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that our misery or our happiness is not the gods, but on the nature of things."

dependent on the caprice of "For all that is evil, there is

judgment of utter destruction; for that which is good, purifying." But,

"Tis a man's immense mistake

Who fashioned to use feet and walk, deigns crawl."

"It's wiser being good than bad;
It's safer being meek than fierce;

It's better being sane than mad;
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;

That after Last, returns the First,

Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can't end worst,

Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst."

For the deformed, idiotic, stunted, limp and ignorant, whom men call "foolish," Browning has infinite pity, patience, and hope; all are backward scholars, waiting the Great Teacher. And for the hateful, noxious, the morally insane whom men call "wicked,” he has infinite pity, patience, hope;-for the "little half-completed castaway whose life was so much worse than herself"; for “Ottima, the temptress, magnificient in sin," for Guido, chief of villians,-all wait the "touch of God's shadow where in is healing." The worst man has something that links him on to humanity, "some germ of good, that may grow to choke out the poisonous, rank growth of a life-time." Quickening, soul-kindling conversion, "may, will, come to all, by God's own ways occult." Some suddenness of fate may cleave the flesh, give issue to the spirit birth; some lightning-stroke may cure the blind ; God's spear may pierce a window in the soul, whence the imprisoned flash shall leap, and find itself at one with God's own sun. "Else I avert my face, nor penetrate into that sad, obscure, sequestered place, where God unmakes, but to remake the soul, He else made first in vain."

And has earth no hope for such? credible feat enough," our poet says. restore"; "a virgin wick he cannot may relume."

Elisha raised the dead-“ A "Man may not create,-he may light, the almost dead lamp he

"Such men are even now upon the earth,
Serene amid the half-formed creatures round,

Who should be saved by them, and joined with them."

"The man who supplies new feeling fresh from God, is he who kindles the soul" with a spark from his own heart fire.

The office of the redeemer, renovator, convertor of men, is not to impose his own personality upon his weaker brother, but to reveal to the man his own soul, to make him " aware of the marvelous dower, life is gifted and filled with," and to open a way through nonconducting flesh and sense, for the magnetic current, that in every soul, sets toward the divine. His the work to educe, not introduce; to "evoke, not transmit." "He gives no gift that bounds itself and ends in the giving and taking"; "His so breeds in the heart and soul of the taker, so transmutes the man who was only man before, that he grows god-like, in his turn can give,—he also brings forth new goods, new beauty from the old."

Intellect alone fits no one for the office. The inner light or spirit "cannot be brought out through what is born and resides in the brain; it is elicited directly or indirectly, by the attracting power of magnetic personalities,—the ultimate, absolute personality being the God-man Christ." Through Him and other Christ-like souls is man "born from above" or through higher personality; and "Through such souls alone, God stooping, shows sufficient of His light for us in the dark to rise by." By man, shall man be "lifted to his level," "made cognizant of the master," see his "true function revealed," and "be admitted to a fellowship with the soul of things."

In a world of failures, loss, pain, decay and imperfection, our poet finds sufficient consolation for life as it is, and for man as he is, in the thought that "man is made to grow-not stop"; "what comes to perfection perishes": "what's whole can increase no more, is dwarfed and dies, since here's its sphere."

"Progress is man's distinction, man's alone, not God's and not the beasts.' God is, they are,-man partly is, and wholly hopes to be."

"God's gift is that man shall conceive of truth
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,
As midway help till he reach fact indeed," as
"Jack was holpen of his been-stalk rung."

Every sorrow, loss and pains yields "increase of knowledge, since he learns because he lives, which is to be a man, set to instruct himself by his past self." Rejoice, “that man is hurled from change to change unceasingly, his soul's wings never furled."

What end to the striving?—“To reach the ultimate, angels law,

indulging every instinct of the soul, there, where law, life, joy, impulse, are one thing."

Browning's universe is so filled with the thought of growth and development that there is no room for decay and death. These he views as incidental processes that lead on to "the best that is to be," -"the last of life for which the first was made."

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And power emerge, but also when strange chance
Ruffles its current; in unused conjuncture,

When sickness breaks the body,-hunger, watching,
Excess or languor,-oftenest death's approach."

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Though a passionate believer in another life, our poet makes small attempt to prove it, and less to map it out. His most doubtful word is when he expresses "only hope." "So I hope, no more than hope, but hope—no less than hope, because compelled by a power and a purpose which, if no else beheld, I behold in life, so hope.' And "What purpose serves the soul that strives, unless the fruit of victories stay, stored up and guaranteed its own forever, by some mode whereby shall be made known the gain of every life, what each soul for itself conquered from out things here." And "Shall earth and the cramped-moment space, yield the heavenly crowning grace? Now the parts, and then the whole !"

"On earth the broken arcs, in Heaven

The perfect round."

Browning affirms the "persistence of mind and heart force." Of continuity of consciousness he says little,-intimates much. When Abt Vogler asks that his music shall live again, not other strains but the same, he is answered, “Yes, you shall have the samenot the semblance but itself. recall, what was, shall be."

Fool, all that is at all, lasts ever, past

"Time's wheel runs back or stops; Potter and clay endure."

The brief time allotted me is unsufficient to give more than a hint of the wealth of illumination and strengthening, abounding in the poems of Robert Browning. The few selections possible to embody here, but inadequately represent his rational thought, his infinite hope and his abundant consolations. Let me recapitulate his prominent teachings.

I. God is Infinite Love.

2.

Man is made imperfect that he may grow.

3. Earth is his nursery, where, by walking, he learns to walk; by failing he learns to succeed.

4. The truth is within us, and is to be educed in God's own time.

5. Men are God's agents in setting free the truth buried in flesh, and this is man's grand privilege.

7.

6. There is ultimate deliverance from all spirit imprisonment. The past has been for good, and the present is for greater good, and the future shall be for increasing good; for good is the final significance of creation.

OF EGYPTIAN WOMEN.

BY MRS. CHARLOTTE B. WILBOUR.

T is generally believed that civilization, amalgamation of races and change of language, deliver mankind from the thraldom of material surroundings and natural tendencies; but in the history of the Nation of the Nile we see how climate and geographical configuration have consistently declared themselves in successive generations, and how, when the incidental and extraneous influences that had seemed to change the prototype have been withdrawn, it rose again in all its distinctiveness and individuality. It is inevi table that a people depending on the measured rise and fall of a river, for the means of life, and even for life itself, should, in a good degree, be the slaves of natural law, and so the more easily subjugated to the will of the human despot who may obtain lordship over their fountain of existence. In these few words I find an explanation for the perpetual servitude of the Egyptian.

It is a fashion, both new and old, to do a wrong, and declare it to be a necessity, and, that in the Egypt of to-day, exhorbitant tribute and forced labor must be extorted from the people to preserve the country, is a tyrant's plea for injustice as old as historic humanity. On Egypt's eldest temple walls, pylons, pillars and memorial tablets, it is recorded in sharply cut hieroglyphics and speaking tableaux, that invasion, slaughter and oppression, the acts of divinelyparented kings and rulers, were done to promote the welfare of the people and to please the Gods. Our modern philanthropists, who for the past five years have been grinding the tillers of the soil, and the peaceful owners of flocks and lands, for the one purpose of giving them a good government, are in no wise original in their special philanthropy. In this philanthropic movement the men who provide literal bread for the people, have suffered most from the excessive taxation and compelled service, which the agents of that going-to-be-good government have imposed upon

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