t, yet pure-hearted and upward-striving souls, in those ages
most especially that walk by sight, not by faith, but yet have no open
vision; he cannot give such souls, perhaps, all they yearn for, but he
gives them much; and what he gives them, they can receive.

Yet no, it is not for what he thus gives them that such souls love him
most! it is rather because of the emotion which gives to his voice so
touching an accent, it is because he too yearns as they do for something
unattained by him. What an affinity for Christianity had this persecutor
of the Christians! The effusion of Christianity, its relieving tears, its
happy self-sacrifice, were the very element, one feels, for which his soul
longed; they were near him, they brushed him, he touched them, he passed
them by. One feels, too, that the Marcus Aurelius one knows must still
have remained, even had they presented themselves to him, in a great
measure himself; he would have been no Justin. But how would they have
affected him? in what measure would it have changed him? Granted that he
might have found, like the _Alogi_ of modern times, in the most beautiful
of the Gospels, the Gospel which has leavened Christendom most
powerfully,--the Gospel of St. John,--too much Greek metaphysics, too much
_gnosis_; granted that this Gospel might have looked too like what he knew
already to be a total surprise to him: what, then, would he have said to
the Sermon on the Mount, to the twenty-sixth chapter of St. Matthew? What
would have become of his notion of the _exitiabilis superstitio_, of the
"obstinacy of the Christians"? Vain question! yet the greatest charm of
Marcus Aurelius is that he makes us ask it. We see him wise, just,
self-governed, tender, thankful, blameless; yet, with all this, agitated,
stretching out his arms for something beyond--_tendentemque manus ripae
ulterioris amore_.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

DOVER BEACH

The sea is calm to-night,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and br