ancient lesson, and to study again the art of suicide as they studied it in imperial Rome. The elder Mill is right; if death is to break the bench of life forever, life is a business that does not pay. The belief that this is but the threshold of existence, that man is the meeting-point of two worlds, that the creature who is the head and crown of the natural is born a child into the spiritual and eternal sphere, and that the issues of life's toils, tears, and martyrdoms lie beyond the gate of death, has furnished to man the inspiration to endure. But this, we learn from those who would bury life in profound and hopeless sadness, is illusion, benign illusion; when it has strung man's energy to toil and suffer, its work is done, there is nothing beyond! One thing only is wanting further — some knowledge of the demon who has made, and who rules, the universe on this scheme of illusion, and has been able to persuade the human generations to toil, to suffer, to agonize, upon a lie.
No! while the bird still "flies into the lighted hall out of the night, enjoys the brightness and warmth for the moment, and then flies out again into the night," the "whence" and the "whither" will be the absorbing questions of interest to mankind. And it is in "the great congregation," where heart beats with heart in concord, and breaths conspire, where common beliefs and common experiences draw the children of toil and pain into close, dear fellowships of sympathy and hope, that the answer will best be given, and the man who can utter it will be most lovingly heard. There is a power in public worship, in the utterance of common sorrows, needs, and hopes, in the prayer that is breathed and the praise that is sung in concert, not with the crowd that fills the sanctuary, but with the innumerable company of all lands and ages who have drunk of the same spring and gone strengthened on their way, which they strangely miss who teach that worship is a worn-out superstition, and that only in the clear light of law can men walk and be blest. While man sins and suffers, while there is blood-tinged sweat upon his brow, while there is weeping in his home and anguish in his heart, that voice can never lose its music which brings forth the comfort and inspiration of the gospel — which tells the sin-tormented spirit the tale of the Infinite Pity, and bids it lay its sobbing wretchedness to rest on the bosom of the Infinite Love. J. Baldwin Brown.
From The Philadelphia Weekly Times.
On the night of the 1st of August, 1793, the guardian of the prison of the Conciergerie was busy arranging a little cell situated at the end of a long, black corridor. The cell was dark, damp, and unhealthy; daylight scarcely ever reached it, and when it did it seemed as though it fell regretfully athwart its heavy iron bars that were full of rust. In this miserable little room, the jailor placed a small iron bed, covering it with two straw mattresses, a sheet, a blanket, and by the side of the bedstead left a small earthen wash-basin and a little stool. Surely if the guardian of this prison made such preparations as these, he must have been expecting the arrival of some important person to occupy it. Alas! it was the queen of France, the daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria, who was to arrive.
It was three o'clock in the morning; already the sky was colored by the rosy tints of an August dawn. It was no longer night, nor scarcely yet day — it was the hour when often the queen of France, opening the window of her apartment in the palace at Versailles, would await alone in silence, and in happy reverie, the sun's first rays and the first songs of the awakening birds. How beautiful the gardens of Versailles were at that hour! The crystalline murmuring of its fountains, as the water stole softly between green lawns and luxurious flowerbeds, the crowd of statues around them seeming as though they were still asleep, the superb old trees which had overshadowed the great king and the great century, the sombre paths where Bossuet had walked, and further on, at the end of the great avenue, the Little Trianon, the marble cottage of which the queen was shepherdess; such was the scene which used to greet her eyes. But on this day we name, at three o'clock in the morning, the queen was rudely awakened from her slumbers. "Get up! get up!" they said to her, for she was to leave the Temple for the Conciergerie, the cell she then inhabited being thought too good for her. She arose at the voice of the two gendarmes and got into a small common cab with them. The blinds of the carriage were lowered, so that the royal captive should not see the bright dawn even through its dirty windows. There were to be no more
