A PRAYER FOR CHARITY.

Full of mercy, full of love,
Look upon us from above;

Thou who taught'st the blind man's night
To entertain a double light,

Thine and the day's-and that thine too :
The lame away his crutches threw ;
The parchéd crust of leprosy

Returned unto its infancy;

The dumb amazed was to hear

His own unchain'd tongue strike his ear;

Thy powerful mercy did even chase

The devil from his usurpéd place,

Where thou thyself shouldst dwell, not he :
Oh let thy love our pattern be;
Let thy mercy teach one brother
To forgive and love another;
That copying thy mercy here,
Thy goodness may hereafter rear

Our souls unto thy glory, when

Our dust shall cease to be with men. Amen.

CHAPTER XVI.

HENRY MORE AND RICHARD BAXTER.

DR. HENRY MORE was born in the year 1614. Chiefly known for his mystical philosophy, which he cultivated in retirement at Cambridge, and taught not only in prose, but in an elaborate, occasionally poetic poem, of somewhere about a thousand Spenserian stanzas, called A Platonic Song of the Soul, he has left some smaller poems, from which I shall gather good store for my readers. Whatever may be thought of his theories, they belong at least to the highest order of philosophy; and it will be seen from the poems I give that they must have borne their part in lifting the soul of the man towards a lofty spiritual condition of faith and fearlessness. The mystical philosophy seems to me safe enough in the hands of a poet: with others it may degenerate into dank and dusty materialism.

What's plague and prison? Loss of friends?
War, dearth, and death that all things ends?
Mere bugbears for the childish mind;
Pure panic terrors of the blind.

Collect thy soul unto one sphere
Of light, and 'bove the earth it rear;
Those wild scattered thoughts that erst
Lay loosely in the world dispersed,
Call in thy spirit thus knit in one
Fair lucid orb, those fears be gone
Like vain impostures of the night,
That fly before the morning bright.
Then with pure eyes thou shalt behold
How the first goodness doth infold
All things in loving tender arms;
That deemed mischiefs are no harms,
But sovereign salves and skilful cures
Of greater woes the world endures;
That man's stout soul may win a state
Far raised above the reach of fate.

HENRY MORE'S RESOLUTION.
UTION.

And long acquaintance with the light
Of this outworld, and what to sight
Those two officious beams 1 discover
Of forms that round about us hover.

Power, wisdom, goodness, sure did frame
This universe, and still guide the same.
But thoughts from passions sprung, deceive
Vain mortals. No man can contrive

A better course than what's been run
Since the first circuit of the sun.

He that beholds all from on high
Knows better what to do than I.
I'm not mine own: should I repine
If he dispose of what's not mine?
Purge but thy soul of blind self-will,
Thou straight shalt see God doth no ill.
The world he fills with the bright rays
Of his free goodness. He displays
Himself throughout. Like common air
That spirit of life through all doth fare,
Sucked in by them as vital breath
That willingly embrace not death.
But those that with that living law
Be unacquainted, cares do gnaw;
Mistrust of God's good providence
Doth daily vex their wearied sense.

Now place me on the Libyan soil,
With scorching sun and sands to toil,
Far from the view of spring or tree,
Where neither man nor house I see ;

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1 It is the light of the soul going out from the eyes, as certainly as the light of the world coming in at the eyes that makes things seen.

To lands where cold raw heavy mist
Sol's kindly warmth and light resists;
Where lowering clouds full fraught with snow
Do sternly scowl; where winds do blow
With bitter blasts, and pierce the skin,
Forcing the vital spirits in,

Which leave the body thus ill bested,
In this chill plight at least half-dead;
Yet by an antiperistasis 1

My inward heat more kindled is;
And while this flesh her breath expires,
My spirit shall suck celestial fires

By deep-fetched sighs and pure devotion.
Thus waxen hot with holy motion,
At once I'll break forth in a flame;
Above this world and worthless fame
I'll take my flight, careless that men
Know not how, where I die, or when.

Yea, though the soul should mortal prove,
So be God's life but in me move

To my last breath--I'm satisfied

A lonesome mortal God to have died.

This last paragraph is magnificent as any single passage I know in literature.

Is it lawful, after reading this, to wonder whether Henry More, the retired, and so far untried, student of Cambridge, would have been able thus to meet the alternations of suffering which he imagines? It is one thing to see reasonableness, another to be reasonable when objects have become circumstances. Would he, then, by spiritual might, have risen indeed above bodily torture? It is possible for a man to arrive at this perfection; it is absolutely necessary that a man should some day or other reach it; and

1 The action by which a body attacked collects force by opposition.