The words are few and simple and yet they appear to me to have an inexpressible majesty of truth about them, to be almost as if they were spoken from the very mouth of God. . . . They cannot be too deeply graven upon the heart. In short, what we all want is that they should not come to us as an admonition from without, but as an instinct from within. The final state which we are to contemplate with hope, and to seek by discipline, is that in which our will shall be one with the will of God, not simply submit to it, not simply shall foilow after it, but shall live and move with it, even as the pulse of the blood in the extremities acts with the central movement of the heart. When the government of Lord Beaconsfield was overthrown Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Duke of Argyll: April 12, 1880. All our heads are still in a whirl from the great events of the last fortnight, which have given joy, I am convinced, to a large majority of the civilized world. The downfall of Beaconsfield is like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance. It is too big, however, to be all taken in at once. We may well be content to thank God in silence, but the outlook is tremendous. Immediately he was summoned by the Queen for the second time to the head of the government and he showed a sense of the need of Divine aid worthy of Moses or Joshua in these words: May He who has of late so wonderfully guided, guide me still in the critical days about to come. A month later, after forty-eight years of strenuous life, he met his twelfth Parliament, and the second in which he had been Chief Minister of the Crown. He records it thus: At 4:15, I went down to the House with Herbert [his son]. There was a great and fervent crowd in the Palace Yard and much feeling in the House. It almost overpowered me as I thought by what deep and hidden agencies I have been brought back into the midst of the vortex of political action. He then speaks of The new access of strength which in some important respects has been administered to me in my old age, and the remarkable manner in which Holy Scripture has been applied to me for admonition and for comfort. Looking calmly on this course of experience I do believe that the Almighty has employed me for his purposes in a manner larger and more special than before, and has strengthened me and led me on accordingly. His sincerity and humility are manifested in his ample apology to two nations for what he bitterly deplored as "an undoubted error, the most singular and palpable, and I may add the least excusable," in declaring "in the heat of the American struggle that Jefferson Davis had made a nation." He adds many self-accusing words, including these: My offense was indeed only a mistake, but one of incredible grossness and justly exposed me to very severe blame. . . I am the more pained and grieved because I have for the last five and twenty years received from the Government and people of America tokens of good will which could not fail to arouse my undying gratitude. When, because of advancing years and physical feebleness, he gave up Parliamentary life he yet continued his individual activities. At the age of eighty-six he wrote a series of articles for the Sunday School Times entitled The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, and about the same time another series for the North American Review on The Future Life and the Condition of Man Therein. On July 25, 1895, the fifty-sixth anniversary of his marriage, there was a great family gathering at Hawarden, and at its close Mr. Gladstone spoke in the town hall of Chester, near by, for more than an hour, paying his respects to "The Unspeakable Turk," on the Armenian outrages. The London Times characterized that address as "quite unparalleled, even as a mere physical achievement, by a man advanced in his eighty-sixth year." To his greatly beloved little granddaughter and playmate, Dorothy Drew, he wrote an invitation consisting of six stanzas, of which these are the first and the last: I know where there is honey in a jar Meet for a certain little friend of mine, That only want small hands to intertwine So, come, thou playmate of my closing day, Such things may show How far into the arctic region of our lives The Gulf Stream of our youth may flow. In the weeks of his agonizing pain he complained not, but "said he had enjoyed so many thousand hours without pain that he was willing to accept this suffering from the hands of Provi dence. . . . He walked bravely on into the valley of the shadow, and it was light everywhere before him. The old hymns he had so often sung on Sunday afternoons with his family were sung to him now. His son (a clergyman) read the Litany to him day by day and he feebly murmured Amen. His whole life had been an amen to all the divine impulses and hopes emobdied in the Cross of Jesus Christ." Our brief and rapid survey of the life of one so noble and so devout may most fitly close with his own words, which show yet once more, in simplest phrase, level to the common mind, the key and the inspiration of his great career: If I am asked, "What is the remedy for the deepest sorrows of the human heart?" I must point to something which in the well-known hymn is called," the old. old story," told in an old book, and taught in the old, old teaching, which is the greatest and best guide ever given to mankind. Cyrus D. Joss race. ART. III.-PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR: LAUREL DECKED For dear the bondman holds his gifts Of music and of song, The gold that kindly Nature sifts John Greenleaf Whittier: Port Royal. PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR was another emancipator of his He set it free from the imputation that the crudities and vulgarities of the minstrel stage are the best products of which it is capable. Indeed he proved these alien to the true spirit of the race, which is really one of gentle delicacy and not one of blare and guffaw. He has faithfully reflected in his verse the warm hopefulness and quaint philosophy of cabin, field, and hearthside. He has skillfully, and in a captivating way, mirrored the beauty of paternal, conjugal, and filial love. He was loyal to his race. Like a prophet he felt himself identified with his people. He suffered and rejoiced as they suffered and rejoiced. He never sought to erase racial peculiarities from what he wrote. Fame and comparative wealth did not turn his head or cause him to forget or be ashamed of his lowly kindred. On the contrary, he stood for them, incarnating as he did their hopes and fears. So he could write, almost imperiously, Hear me pleading now, Who bearest unashamed upon my brow There is something fairly majestic in his mental vision of the progress of his people from the abyss of servitude to the heights of enfranchised and educated manhood as he writes, Slow moves the pageant of a climbing race. The temporary arrests of this moving pageant were to him only new assurances that it would finally reach the goal: Heed not the darkness round you, dull and deep, He reaches his highest note in his passionate protest against peonage: Did sanctioned Slavery bow its conquered head Is it for this we all have felt the flame, This newer bondage and this deeper shame? Love of his people made him keenly appreciative of their benefactors, in praise of whom he wrote his stateliest lines. Of Harriet Beecher Stowe, he says: Earth learned of thee what heaven already knew, This splendid, unerring fidelity to his blood is a substantial contribution to the power which will ultimately give his class a stable position at home and abroad. He is in himself, in the ultimate analysis, as William Dean Howells suggests, evidence of the unity of the human race which does not think or feel black in one and white in another, but human in all. nor Dunbar maintained the same noble attitude toward his art that he did toward his race he had the highest possible ideal of it. Evidences abound of his painstaking care. He was never hasty, rushed to print. to print. Publishers could entreat, promise, cajole, and threaten for copy. He was unmoved if he felt himself sterile or if his product was not polished to his liking. The monetary was not the highest, if indeed it was ever any motive at all, although he does laughingly say in The Lapse, "Cheques are pleasing." Robert Ingersoll, in a letter to Dr. H. A. Tobey, said that William Dean Howells was thought to have done a great service for Dunbar in his well-known affirmation that he was |