COMFORT.

Speak low to me, my Saviour, low and sweet,
From out the hallelujahs sweet and low,
Lest I should fear and fall, and miss thee so,
Who art not missed by any that entreat.
Speak to me as to Mary at thy feet--
And if no precious gums my hands bestow,
Let my tears drop like amber, while I go
In reach of thy divinest voice complete
In humanest affection--thus, in sooth
To lose the sense of losing! As a child,
Whose song-bird seeks the wood for evermore,
Is sung to in its stead by mother's mouth;
Till sinking on her breast, love-reconciled,
He sleeps the faster that he wept before.

Gladly would I next give myself to the exposition of several of the poems
of her husband, Robert Browning, especially the _Christmas Eve_ and
_Easter Day_; in the first of which he sets forth in marvellous rhymes
the necessity both for widest sympathy with the varied forms of
Christianity, and for individual choice in regard to communion; in the
latter, what it is to choose the world and lose the life. But this would
take many pages, and would be inconsistent with the plan of my book.

When I have given two precious stanzas, most wise as well as most lyrical
and lovely, from the poems of our honoured Charles Kingsley, I shall turn
to the other of the classes into which the devout thinkers of the day
have divided.

A FAREWELL.

My fairest child, I have no song to give you;
No lark could pipe to skies so dull and grey;
Yet, ere we part, one lesson I can leave you
For every day.

Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever;
Do noble things, not dream them, all day long;
And so make life, death, and that vast for-ever
One grand, sweet song.

Surely these last, who have not accepted tradition in the mass, who
believe that we must, as our Lord demanded of the Jews, of our own selves
judge what is right, because therein his spirit works with our
spirit,--worship the Truth not less devotedly than they who rejoice in
holy tyranny over their intellects.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE QUESTIONING FERVOUR.

And now I turn to the other class--that which, while the former has fled
to tradition for refuge from doubt, sets its face towards the spiritual
east, and in prayer and sorrow and hope looks for a dawn--the noble band
of reverent doubters--as unlike those of the last century who scoffed, as
those of the present who pass on the other side. They too would kn