With which plaint the note of a later minstrel, his theme the Mystery of Evil, is in tune:

"And then 'Resurgam' on those tombs was writ,

Though, when man once was hidden in their glooms,

I saw him never with life's spark relit:

Yet from their silken graves the very worms did flit.”

Wordsworth's sonnet in Lombardy closes with a reverse of this last figure an old man bent by a load of mulberry leaves being his theme, and Man and Worm compared and contrasted: erelong their fates do each to each conform: "both pass into new being, but the Worm, transfigured, sinks into a hopeless grave; his volant spirit will, he trusts, ascend to bliss unbounded, glory without end." Hood falls in with the current notion of flower privilege, in his Ode to Melancholy:

"Is't not enough to vex our souls,

And fill our eyes, that we have set
Our love upon a rose's leaf,

Our hearts upon a violet ?

Blue eyes, red cheeks, are frailer yet;
And, sometimes, at their swift decay
Beforehand we must fret:

The roses bud and bloom again;

But love may haunt the grave of love,

And watch the mould in vain."

Chateaubriand finishes a chapter of his d'outre-tombe memoirs with an apostrophe to a little wood-pink resting on his table among his papers: "Thou wilt spring forth again, little woodpink-thou whose late blossom blooms among the heather". but we, nous autres, "we shall not live again upon this earth as will the sweet and solitary flower." Delta (Moir) sings over his loved lost Casy Wappy that snows muffled earth when he left it in life's spring-bloom, but now "the green leaves of the tree return-but with them bring not thee":

"Tis so; but can it be-(while flowers

Revive again)—

Man's doom, in death that we and ours

For aye remain?

Oh, can it be, that, o'er the grave,

The grass renew'd should yearly wave,

Yet God forget our child to save?"

The same note of interrogation, of deprecation, almost of expostulation, rings through the closing stanzas of W. Caldwell Roscoe's lines written after his sister's death:

"What! shall the faithful God who leads

The long revolving year—,

Who in His bosom warms the seeds,
And breathes on Nature's bier,—
Let lapse in earth our mortal goal-
This life, our seed immortal?
Or this diviner spring-our soul,

Let freeze in Death's cold portal?"

Abu Abdallah offered to his American visitor the rose of Jericho as a proof positive of man's immortality in due season the rose withers and dies, but also in due time it— but what "it"?-revives: "The little shapeless mass became a miracle indeed. . . . The roots had expanded, the leaves had unfolded, life and breath had returned to the dead child of the Sahara, and the very blossoms began to show, and to rival the faint rosy tints of the evening sun.-I never," adds Mr. De Vere, "forgot that lesson of immortality-I never forgot that Rose of Jericho. On my return to Europe I learned that botanists called it 'Anastatica,' the flower of the resurrection.”* But the analogy should be of individual man with each several flower; the root corresponds to the human stock or race. That abides, but the individual man dies off like the several leaves or blossoms of each succeeding year, and those several leaves or blossoms revive not with reviving spring.

"Ah, friends! methinks it were a pleasant sphere,
If, like the trees, we blossom'd every year,"

sings Leigh Hunt. But what he sees, and presently goes on to say or sing, is applicable to our purpose:

"Besides, this tale of youth that comes again,

Is no more true of apple-trees than men.
The Swedish sage, the Newton of the flow'rs,
Who first found out those worlds of paramours,

* Leaves from the Book of Nature, by M. S. De Vere.

Tells us, that every blossom that we see
Boasts in its walls a separate family;
So that a tree is but a sort of stand,

That holds these filial fairies in its hand."

Young is within his right when he tells how day follows night, and gray winter gives place to soft spring, and all, to reflourish, fades as in a wheel, all sinks, to reascend; emblem of man,

66

who passes, not expires." But man is here the stock, the race, not the individual. Young was verging on the misleading analogy when he proceeded to ask, Can it be that matter is immortal and that spirit dies, and

"Shall man alone, for whom all else revives,
No resurrection know? Shall man alone,
Imperial man! be sown in barren ground,
Less privileged than grain, on which he feeds,
Severely doom'd death's single unredeem'd ?"

