d tune, stealing up from the
depths of the human heart, deep calling unto deep, gentle and strong
like the waves of the great sea hushing themselves to sleep in the dark;
the words of Burns touching the kindred chord; her last numbers, "wildly
sweet," traced with thin and eager fingers, already touched by the last
enemy and friend,--_moriens canit_,--and that love which is so soon to
be her everlasting light, is her song's burden to the end.

"She set as sets the morning star, which goes
Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides
Obscured among the tempests of the sky,
But melts away into the light of heaven."

THE DEATH OF THACKERAY

From 'Spare Hours'

We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December, when he
was walking with two friends along the Dean road, to the west of
Edinburgh,--one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely
evening,--such a sunset as one never forgets: a rich dark bar of cloud
hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed
in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills there was a
narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip color, lucid, and as
if it were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every object
standing out as if etched upon the sky. The northwest end of
Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this
pure radiance, and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was
so placed as to assume the figure of a cross; there it was,
unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at
it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle,
and rapid voice, to what all were feeling, in the word "CALVARY!" The
friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other things. All that
evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of
divine things,--of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing
his simple faith in God and in his Savior.

There is a passage at the close of the 'Roundabout Paper' No. 23, 'De
Finibus,' in which a sense of the ebb of life is very marked; the whole
paper is like a soliloquy. It opens with a drawing of Mr. Punch, with
unusually mild eye, retiring for the night; he is putting out his
high-heeled shoes, and before disappearing gives a wistful look into the
passage, as if bidding it and all else good-night. He will be in bed,
his candle out, and in darkness, in five minutes, and his shoes