenial companions

to my husband; and between their coming and going, intervals of our own life. William was well and strong; the seasons were all unusually fine; in autumn the hills were one sheet of golden bracken, such as we never saw before or since; the leaves hung later on his beloved birchtrees, and our mountain walks were longer than usual.”

Mr. Merriam, with that felicity of expression which has led him everywhere to choose the right word, has named his book the Story" of William and Lucy Smith, and so fully does it possess the interest of a romance, that had it, after the manner of a romance, ended with the wedding, every reader would have felt that it had been well worth the telling. But when through all the experiences of their wedded life the thoughtful interest steadily expands, as every great theme which occupied the philosopher yields constantly new points of consideration, as the common joy, growing ever more intense, diffuses itself like a fragrance through a circle of closely united friends, as every anticipation is surpassed by the reality, and the only shadow cast upon their lives is that shared by all human joy, the question of its possible earthly continuance, surely the highest end of the story has been reached. Yet had the record closed with the history of these glad years, love's deepest lesson would still have been untaught. In the sense of communion with spirits who have gone before us comes the largest impulse to that patience, courage, and faithfulness with which we strive to complete for them the work they began. But if the passionate fervor of her affection was too deep, too intense, for her physical frame long to endure its strain, it was at all events wholly free from that morbid self-indulgence which is only a more refined form of spiritual egotism.

Perhaps the fittest expression for that sublimation of affection into which her whole being was absorbed would be the apotheosis of love, but with this worship, to which she does not hesitate to give the name of adoration, there is mingled the constant recognition of the higher truth, that love is of God, and loses itself in God. There is iteration, but it never wearies us, simply because it expends itself ever in reproducing from some new and fresh side the manifold thoughtful life of its object.

"Doubtless, too, she was under special influences from the character of her husband's thinking, and from her attitude toward his memory. That attitude was one of worship. A part of her worship was to seek to follow his thoughts, his ideals, and no others; to mould herself wholly on him. But may we not believe that he would have gently reminded for it was one of his most characteristic thoughts — that to every

her

-

nature, to every organization, there is assigned its own law, its own development, for which no other can be substituted, not even that of the most revered and beloved? Whoever saw these two together in life, and appreciated their perfect union, must have realized that its very perfection lay partly in those differences which made them supplements to each other. Of no pair was it ever truer than of them, that

“Woman is not undeveloped man,

But diverse; could we make her as the man,

Sweet love were slain; his dearest bond is this,

Not like to like, but like in difference.'

"When he was taken from her, she tried to follow in his footsteps, as everywhere else, so especially on the one subject that engaged her heart -the thought of a future life. But in regard to that theme the difference between his nature and her nature, between his experience and her experience, required and even compelled a different attitude in her from what his had been. The favorite realm of his life was thought, inquiry, speculation. His virtue was to test each belief inexorably and fearlessly by the standard not of desire but of truth; to keep reason on the judgment-seat, sovereign over the feelings which thronged and pressed like tumultuous suitors. And thereby he disciplined himself in self-control, and made large advances in those provinces of knowledge which are to be mastered by study and reflection.

"But no man can escape the limitation of his own qualities.' And the habit of incessantly subjecting all ideas and emotions to a rigorous scrutiny imposes an undue limitation on some noble faculties. A lawyer's cross-examination often sifts truth out of falsehood, but a perpetual crossexamination may rob the true story of its impressive and convincing quality. Nor does the atmosphere of perpetual meditation serve best to generate the great insights and assurances which belong to a complete humanity. Some highest knowledge comes only through action. It is only when the young bird trusts itself to flight that it learns how buoyant the air is to its wing. Meditation was to this soul the nest whence it could never bring itself to fly. It would seem that its full liberation could come only with the release from earthly conditions."

"On one of the spurs of Snowdon.”

"My angel out of sight, how could I bear

The sunset glory of this summer eve,

When all the hills their purplest shadows wear,

And all the clouds their rosiest hues receive,

How could I bear it, did I not believe

Thy present sphere is yet more perfect and more fair.

