Oh! privilege and blessing,

To find I ever own,
What great ones, in possessing,
Imagine theirs alone!

Oh! glory to the Maker,

Who gave such boon to hold,
Who made me free partaker
Where others buy with gold!
For while the woods and mountains
Stand up where I can see,
While God unlocks the fountains,
'They all belong to me!'

RUSKIN

The Natural Joy of Work

WHEN men are rightly occupied, their amuse

ment grows out of their work, as the colourpetals out of a fruitful flower;—when they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour out our whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; and having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with, not innocently, as children

with dolls, but guiltily and darkly, as the idolatrous Jews with their pictures on cavern walls, which men had to dig to detect. The justice we do not execute, we mimic in the novel and on the stage; for the beauty we destroy in nature, we substitute the metamorphosis of the pantomime, and (the human nature of us imperatively requiring awe and sorrow of some kind) for the noble grief we should have borne with our fellows, and the pure tears we should have wept with them, we gloat over the pathos of the police court, and gather the night-dew of the grave.

ROBERT LEIGHTON

Beauty and Rectitude

'TWO

'WOULD seem there's some affinity between Beauty and rectitude. We cannot sway

From truth and virtue, but it draws a screen

Over the face of the day :

The blue sky blurred, and earth's refreshing green, With hill and dale and cattle-haunted fords,

All dead and hollow as the ochred scene

Round the dramatic boards.

The flowers shut up their wonder from our eyes, Their beauty that enchanted us; and books Refuse to give the deeper sense that lies

Revealed to virtuous looks.

A soul of artless purity discerns
Poetic wreathings in prosaic facts,
And finds that universal Nature turns

To beauty all her facts.

To perfect purity—if such could be—

This earth were all transparent, the dull clodIn which we neither life nor beauty see-Breathing the living God.

Beauty of nature through the varied year,
Beauty of truth, of right, of form, of soul—
All beauty is of God-one atmosphere

That permeates the whole.

Let beauty cease to be our daily food,

We lose the finer sense of truth and right: Forsake the holy paths of rectitude,

And beauty suffers blight.

Duty

I

REACH a duty, yet I do it not,

And therefore see no higher but if done,

My view is brighten'd, and another spot

Seen on my moral sun.

For, be the duty high as angel's flight,
Fulfil it, and a higher will arise,
E'en from its ashes. Duty is infinite-

Receding as the skies.

And thus it is, the purest most deplore
Their want of purity. As fold by fold,
In duties done, falls from their eyes, the more
Of Duty they behold.

Were it not wisdom, then, to close our eyes
On duties crowding only to appal ?
No: Duty is our ladder to the skies,

And, climbing not, we fall.

GEORGE ELIOT

MAY I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirred to generosity,

In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn

For miserable aims that end with self,

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues.

This is life to come,

Which martyred men have made more glorious

For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven, be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty—
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense.
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

Brother and Sister

LONG years have left their writing on my brow, But yet the freshness and the dew-fed beam

Of those young mornings are about me now, When we two wandered toward the far-off stream

With rod and line. Our basket held a store
Baked for us only, and I thought with joy

That I should have my share, though he had more,
Because he was the elder and a boy.

The firmaments of daisies since to me

Have had those mornings in their opening eyes, The bunched cowslip's pale transparency Carries that sunshine of sweet memories,

And wild-rose branches take their finest scent
From those blest hours of infantine content.