destiny of those to whom God hath given the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear. And to another was entrusted the appeal, "He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches." For only the ear of the wise seeketh knowledge. The unwise is like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear. The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord hath made even both of them.

Give but interest in the theme, and the listener's ear fulfils its natural function, that of hearing. "Mine ears hast Thou opened." Intensify the interest, and the listener is all ears, all Milton pictures a time

ear.

"when, Adam first of men,

To first of women, Eve thus moving speech,
Turn'd him, all ear."

So again the attendant spirit in his "Comus"

And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of Death."

Webster's ill-starred Duchess of Malfi assures her brother, "I will plant my soul in my ears to hear you." Je t'écoute sans cligner la paupière, exclaims Marillac, in "Gerfaut," dût ta narration durer sept jours et sept nuits. "Alarmed nature starts up in my heart, and opens a thousand ears to listen," cries Colonel Talbot in an old play. Perplexed in the extreme, and cut to the heart, by a revelation of household treachery and wrong, an incredulous husband is described in a modern romance, with his hands clasped together, and with his head bent to catch every syllable of the harrowing news,—listening "as if his whole being were resolved into that one sense of hearing." That reads like a literal translation of Balzac's description of one whose whole vie se concentra dans le seul sens de l'ouïe. On another page he is not forgetful of certains hommes who se bouchent les oreilles pour ne plus rien entendre. None so Ideaf as those who will not hear. Next to them may rank those who do not care to. The familiar narrative of " Eyes and No Eyes" might easily have its pendent and parallel, point by

point, and paragraph by paragraph, in one to be called Ears and No Ears.

It is with hearing as with seeing. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Mendelssohn, in one of his letters from abroad, rapturous with gazing on his "favourite Titian," declares that one "might well wish for a dozen more eyes to look one's fill at such a picture. "Had I three ears I'd hear thee!" exclaims Macbeth, when summoned to attend by the apparition of an Armed Head, in the witches' cave. Just as one of Plato's epigrams expresses a wish for the thousand eyes of the starry sky, that he might gaze his fill on the star of his life :

εἴθε γενοίμην

Οὐρανὸς, ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν εἰς δὲ βλέπω.

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Horace uses the expressive phrase, bibit aure, in one of his odes-literally, "drink in with the ear"-a phrase admired by the commentators for its lyric boldness. "I was all fixed to listen," says Dante, in the tenth gulf of l' Inferno. speak your counsel now, for Saturn's ear is all a-hungered," entreats the Titan, in Keats's Hyperion. D'Artagnan, in the ante-chamber of M. de Treville, is described as looking with all his eyes and listening with all his ears, stretching his five senses so as to lose nothing. The same author tells how Mazarin listened, dying as he was, to Anne of Austria, as ten living men could not have listened. "Will you listen ?" asks a prince in the same story; and is answered, "Can you ask me? You speak of a matter of life or death to me, and then ask if I will listen."

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When Falstaff asks the prince, "Dost thou hear me, Hal?” Ay, and mark thee too," is the reply; and that there is a difference between hearing and marking, between lending one ear and giving both, Falstaff knew as well as most men. And could practise what he knew, if occasion prompted. Witness his wilful deafness when taken to task by the Lord Chief Justice. "Boy, tell him I'm deaf,” he bids his page say. So, "You must speak louder, my master's deaf," says the boy. "I am sure he is, to the hearing of anything good," rejoins the

Chief Justice. And when, anon, his lordship taxes the incorrigible knight with being deaf to what he is saying, Sir John assures him, with that consummate assurance of his, that he hears him very well: "Rather, an't please you, it is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking, that I am troubled withal." Quite capable is that witty profligate of entering into the import of each phrase in the collect on the Holy Scriptures, which prays that we may in such wise hear them, as to mark and learn, and inwardly digest them.