"Oh, but that deep down in my secret heart
Such trust all fear and doubting underlies,
Glories like these, in which thou hast no part,
What could they be but torture to my eyes?

Better the dreariest scene, the darkest skies,
Better no more to be if thou no longer art.

"But since, Beloved, while I sit and gaze
Upon the pageant of the earth and sky,

My heart still throbs with thankfulness and praise,
For what thou lovedst in our days gone by,

I know thou must be living-life more high,
Seeing and serving God in nearer, nobler ways."

Is it too much to say that in her love conquered death when the very sense of existence became at last a present consciousness of an immortal union? But the more profound and intense her grief, the deeper and more imperative became the impulse to constant and beneficent activity. The friendships whose caressing tenderness became ever more delicate and beautiful in the intercourse with this stricken and sorrowing soul occupy still the central place, while as one after another of the scenes of their happiness together are revisited, there is ever a yearning desire to found some permanent memorial, whose continued ministry of blessing shall fitly embody that large sympathy with humanity which characterized his life, a desire which, as in the Patterdale Reading Room and Library, more than once found gratification.

The delightful letters to intimate friends, which form a considerable part of the volume, reveal yet more fully this many-sided nature. In them she pours forth, now in playful, now in impassioned language, the richness of her fancy, and most of all of an affection which took all the world to her heart, and strove by the fullness of its own bounty to bring some compensation to those who seemed by sorrow, privation, or suffering shut out even from the simplest joys of existence. There was, perhaps, no trait in both Mr. and Mrs. Smith more remarkable, or which is more characteristic of her letters, than a certain vividness of perception and of sentiment in the presence of the commonest things. Nothing for them could become wholly commonplace. There seemed to be no object which the soul could not invest with a sense of beauty, wonder, and awe. The grass, the sunlight, a child were seen by them as if for the first time. Repetition had no power to stale any feature of a divine creation. Mrs. Smith was in the truest sense of that appellation, also, a poet, and the poems with which Mr. Merriam has enriched this volume, and which blossomed as naturally and irrepressibly from her pen as do nature's offerings of beauty under the showers and the sun of the spring, illustrate by their quaint simplicity and beauty of thought

and expression the unpretentious openness and beauty of her life.

The deepest influence exerted by human souls is the influence of character. Higher than any force of argument is the fascination of pure, unselfish, and saintly lives, even when associated with views which are inadequate or convictions which are mistaken, and it is a fascination which is often increased rather than diminished when it involves also sympathy with suffering. It can hardly be doubted that, even by such sympathy as will here be awakened, some souls sore pressed by the atmosphere of doubt and of darkness by which so many in our day are surrounded, will be led still farther to yield to such doubts, that for some such faint hold as they still have had upon the Son of God will be loosened, in the impression that perhaps the best intellects of the world are in protest against the claims of a Christian faith. But we believe that this will be true only of the smallest number of those for whom such lives as these will have any attraction whatever, and that among them all there will be fewer still who have ever known the comfort and joy of a true spiritual life for whom every spiritual experience of their own will not be deepened, and who will not clasp every object of their own Christian affection and hope with a yet deeper and more abiding sense of its preciousness and its reality. Surely if admiration shall lead to imitation, if any shall be drawn by their example to accept loneliness for the sake of the rewards of the thinker, or to exchange the cheap satisfactions of social vanity for intimate converse with the most exalted themes of the universe; if any shall become so enamored of the utter unworldliness of lives for whom plain living and high thinking necessitated an atmosphere too pure and too rare to sustain any save the purest and the most unselfish of human friendships, then the world will be the richer by the influence

exerted.

A review of these two charming lives is not a fitting place for any attempt to traverse the entire range of beliefs or of disbeliefs accepted by them, nor for a formal and elaborate defense of Christianity as the true and legitimate embodiment of the kingdom of God in the world. There are, however, certain presuppositions constantly recurring in the language of the biographer, and certain implications for which the reader's acceptance is persistently asked, which challenge attention, and which cannot be overlooked. It is taken for granted that in the most thoughtful minds that general view of the universe which underlies the Scriptures has