“‘Night hangs upon mine eyes; my bones would rest, That have labor’d to attain this hour.’ * * * * * “‘This day breathed first; time is come round, And where I did begin there shall I end.’ “I find it in Robert Burns when he sang of the cavalier who ‘turned his charger as he stepped upon the Irish shore, and gave his bridle rein a shake with adieu forevermore, my love, adieu forevermore.’ (Applause.) I have felt it in many of the stories, the matchless American stories of Bret Harte. I feel it in that talk of poor old Bowes, the fiddler, when standing on the bridge in the evening; I feel it in the Colonel’s response when the chapel bell rings in the old Charterhouse, and I say that there is but one step from the death-bed of William Lucian to the death-bed of William Maclure. All through literature runs that plaintive note, ‘So from hand to hand the divine torch of genius has passed along.’ When Robert Burns died, in 1796, it might have been thought that the voice of poetry was done, but at that time Byron was playing along the banks of the Dee. Any one might have thought that all was ended; but then others were ripening for the work of generations to come. So when we look about us and see what has been done; when we see Dr. Watson, and Barrie, and Hardy, we feel that the time of mourning for Dickens, and Thackeray, and George Eliot has come to an end. “I am not surprised to find that this voice comes from Scotland. When I have stood on the old Calton hill under a blue and black sky, and seen the drifting smoke from a thousand chimneys fall over Edinburgh; when from the height of the necropolis I have looked down upon old Glasgow and the grim figure of Drumtochty; when from the slopes of Ben Cruachan 1 have seen the sunsets fade and darken in the valleys; when just before the dawn I have looked down upon the town slumbering in darkness; when I have been in the old broken cathedral of Iona and have heard there the swashes of the murmuring sea, I have not wondered that Scotland has all the poetry, and that deep in the heart of every Scotchman there is a note which thrills to the melodies of Burns, of Hogg, Ramsay, and to the eternal memories of Scott. (Great applause.) Scotland, its beauties, its glories, and its loves! I will read a few verses of mine, unknown, I think, to you, descriptive of my feelings when I parted from the most sacred of its shrines: “FAREWELL TO IONA. I. “Shrined among their crystal seas-- Thus I saw the Hebrides: All the land with verdure dight; All the heavens flushed with light; Purple jewels ’neath the tide; Hill and meadow glorified; Beasts at ease and birds in air; Life and beauty everywhere! Shrined among their crystal seas-- Thus I saw the Hebrides. II. “Fading in the sunset smile-- Thus I left the Holy Isle; Saw it slowly fade away, Through the mist of parting day;