consoling aspirations is presented in the touching fragment of the old Greek poet Moschus which no doubt expresses the scepticism of the ancient world--I give a free translation: Aye, aye the garden mallows, mint and thyme When they have wither'd in the winter clime, After a little space do reappear, And live again and see another year: But we, the brave, the noble, and the wise, When once for all pale Death hath closed our eyes, Sink into dread oblivion dark and deep, The everlasting, never-waking sleep. With the approach of death he seemed to himself to undergo a kind of physical regeneration. "Apropos to spiritual matters," he writes in 1890, "I have had recently for several consecutive days some very strange experiences. One morning I awoke and seemed to have lost my natural memory. Objects daily presented to me for years seemed no longer familiar as of old--but as when a man after years of travel returning to his home and the chamber he formerly occupied takes some time and labour of thought to bring back to his recollection the whereabouts of objects once (as it were) instinctively known to him--I had the same difficulty in recovering my relations to my own surroundings. And this for days was supplemented by a strange sense of having been far away and conversant with wonderful things--movements and tumults--which only immeasurable distance deadened to my perception like great music borne away by the wind. Ever and anon there flashed up within me what I can only describe symbolically as Iridescences of feeling as when the prismatic colours of a rainbow succeed one another, or the coloured lights in Pyrotechnics cause objects in midnight darkness to assume their own hues. But all this, wonderful though it may seem, is not the only change that has come upon me--I am happy to say that simultaneously with these phenomena a revolution in my spiritual economy of far greater moment has, I believe, taken place. I have always prayed for that regeneration, or second birth ('Thou must be born again,' said the Lord to Nicodemus), to be shielded from selfhood--and as the divine answer to such prayers continually repeated, I can declare, without any self-delusion, that the answer has actually been a sensible change in the nature of my affections. Never have I felt towards those around me, such tender inclinations, such earnest desire to do them all possible good regardless of self-interest, such a spirit of forgiveness of any wrongs; and my earnest prayerful thankfulness for such inestimable benefits has been invariably acknowledged by that Voice from the Lord Himself by which He has repeatedly ratified to my spiritual ear His promise of blessing and the continuation thereof--and that 'Thou hast nothing to fear, for I