drag such hounds to justice; if they will do nothing to free themselves from the old stigma that from 1820-48 they have themselves notoriously engaged in such outrages and murders then let them be put down by law as incapable morally as politico-economically. With you I have defended the right of combination among the workmen, in hope that they would become wiser than of yore. But if they continue to murder, I see nothing for them but the just judgment of public opinion which will sweep them away, and I fear inaugurate a reign of tyranny and of capital. I and others have been seeing with dread the growing inclination of the governing classes to put down these trade unions, &c., by strong measures. What am I to say when I see the working men themselves, in the face of this danger, justifying the measures of those who wish to be hard on them? I have seen enough of trade unions to suspect that the biggest rogues and the loudest charlatans are the men who lead or mislead the honest working men; but if the honest working men themselves make no move towards detecting and exposing the authors of such outrages, they must suffer with their blind and base leaders. If they fancy they are too strong for the classes above them, that they can defy the laws of England and the instincts of humanity, then they will find themselves mistaken, even if they have to be taught their folly by a second Bristol riots or a second Peterloo." His Preface to "The Life and Sermons of Tauler" written at this time came out of the depths of his heart. It concludes with these striking words: "With Tauler, whether he be right or wrong in any given detail, practical righteousness of the divinest kind and loftiest kind is at once the object, and the means, and the test, of all upward steps. God is the Supreme Preface to Tauler's Life 17 Good which man is intended to behold; but only by being inspired by Him, owing all to Him, and copying Him, can he behold Him, and in that sight find his highest reward, and heaven itself. . . . There are those who, opprest by doubts and fears and sorrows, may find in Tauler's genial and sunny pages a light which will stand them in good stead in many an hour of darkness. There are those, heaped beyond desert with every earthly bliss, who have had to ask themselves, in awful earnest, the question which all would so gladly put away-Were I stripped to-morrow of all these things, to stand alone and helpless as I see thousands stand, what should I then have left?' . . . Tremblingly they have turned to religion for comfort, under the glaring eye of the dark spectre of bereavement, but have felt about all commonplaces, however true, as Job felt of old: Miserable comforters are ye all! Oh! that I knew where I might find HIM. . . . To such Tauler can tell something of that still waste, where a man, losing all things else, shall find himself face to face with God, and hear from Him that which no man can utter again in words even to the wife of his bosom. . . . And for 'darker struggles and deeper problems,' and 'the abyss of boundless doubt,' — he can tell how he came to find an eternal light shining for ever in that utter darkness, which the darkness could not comprehend; an eternal ground in the midst of that abyss, which belonged not to the abyss, nor to the outward world which had vanished for the moment, nor to space, nor time, nor any category of human thought, or mortal existence; and that its substance was the everlasting personal good, whose love is righteousness. Tauler can point out the path by which he came to see that Light, to find that Rock of Ages; the simple path of honest self-knowledge, self-renunciation, self-restraint, in which every outward step towards right exposes some fresh depth of VOL. II.-2 inward sinfulness, till the once proud man, crushed down like Job and Paul, by the sense of his own infinite meanness, becomes like them, a little child once more, and casts himself simply upon the generosity of Him who made him. And then there may come to him the vision, dim, perhaps, and fitting ill into clumsy words, but clearer, surer, nearer to him than the ground on which he treads, or than the foot which treads it, — the vision of an everlasting spiritual substance, most human and yet most divine, Who can endure; and Who, standing beneath all things, can make their spiritual substance endure likewise, though all worlds and stars, birth, and growth, and death, matter, space, and time, should melt in very deed, 'And like the baseless fabric of a vision, Leave not a rack behind.'" With spring his thoughts turned to fishing; and one April morning when the southwest wind wafted certain well-known sounds from the Camp at Aldershot, the South-Western Railway, and Heckfield Place, to the little Rectory, these lines were written and put into his wife's hand: Oh blessed drums of Aldershot! Oh blessed southwest train! Oh blessed, blessed Speaker's clock, Oh blessed yaffil, laughing loud! Oh blessed falling glass! Oh blessed fan of cold gray cloud! Oh bless'd southwind that toots his horn I'm off at eight to-morrow morn, To bring such fishes back! April 1, 1856. Fishing Poems and Flies 19 TO H. STAINTON, ESQ. "As to caddises, I see three years' work at least before getting them at all in order, if (as you say) the thing has not been done; for my belief is, that the species are either very local, or very variable, depending on differences of soil and river-bed, and that they will give a great deal of trouble. My fishing-tackle maker sickened me the other day by'you talk of yellow sallies, sir, I've seen twenty different sorts a different sort for every stream;' and if this is the case with one fly, local, not common and strongly marked, what must be the case with the herd? I will do what I can this year to arrange the typical species of our Hampshire, Surrey, and Berkshire streams (chalk, or iron gravel), and may get a few Snowdon species in August. My belief is that the generality of Snowdon species are quite distinct from ours, e. g., the all-killing gray Gwynant (Phyancæ), which was to me new when I went to Snowdonia. If you will do me the favor of hints as to what to do, and how to do it, I should enjoy, amid the intervals of country parish labor, to apply myself to them. I have great advantages, being surrounded by rivers and ponds, and finding my sole amusement in fly-fishing, once a week, but no more. And only a fly-fisher can do the work, for he only watches, and is forced to watch, the works and ways of the family in situ. . . ". . . I have put into the new edition of 'Glaucus' a hint for a few fly-fishers in various parts to form themselves into a 'Naiad club' to investigate these waterflies. It might do much to science, and still more to the men. I know the value of a little science, as an angler. In Snowdon, three years ago, when no one could catch anything, I found, for the first time in my life, Chloroperla viridis (yellow Sally) running on the burning boulders of a stream; luckily had a good imitation (which I had never used), recognized the natural why there should be men like you, to whom it is said, 'Thou shalt not be tempted to waste thy time over the visible world, because thy calling is to work out that spiritual moral world, of which man can learn just nothing from the visible world—which he can only learn from his own soul, and the souls of other men.' "My dear master, I have long ago found out how little I can discover about God's absolute love, or absolute righteousness, from a universe in which everything is eternally eating everything else. Infinite cunning and shift (in the good sense). Infinite creative fancy it does reveal; but nothing else, unless interpreted by moral laws which are in oneself already, and in which one has often to trust against all appearances, and cry out of the lowest deep (as I have had to do) Thou art not Siva the destroyer. Thou art not even Ahriman and Ormuzd in one. And yet, if Thou art not, why does Thy universe seem to say that Thou art? Art Thou a Deus quidam Deceptor,' after all?—No. There is something in mewhich not my nature, but Thou must have taught me which cries and will cry: Though Thou slay me, as Thou hast slain world on world alreadythough I and all this glorious race of men go down to Hades with the ichthyosaurs and the mammoths, yet will I trust in Thee. Though St. Peter's words be fulfilled (as they may to-morrow by the simplest physical laws) and the elements melt with fervent heat, and the earth and all the works therein be burned up—yet I know that my Redeemer, He who will justify me, and make me right, and deliver me out of the grasp of nature, and proclaim my dominion over nature, liveth, and will stand at the latter day upon the earth, and in some flesh or other I shall see God, see Him for myself as a one and accountable moral being for ever. But beetles and zoophytes never whispered that to me. . . . The study of Nature can teach no moral theology. It may unteach it, |