I know that the act will be very agreeable to her Majesty. The cathedral of Chester is under an energetic Dean, and nave services are now carried on in it with excellent effect." Many were the congratulations he received. The answer to one of them is characteristic: "You never were more right than when you said that I should not like to be a bishop. . . . And even a deanery I shrink from; because it would take me away from Eversley; the home to which I was ordained, where I came when I was married, and which I intend shall be my last home; for go where I will in this hard-working world, I shall take care to get my last sleep in Eversley churchyard." In October he went to Bristol to the Social Science Congress, as President of the educational section. His address, which made a profound sensation at the time, was printed, and about 100,000 copies distributed by the education League. He had this year joined the League with several other clergymen, who, like himself, nearly despaired of a Government scheme for compulsory education, in which alone they saw hope for the masses; but he subsequently withdrew, and gave his warm allegiance to Mr. Forster's Act. He had long deplored the religious disputes which formed the chief hindrance to a National Education Act, and in a sermon in London some years before had spoken thus of them: "Let me remind you very solemnly, that the present dearth of education in these realms is owing mainly to VOL. II. - 17 our unhappy religious dissensions; that it is the disputes, not of unbelievers, but of Christians, which have made it impossible for our government to fulfil one of the first rights, one of the first duties, of any government in a civilized country; namely, to command, and to compel every child in the realm to receive a proper education. Strange and sad that it should be, yet so it is. We have been letting, we are letting still, year by year, thousands sink and drown in the slough of heathendom and brutality, while we are debating learnedly whether a raft, or a boat, or a life-buoy, is the legitimate instrument for saving them; and future historians will record with sorrow and wonder a fact which will be patent to them, though the dust of controversy hides it from our eyes even the fact that the hinderers of education in these realms were to be found, not among the so-called skeptics, not among the so-called infidels; but among those who believed that God came down from heaven, and became man, and died on the cross, for every savage child in London. Thus Compulsory Government Education is, by our own choice and determination, impossible." — Discipline and other Sermons. ". . . It is the duty of the State, I hold, to educate all alike in those matters which are common to them as citizens; that is, in all secular matters, and in all matters also which concern their duties to each other as defined by law. Those higher duties which the law cannot command or enforce, they must learn elsewhere; and the clergy of all denominations will find work enough, and noble work enough, in teaching them. We shall have always work enough in such times as these in teaching what no secular education can ever teach; in diffusing common honesty, the knowledge of right and wrong, and the old-fashioned fear of God as the punisher of those who do ill, and the rewarder of those who do well. . . .” -Speech at Bristol. On the 2nd of December he and his daughter embarked at Southampton for the West Indies. "At last I, too, was crossing the Atlantic. At last the dream of forty years, please God, would be fulfilled, and I should see the West Indies and the Spanish Main. From childhood I had studied their natural history, their charts, their romances, and alas! their tragedies; and now at last I was about to compare books with facts, and judge for myself of the reported wonders of the earthly paradise. . . .” .. MAIL STEAMER SHANNON: December, 1869.- "Latitude 25°, longitude 50°, i.e., in the Doldrums or Calves of Cancer, past the Gulf-weed, and among the flying-fish. We are having the most charming passage which even old hands remember at this time of year, and the steamer is full of delightful and instructive people, so that I am learning something every day. We have already invitations to Barbadoes, to Jamaica, to Cuba, Granada, Tobago-so that we might spend months in the West Indies; but I shall be home, please God, by the mail I promised. I have done duty, and preached twice, and I hope not in vain. I go up with your prayerbook every morning on the paddle-box on deck, before any passengers are up, so that I have a quiet gracious time- up at six, and breakfast at nine. . . . It all seems at times like a dream, then as if one had been always on board; then I want to show or tell you something, and forget for the moment you are three thousand miles off, in frost, perhaps, and snow, while we are in rich showery midsummer, with such sunrises and sunsets. . . .” It would be a twice told tale to those who have read his "At Last" to do more than glance at his account of the voyage and its new experi ences, the historic memories which the sight of the Azores woke up of Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Richard Grenville, and many of England's forgotten worthies; and of all he felt at finding himself on the track of the "old sea heroes, Drake and Hawkins, Carlile and Cavendish, Cumberland, Preston, Frobisher, and Duddely, Keymis and Widdon - and of the first specimen of the Gulf-weed which brought back "the memorable day when Columbus's ship plunged her bows into the tangled ocean meadow, and the sailors were ready to mutiny, fearing hidden shoals, ignorant that they had four miles of blue water beneath their keel," and of the awe which the poet and the man of science must needs feel at that first sight of the "Sargasso sea, and of the theories connected with it — not wholly impossible of a sunken Atlantic continent and of his enjoyment of the glorious cloudland, and the sudden sunsets when 'The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out, to be succeeded after balmy nights by the magnificent pageant of tropic sunlight"—and of the first sight of the New World, and the look out for Virgin Gorda, one of those numberless islands which Columbus discovered on St. Ursula's day; and of the arrival at St. Thomas, with its scarlet and purple roofs piled up among orange trees, and the first glimpse of a tropic hill-side. “Oh! for a boat to get into that paradise!" and how the boat was got; and how he leapt out on a sandy beach and then the revelation of tropic vegetation, and the unmistakable cocoa-nut trees, and the tall aloes, and the gray-blue Cerei, and the bright deep green of a patch of Guinea grass; -and the astonishment which swallowed up all other emotions at the wonderful wealth of life and the "effort, at first in vain, to fix our eyes on some one dominant or typical form, while every form was clamoring as it were to be looked at, and a fresh Dryad gazed out of every bush, and with wooing eyes asked to be wooed - and the drooping boughs of the shoregrape with its dark velvet leaves and crimson midrib, and the fragrant Frangipane, and the first cocoa-nut, and the mangrove swamp, and then the shells the old friends never seen till now but in cabinets at home, earnests that all was not a dream; the prickly pinna, the great strombi, with the outer shell broken away, disclosing the rosy cameo' within and looking on the rough beach pitifully tender and flesh-like; and the lumps of coral, all to be actually picked up and handled and the first tropic orchid, and the first wild pines clinging parasitic on the boughs of strange trees, or nestling among the angular shoots of the columnar cereus';" and the huge green calabashes, the playthings of his childhood, alive and growing; and how "up and down the sand we wandered collecting shells, till we rowed back to the ship over white sand where grew the short manati grass, and where the bottom was stony, we could see huge prickly sea urchins, huger brainstone corals, round and gray, and above, sailing over our heads, flocks of brown and gray pelicans, to show us where we were and met the fleet of negro boats laden with bunches of plantains, yams, green oranges, sugar canes;" and then the - |