A late divine, treating of "animal men" in the "animal" sense of St. Paul, as those who cannot discern spiritual things, but are absorbed in animalism as their being's end and aim, affirmed that unavailing as it seems to be to talk to them of religion, it avails no more talking of poetry, and art, or speculative science, or the nobler things of the soul: "How can such men discern the things of the Spirit? They understand Tennyson as little as they understand St. Paul." Having ears they hear not anything so far away as the music of the spheres. Of that, and such as that, the animal man might say, by self-application of a couplet of Cowper's,

O good thing will He, from whom cometh every good

No will

gift, withhold from them that love Him, and that walk uprightly; least of all then His presence when most that presence is indispensable,—as a very present help in trouble. And when so indispensable as in the valley of the shadow of death-darkening more and more unto the perfect night? We must die alone. It is a truism, in its natural sense. But in what the devout mind refuses to call or consider a non-natural sense, the righteous hath companionship as well as hope in his

death. He who can say, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, confines not his reliance to the range of green pastures and still waters, but extends it to the glooms of the grave and the swellings of Jordan. Not alone at the last, for the Good Shepherd knoweth His sheep, and is known of them. And how known? For one that will not let them want. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me."

Pascal said that the solitude of death was the bitterest pang of humanity; and because one must die alone, the end of life is its heaviest trial. Some Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, very French, have essayed, in their peculiar fashion, to elude the disaster, simply by dying in public. People in Paris died in public in the seventeenth century. Death, as Mr. Herman Merivale puts it, was but the last scene of the play, to be performed with a theatrical bow and exit. He shows us the young beauty, perishing of dissipation, who made her adieux to the world in appropriate costume and sentiments; and the worn-out statesman, who might not turn his face to the wall in peace, but was surrounded by a whole court in full dress, and talked on till his husky accents could no longer convey the last of his smart sayings to the listeners.* With all his fribbles and frivolities Horace Walpole was not quite Frenchified enough to willingly face death in a French hotel, with all its noise and excitement," and, what would be still worse, exposed to receive all visits; for the French, you know," he writes to Conway, "are never more in public than in the act of death. I am like animals, and love to hide myself when I am dying" -which refers to his periodical, and prolonged, and always perilous attacks of gout. "If," says the author of "Life in the Sick-room," "I could not trust my friends to save me from

* "See the well-known print of Mazarin's death-bed, surrounded by ladies at cards. According to Grimm, the Maréchale de Luxembourg and two of her friends played at loto by that of Madame du Deffand till she expired. But at that time the proceeding was at least thought singular."-"Histori cal Studies," by Herman Merivale.

involuntary encroachment at the last, I had rather scoop myself a hole in the sand of the desert, and die alone, than be tended by the gentlest hands, and soothed by the most loving voices in the choicest chamber." Wordsworth's Marmaduke ex

claims,

"Give me a reason why the wisest thing

That the earth knows shall never choose to die,
But some one must be near to count his groans.
The wounded deer retires to solitude,

And dies in solitude: all things but man,
All die in solitude."

Special note has been taken of the exceptional characteristic in the altogether exceptional career of the prophet Elijah, that, in his last hour, when he was on his way to a strange and unprecedented departure from this world-when the whirlwind and flame chariot were ready, he asked for no human companionship. "The bravest men are pardoned if one lingering feeling of human weakness clings to them at the last, and they desire a human eye resting on them-a human hand in theirs —a human presence. But Elijah would have rejected all. In harmony with the rest of his lonely severe character, he desired to meet his Creator alone." One hears of such preferences now and then, in oddly constituted natures. Sir Walter Scott, in a letter to his sister-in-law, appears to indicate a disposition of this kind as prevalent in his father's family. "Poor aunt Curle," he tells her, "died like a Roman, or rather like one of the Sandy-Knowe bairns, the most stoical race I ever knew. She turned every one out of the room, and drew her last breath alone. So did my uncle, Captain Robert Scott, and several others of that family." Affectation was so inherent in Chateaubriand's confessions and professions, that one knows not how far genuine may have been his plea for what he calls the "necessity of isolation," and its advantages in death as in life. "Any hand is good enough to reach us the glass of water that we call for in the fever of death. Ah! may that hand not be too dear to us!" The "necessity of isolation" reminds us of Keble's query :—