guardianship achieved, speeds away like Ariel, set free to the elements, and leaves in poetry words of encouragement and promise to humanity:

"Now my task is smoothly done,

I can fly or I can run

Quickly to the green earth's end

Where the bow'd welkin slow doth bend,

And from thence can soar as soon

To the corners of the moon.
Mortals, that would follow me,
Love Virtue; she alone is free:
She can teach you how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime,
Or if Virtue feeble were,

Heaven itself would stoop to her."

One cannot part with this poem, radiant as it is with what is bright and pure and lofty in poetry and philosophy, without thinking how little that high-born woman, when her heart was throbbing in the loneliness of Haywood Forest-how little could she have thought that a young poet's words were to win for her more enduring honour than wealth or heraldry could bestow.

The most distinct foreshadowing of Milton's great epic poem, and of his own independent genius, is an earlier poem-"The Hymn on the Nativity"-which gives the poet the fame of having composed almost in his youth the earliest of the great English odes, the like of which had not, I believe, been heard, since Pindar, two thousand years before, had struck the lyre for assembled Greece. It is a lyric that might have burst from that religious bard of paganism, could he have had prophetic vision of the Advent. It is a poem that revealed a new mastery of English versification, disciplined afterward to such

power in the blank verse of Paradise Lost. Nothing in the way of metre can be grander than some of the transitions from the gentle music of the quiet passages to the passionate parts, and their deep reverberating lines that seem to go echoing on, spiritually sounding, long after they are heard no more. The universal peace at

the time of the Nativity is told with the very music of peace:

"No war or battle's sound

Was heard the world around;

The idle spear and shield were high up hung:
The hooked chariot stood

Unstain'd with hostile blood;

The trumpet spake not to the armed throng;

And kings sat still with awful eye,

As if they surely knew their sovereign Lord was by.

But peaceful was the night

Wherein the Prince of Light

His reign of peace upon the earth began:

The winds, with wonder whist,

Smoothly the waters kist,

Whispering new joys to the mild ocean,

Who now hath quite forgot to rave,

While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.”

"

The stanzas that tell of hopes of a golden age again

are followed by that solemn one :

"But wisest Fate says no,

This must not yet be so;

The Babe yet lies in smiling infancy,

That on the bitter cross

Must redeem our loss,

So both himself and us to glorify;

Yet first to those ychained in sleep

The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep."

The grandest portion of this poem is that which tells

of the flight of the false deities of heathendom, the panic of the priests, the silencing of the oracles, and the cessation of the services of superstition, when the star was seen over the infant Saviour. The profusion of mysterious epithets and the dim imagery seem to blend the magic of the dark incantations of Shakspeare's witchcraft with the splendours of Greek mythology. Paganism and superstition-Europe's, Asia's, Africa's—all, with all the host of their ministry, are vanishing like witches at the touch of music-a babe's cry heard from the manger at Bethlehem throughout the spiritual uni

verse:

"The oracles are dumb;

No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.

No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

The lonely mountains o'er,

And the resounding shore

A voice of weeping heard and loud lament

From haunted spring and dale,

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting Genius is with sighing sent:

With power-inwoven tresses torn,

The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

The brutish gods of Nile as fast

Isis and Orus and the dog Anubis haste.

Nor is Osiris seen,

In Memphian grove or green,

Trampling the unshower'd grass with lowings loud;
Nor can he be at rest

Within his sacred chest;

Nought but profoundest hill can be his shroud:
In vain with timbrel'd anthems dark

The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worshipt ark.

He feels from India's land

The dreaded Infant's hand."

*

Of Milton's various prose-writings, and of his epic poems, it would hardly be possible to say much in a general lecture on the literature of the century. What I have to say respecting the Paradise Lost, I propose to put in this course in another connection.

I have ventured to include, in the subject of this evening's lecture, some suggestions on Sunday reading; and, in turning aside to this topic, let me first explain why I have connected it with this portion of my course. The literature of the seventeenth century includes that which is most generally regarded as the great sacred poem of our language-I mean, of course, the Paradise Lost; and, again, it is the most illustrious age of English pulpitoratory and of theological literature. Let me, in the next place, say, that I trust it will not be thought presumptuous or impertinent in me to introduce, even somewhat casually, into a course like this, the subject of Sunday reading. I am truly solicitous, on the one side, not

to put my hand unduly upon sacred subjects, which are appropriate to another profession of public teachers; and, on the other, not to treat those sacred subjects, so far as I may have occasion to touch them, as ordinary topics of literature and taste. The literature which is associated with holy things must be approached with the reverential feeling with which the picture of a sacred subject should be looked on, remembering that there is due to it something deeper than unloving, technical criticism of art.

I have been attracted to this subject by the conviction that every Sunday has its unappropriated portions of time, and also that there is an abundant literature, in English words, to be used appropriately to the day, and beneficially. The week-day opportunities for reading vary very much with the business and duties of our lives; but our Sundays, with the rest they bring, put us all more on an equality. The most punctual attendance on public worship does not absorb the day; and, the day's duties discharged, the evening can have no better employment than that which is in-door and domestic. There are the contingencies, too, that compel the spending of the whole day at home; and I believe that is a sore trial to those who have no resources for the employment of it. This is a great pity, considering how large those resources I do not propose to speak of the study of the Bible, because I am not willing to treat that as a literary occupation. It stands on higher ground, and ground of its

are.

own.

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With regard to modes of Christian faith and systems of church-government, it surely is becoming for every one, both man and woman, to have an intelligent knowledge of their belief and membership. It is right to