We shall sing on that beautiful shore The melodious songs of the blest, And our spirits shall sorrow no more, Nor sigh for the blessing of rest. In the sweet by and by, etc. "SUNSET AND EVENING STAR." Was it only a poet's imagination that made Alfred Tennyson approach perhaps nearest of all great Protestants to a sense of the real "Presence," every time he took the Holy Communion at the altar? Whatever the feeling was, it characterized all his maturer life, so far as its spiritual side was known. His remark to a niece expressed it, while walking with her one day on the seashore, "God is with us now, on this down, just as truly as Jesus was with his two disciples on the way to Emmaus." Such a man's faith would make no room for dying terrors. Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me, And may there be no moaning of the bar When I put out to sea, But such a tide as, moving, seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home. Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark, And may there be no sadness of farewell When I embark. For though from out our bourne of time and place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crossed the bar. Tennyson lived three years after penning this sublime prayer. But it was his swan-song. Born at Somersby, Lincolnshire, Aug. 63 1809, dying at Farringford, Oct. 6, 1892, he filled out the measure of a good old age. And his prayer was answered, for his death was serene and dreadless. His unseen Pilot guided him gently "across the bar"--and then _he saw Him_. _THE TUNE._ Joseph Barnby's "Crossing the Bar" has supplied a noble choral to this poem. It will go far to make it an accepted tone in church worship, among the more lyrical strains of verse that sing hope and euthanasia. "SAFE IN THE ARMS OF JESUS." If Tennyson had the mistaken feeling (as Dr. Benson intimates) "that hymns were expected to be commonplace," it was owing both to his mental breeding and his mental stature. Genius in a colossal frame cannot otherwise than walk in strides. What is technically a hymn he never wrote, but it is significant that as he neared the Shoreless Sea, and looked into the Infinite, his sense of the Divine presence instilled something of the hymn spirit into his last verses. Between Alfred Tennyson singing trustfully of his Pilot and Fanny Crosby singing "Safe in the Arms of Jesus," is only the width of the choir. The organ tone and the flute-note breathe the same song. The stately poem and the sweet one, the masculine and the feminine, both have wings, but while the one is lifted in anthem and solemn chant in the great sanctuaries, the other is echoing Isaiah's tender text[48] in prayer meeting and Sunday-school and murmuring it at the humble firesides like a mother's lullaby.