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domestic happiness, and to whom he was more like a lover than a husband, was wrenched from his side by a merciless disease marked by excruciating torture. Meantime the health of the strong man succumbed; his constitution became shattered under repeated attacks of illness; his powers began to fail him, and even his right hand, he

declared, had lost its cunning. He died, as Dickens and Thackeray died, in his sleep, parting with many in love and affection, with all in peace and charity. Dr. FitzPatrick's picture of a chequered life -coloured with the unfading tints of genius-cannot fail to arrest attention.

EMIGRANTS.

Silver and gold, silver and gold!—

For the sun's dusk red in the western fold
Tells that the end of a day draws nigh;

And the clouds they grow bolder along the sky.

Silver and gold, silver and gold,—

For the moon in the east is a queen to behold,

As she reigns with her spells o'er the calm sweet night,
Holding tremulous sceptre where ghosts walk white.

Silver new-molten meets ebbing of gold,
On a wandering isle without a foothold,
A vessel alone on the lonely seas,

Stirred with the sigh of the fanciful breeze.

Moonbeams and sunbeams, silver and gold!-
And they toyed with the barque as she idly rolled
On the silent waters that shadowy grew,

As the night-gloom fell, and the stars stole through.
Silver and gold, silver and gold ;-

And the sun that is wasted in cloudland cold,

Throws a purple pall o'er a woman's face,

Where death's colourless finger is smoothing pain's trace.

Moonbeams and sunbeams, silver and gold,

The young is come in place of the old,

A seal set on lips that have said their last word,

And lips that ne'er opened before, are stirred.

Lights of earth, Light of heaven, shower silver and gold;

Come aboard the great ship is a traveller bold:

Twilight and moonlight, in soft mantle hide
One that vanishes silently o'er the ship's side.

Silver and gold, silver and gold,
The sun is lost in the wide sea-wold,
The veil falls over the mother's head,
On a journey new is the traveller sped.

Silver and gold, silver and gold;

The waves, as if bells by the star-rays knolled,

Ring of death, and of ghosts that dance all in white,
And the babe's cry breaks on the calm sweet night.

Moonbeams and sunbeams, silver and gold;
A life is hidden, a life doth unfold :
One goeth hence to a brightness afar,

One hath found the way here by the light of a star.

K. C.

[graphic][merged small]

CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS.

NEW SERIES.-No. 23.

THOMAS ALVA EDISON.

ALL kinds of seership are rare. The possessor of the gift of vision which the Scotch call second-sight, and which penetrates into a hidden sea of subtle ether that seems to play mysteriously about life's path, is not an individual whom we meet every day. But still more difficult to meet with is a person endowed with what we will call first-sight, that is, with the gift of clear and penetrating vision into the actual life that rolls around us. The generality have lack-lustre eyes and see nothing beyond their own noses; a few take a lively interest in watching and sharing in anything bright, new, and original-these are souls not quite asleep. But they are very few indeed who are sufficiently awake to realise how marvellous a world this is in which we live; what huge sleeping powers lie within it, waiting only for the hand of man to rouse and direct their boundless activity.

Once, in " Essays and Reviews," a man who ought to have known better (Baden Powell) said that "the meaning of 'moral laws controlling physical' is not very clear." The meaning is this, that no degraded race is trusted with great powers. Were the leading races of the world to lose their orderliness and responsibility, with these qualities, we may be sure, would vanish their faculty of wielding the vast yet delicate mechanical powers to which they owe so much. Concurrently with the growth of civilisation these powers have developed. There were certain achievements of ancient civilisations which vanished with their decline and have never re-appeared. Everyone who will help to put his discoveries to wise uses can help the inventor to invent. The poet will not compose if there is no hope of a listening ear; the singer counts upon, almost lives upon, the sympathy of his audience; the representative man would be as badly off without the people as popular units would be helpless without representative, or, to use an American expression, pivotal men.

Strange as it may seem, Mr. Edison, a seer whose seership is held to Matter, has many of the characteristics ascribed to the seer of occult things. He reaches the acme of discovery very often in the dead of

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