ago has
proved herself worthy of the great love wherewith the world hath loved
her, and of the great faith wherewith the world hath believed in her.
She has come up out of her bereavement strong through suffering, wearing
yet her badge of mourning, her face subdued, but uplifted, wise and
strong of purpose; her eye sad, but earnest and true; her figure less
imperious, but majestic and regal; her spirit less arrogant, but just as
brave, just as heroic, and more human.

SARAH WINTER KELLOGG.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

A STRAYED SINGER.

Most of us know what a pathos is mixed with the sweet surprise of
meeting a beautiful thing in strange and inferior surroundings, in
circumstances that suggest an utter incongruity between the subject and
the situation, and imply an awful weight of loneliness and an
intolerable lack of sympathy. The Alpine harebell on the edge of the
glacier, the caged lion gazing vacantly into a wearisome monotony of
idleness, the shivering little Italian fiddling about our winter
streets, make the same appeal, in various measure, to this consciousness
of incongruity that in another phase would stimulate our laughter
instead of our tears.

As with space, so with time. It is the appreciation of the discord
between the subject and its surroundings that awakens our sympathy for
men "born out of their time," as we express it with an arrogance of
wiser judgment. In every period of history, affronting the great
averages of intellectual development, appear certain minds classified at
once as being either before or behind their age. To the first class
belong the great reformers, discoverers, inventors--men whose immense
genius, concentrated upon one idea, carries them beyond their fellows,
as a straight-going steamer distances a pleasure-yacht. These men we do
not think of pitying, unless they come too near us, and then we call
them fools or fanatics.

But there are lost children of the second class whose fate we all
deplore--children of an earlier age or a summer clime, drifting about
in this laborious world like helpless babes in the wood; bright-eyed,
luxurious young Greeks, rebelling against pain and intolerant of toil,
struggling in vain to hold their own among keen, restless Yankees;
dreamy mystics, strayed from the shadows of some cloister, their vague
eyes dazzled by the sun; artists of early Italy, worshiping the mediaeval
Madonna; poets, belonging of right to the court of Elizabeth, or
compan