el the pulses of hearts that are now dust." Did this
passage occur, I wonder, in the sermon of which I rather remember a
fierce, hopeless, human protest against 'change and decay'?--the voice
ringing down on each plea, "What do the change-and-decay people say to
_that?_"

"I postulate the continuity." Vain postulate it often seems, yet of all
life Brown demanded it. Hear him as he speaks of his wife's death in a
letter to a friend:--

"My dear fellow-sufferer, what is it after all? Why this sinking of
the heart, this fainting, sorrowing of the spirit? There is no
separation: life is continuous. All that was stable and good, good
and therefore stable, in our union with the loved one, is
unquestionably permanent, will endure for ever. It cannot be
otherwise. . . . When love has done its full work, has wrought soul
into soul so that every fibre has become part of the common life--
_quis separabit?_ Can you conceive yourself as existing at all
without _her?_ No, you can't; well, then, it follows that you don't,
and never will."

I believe it to have been this passion for continuity that bound and kept
him so absolute a Manxman, drawing his heart so persistently back to the
Island that there were times (one may almost fancy) when the prospect of
living his life out to the end elsewhere seemed to him a treachery to his
parents' dust. I believe this same passion drew him--master as he was of
varied and vocal English--to clothe the bulk of his poetry in the Manx
dialect, and thereby to miss his mark with the public, which inevitably
mistook him for a rustic singer, a man of the people, imperfectly
educated.

"I would not be forgotten in this land."--

This line of another true poet of curiously similar temperament[1]
has haunted me through the reading of Brown's published letters.
But Brown's was no merely selfish craving for continuity--to be
remembered. By a fallacy of thought, perhaps, but by a very noble one, he
transferred the ambition to those for whom he laboured. His own terror
that Time might obliterate the moment:

"And all this personal dream be fled,"

Became for his countrymen a very spring of helpfulness. _Antiquam
exquirite matrem_--he would do that which they, in poverty and the stress
of earning daily bread, were careless to do--would explore for them the
ancient springs of faith and custom.

"Dear countrymen, whate'er is left to