.. Nos,

Redeunt jam gramina campis, Arboribusque comæ: . . . ubi decidimus Pulvis et umbra sumus. Spring after winter is life coming back to a dead world: it is a resurrection. But all this species of analogy and illustration, valuable as it is in the way of suggestiveness, is, in Frederick Robertson's words, "worth nothing in the way of proof." It may be worth everything to the heart, in so far as it strengthens the dim guesses and vague intimations which the heart has formed already; but it is, he insists, worth nothing to the intellect; for the moment we come to argue the matter, we find how little there is to rest upon in these analogies. "They are no real resurrections after all they only look like resurrections." To take a simile as much in favour as the flowers of the forest-the chrysalis only seemed dead, just as the tree in winter only seemed to have

* Lord Holland at a dinner-party at Bowood in 1819 objected to the stanza in a new poem of James Montgomery's which was being then and there discussed:

"The dead are like the stars by day,
Withdrawn from mortal eye,

But not extinct-they hold their way
In glory through the sky."

It begged the question, he objected in the first place; and next, the stars reappear continually, which the dead do not.

lost its vitality. What is wanted to show is a butterfly which has been dried and crushed, fluttering its brilliant wings next year again—or a tree that has been plucked up by the roots and seasoned by exposure, the vital force really killed out, putting forth its leaves again. We should then, it is admitted, have a real parallel to a resurrection. But not until then.

XXIV.

THE MORE KNOWLEDGE, THE MORE SORROW.

WHAT

ECCLESIASTES i. 18.

'HAT came of the Preacher giving his heart to know wisdom? The invariable outcome, in his case: vexation of spirit. "For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow."

Man's unhappiness, the Weissnichtwo philosopher takes it, comes of his greatness. His capacity of knowledge brings pains and penalties with it. Of almost all books that enlarge the experience and have something really of revelation in them, it may be said, as of that little book in the Apocalypse, that even though sweet as honey in the mouth, the after-taste, the abiding one, is bitter. Some books indeed, and to some students, lack the prelibation of sweetness; for, in a sense, all study is a weariness to the flesh, and the rhymed rhetoric of Shakspeare's Biron will apply:

"Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain,
Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain:
As, painfully to pore upon a book,

To seek the light of truth; while truth the while
Doth falsely* blind the eyesight of his look:
Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile :
So ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes."

The aspirations of Manfred have been beyond the dwellers

* Dishonestly, treacherously.

of the earth, and they have only taught him that "knowledge is not happiness, and science but an exchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance." There was never a finer lesson read to the pride of learning, says a great critic, than the exclamation of Marlowe's Faustus, after his thirty years' study: "Oh, would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book!" On the score of happiness, what comparison, asks a latter-day sage, can you make between the tranquil being of the wild man of the woods, and the wretched and turbulent existence of Milton, the victim of persecution, poverty, blindness, and neglect? "The records of literature demonstrate that Happiness and Intelligence are seldom sisters." Every new lesson, says an eastern proverb, is another gray hair. latter-day pseudo-Solomons have echoed the prayer,

"Take from me this regal knowledge;

Sated

Let me, contented and mute, with the beasts of the field, my brothers,
Tranquilly, happily lie,—and eat grass, like Nebuchadnezzar !"

It is in opposition to the doctrine of Pope's line, of "Happiness, our being's end and aim," that Mr. Carlyle asks, How comes it that although the gross are happier than the refined, the refined would not change places with them? Were that doctrine right, for what should we struggle with our whole might, for what pray to Heaven, if not that the "malady of thought" might be utterly stifled within us, and a power of digestion and secretion, to which that of the tiger were trifling, be imparted instead thereof? "O too dear knowledge! O pernicious learning!" is the regretful cry in one of Hood's serious poems. And in the same key is the note of Selred when taxing Ethwald with having spoilt a promising youth by his clerkly appliances :

"For since he learnt from thee that letter'd art
Which only sacred priests were meant to know,
See how it is, I pray! His father's house

Has unto him become a cheerless den,

His pleasant tales and sprightly playful talk,
Which still our social meals were wont to cheer,

Now visit us but like a hasty beam

Between the showery clouds."

Even the growing sense of ignorance is a depressing power.