Shall we not weary in the windless days Hereafter, for the murmur of the sea, The cool salt air across some grassy lea? Shall we not go bewildered through a maze Of stately streets with glittering gems ablaze, Forlorn amid the pearl and ivory, Straining our eyes beyond the bourne to see Phantoms from out life's dear forsaken ways? Give us again the crazy clay-built nest, Summer, and soft unseasonable spring, Our flowers to pluck, our broken songs to sing, Our fairy gold of evening in the West; Still to the land we love our longings cling, The sweet vain world of turmoil and unrest. --Graham R. Tomson. Let me frankly confess that I love this world and the things of it, and so, I believe, do all in whom the "great, glad, aboriginal" and God-given love of life is whole and healthy, and not stunted by sickness of mind or body. For the bereaved and the sorrow-stricken I make every allowance and would have all tenderness, but I suspect either the honesty or the health (and by "health" I mean, of course, mental as well as physical soundness) of those who express themselves as being "desirous of departing," or who assert that love of this world is irreconcilable with the love of God. It is not God's world, with its love and friendship and little children, its fields and flowers, sea and sky, sunlight and starshine, and sweet consolations of Art and Song, against which we are bidden to beware. No it is _man's_ world--the world which devotes itself to gain, or to the wish to be somebody in society; to the frittering away of our days in fashionable frivolity, or in struggling to outdo our neighbour, not in the purity of our lives, or the dignity of our actions, but in our clothes, our carriages, and the company we keep--_this_ world it is which cannot be rightly loved by one in whom dwelleth the love of the Father. But God's world we can never love half enough, can never sufficiently appreciate and enjoy. Suppose that you and I, my reader, had to make a world--call it a heaven if you will--of our own designing, and were entrusted with infinite potentialities for the purpose. Could we, could all of us combined, ever conceive of anything half so beautiful as this world at which so many of us gaze with apathetic eyes? "An idle poet, here and there, Looks round him, but for all the rest, The world, unfathomably fair, Is duller than a witling's jest." At best we could but copy, but if it so happened that we, to whom it was given to create, had never been permitted to set eyes even upon this earth beforehand, what sort of a world then, think you, should we contrive to construct?