It is needless, it is impossible to add anything to this; the fervor, the sweetness, the flush of poetic ecstasy, the lovely and glowing eye, the perfect nature of that bright and warm intelligence, that darling child; Lady Nairne's words, and the old tune, stealing up from the depths of the human heart, deep calling unto deep, gentle and strong like the waves of the great sea hushing themselves to sleep in the dark; the words of Burns touching the kindred chord; her last numbers, "wildly sweet," traced with thin and eager fingers, already touched by the last enemy and friend,--_moriens canit_,--and that love which is so soon to be her everlasting light, is her song's burden to the end. "She set as sets the morning star, which goes Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides Obscured among the tempests of the sky, But melts away into the light of heaven." THE DEATH OF THACKERAY From 'Spare Hours' We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December, when he was walking with two friends along the Dean road, to the west of Edinburgh,--one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely evening,--such a sunset as one never forgets: a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip color, lucid, and as if it were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The northwest end of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this pure radiance, and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross; there it was, unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what all were feeling, in the word "CALVARY!" The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other things. All that evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of divine things,--of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing his simple faith in God and in his Savior.