'Peace, my child, for I thy loving Father Smite in love, and never smite in vain; One by one, the children round Me gather, Perfected by pain.' Every night I lay me down in sorrow, Every morning finds me drowned in tears; Endlessly to-morrow and to-morrow Grows to months and years. "Yet, through paths as sad, and hearts as hollow, I, thy Lord and Master, went before; My disciple, is it hard to follow With the cross I bore?' No; but should my spirit failing, dying, Lose that Presence in the last dim dream ;- 'Christian, at that low and narrow portal Hush, my heart, the Lord hath heard thy weeping, THE UNBROKEN. BY THE REV. WILLIAM HEYGATE. 'A bone of Him shall not be broken.'-St. John, xix. 36. STRIKE hard, ye ruthless soldiers. Let the bones And purple jets of blood.* Strike hard; for one repentance scorns, and hell And hastens to rejoin His Lord in Paradise. * See the picture of Rubens in the Museum at Antwerp. M. C. But touch not the Anointed; for the Lamb, Pierced, bruised, and slain, is under angels' care; Of Him shall ever break. Thus far, no farther, dash your angry waves; Safety, and sweetest peace." No hostile hand shall touch Him now; but love And lay Him in the tomb. The bones are strength,† and man could never break Before the judge; and calm Peter was broken, with his timid friends, Who faithless fled, and left in time of need; 'I am' abode-abides. The Church, His Body, often hard bested, Who never can be broke. The martyr, and the widow, and the child, Orphaned and lone, and souls oppressed with guilt, From the speech, 'It is finished,' a new period seems to set in; and honour takes the place of dishonour. The piercing of the Side had a mystical meaning, and does not mar this thought. VOL. 7. † S. Aug. Enarr. in Psalm cxxxix., and elsewhere. 16 PART 39. But come, thou teacher, taught thyself at last; The font of that new birth.* And come from Ramah, weeping by the way; Thou truly rich in this, That Christ will bless thy grave. Gently draw forth the nails, and gently place Unbroken, undefiled, our only Strength, Roll up the stone, ye soldiers. Seal it sure, MEDIEVAL SEQUENCES AND HYMNS. No. XV.-FOR THE ANNUNCIATION OF OUR LADY. (Salve salve sancta parens) HAIL, all hail! O sacred Mother! Than the Word dost thou conceive; As the dew on wool descendeth, As the sun his ray extendeth Through the glass, and works no ill; So the Father's power all holy, Shadows o'er that Mother lowly, Gloriously a Virgin still. * St. John, iii. By the ever-closed portal Enters He, Whom nature mortal Gabriel's Ave, mystic greeting, Turns her woe to holy mirth; Full of grace, most blest of earth. MORE THOUGHTS OF A LOVER OF OLD ENGLISH PROSE. IN continuing my remarks on our English prose writers, I am made to feel the impossibility of doing more than giving a very few specimens ; and so deeply am I penetrated by the sense of the superficial character of such a proceeding, that nothing but the hope of leading here and there a reader of the Monthly Packet to look into the pages of the writers themselves would induce me to go on. There is also another consideration which emboldens me: it is not absolutely necessary that young ladies should possess themselves, even by borrowing, of the original prose works of Milton, of Bacon, of Hooker, or even of Jeremy Taylor-if ever such volumes come in their way, they will be prepared to select for themselves; meanwhile I would only refer for instance to the valuable compendium entitled, 'Bacon, his Writings and his Philosophy,' enriched with numerous quotations, edited by Mr. George Craik, and occupying three of Mr. Knight's little useful volumes, published in 1846. Even this contains very much more, probably, than will be cared for-far more than I myself, at least, can master; but I mention it because it really is a pains-taking carefully executed little work, which no student of Bacon ought to be without. Francis Bacon's ESSAYS, it is well known, have within a few years received the benefit of an introduction and Commentaries by the late Archbishop Whateley. These are very accessible; and I am sure that (Milton's works always excepted) I could find no more striking specimens of fine thoughts well expressed than in the Essays. Yet I should like just now, not to take my examples from them; rather one wishes to see what Bacon, retracing his career, tells us was his earliest aim. It is impossible not to admire the calm grandeur with which he seems to have looked into the future that was before him-even as Milton with a yet more spiritual eye beheld his great epic poem in the distance. The piece from which I shall give an extract is entitled 'De Interpretazione Naturæ Procedeum,' (a treatise concerning the interpretation of nature.) It is generally thought to be connected with the grand preface to the 'Instauratio.' Now that work was not given to the world till 1620, when Bacon was fifty-nine years of age; but he was in the habit of writing down thoughts as they occurred, and afterwards using them in suitable places. Many of these were originally written in Latin; while others were, even by himself, first written in English and afterwards Latinized. Mr. Craik gives the piece to which I refer in English only, though informing us it is from the Latin; and of course I give only what I find and think may be relied on as from a conscientious critic. I cannot but, however, here refer to Mr. Spedding's most valuable work, 'Life and Letters of Francis Bacon,' as bearing the strongest testimony to the early formation of Bacon's habits of mind and aspirations. Mr. Spedding well says that no man will ever form a correct idea of Bacon's life unless he bear in mind that from very early youth his mind was divided between three great objects, distinct but not discordant;'-namely, zeal for the reformed religion, imbibed from his mother, a learned, eloquent, and religious woman, deeply imbued with the Nonconformist spirit; a love of his country and strong interest in public affairs, derived from his father, the Lord Keeper; and a general desire after the improvement of all the means whereby the human race might attain true knowledge. While at Cambridge, and only in his fifteenth year, he seems to have received a strong impression of the imperfection of the then prevalent modes of study, and as Mr. Spedding very eloquently says, 'From that moment there was awakened in his breast the appetite which cannot be satiated, and the passion which cannot commit excess. From that moment he had a vocation which employed and stimulated all the energies of his mind, gave a value to every vacant interval of time, and interest and significance to every random thought and casual accession of knowledge; an object to live for as wide as humanity, as immortal as the human race; an idea vast and lofty enough to fill the soul for ever with religious and heroic aspirations. From that moment, though subject to interruptions, disappointments, errors, and regrets, he could never be without work, hope, nor consolation.' * But I will now cite the passage to which I have referred: 'When I came to conceive of myself as born for the service of humanity, and to look upon state employment as amongst the things that are of public right, and patent to all like the wave or the breeze, I proceeded both to inquire what might most conduce to the benefit of men, and to deliberate for what special work I myself had been best fitted by nature. Thereupon I found that no other thing was of so great merit in reference to the human race, as the discovery and * Spedding, vol. i. p. 4. |
