SELF-SUNG TO THE LAST SLEEP. 321

has touched more hearts to the core than the classical eloquence of an earlier French poet, who pictures a fille expirant sous le cyprès paternel:

"Sa voix mourante à son luth solitaire
Confie encore un chant délicieux,

Mais ce doux chant, commencé sur la terre,
Devait, hélas! s'achever dans les cieux."

master's hand in hers, begging her to compose herself, and not sing so. . . . At last, another hymn, as clear and sweet as a nightingale !—Everybody present said 'twas the song of angels." (ch. xxv.)

There is a strange impulse, observes the author of Dred, which sometimes comes in the restlessness and distress of dissolving nature, to sing. Accordingly the Nina of that book is described, as she lies with her eyes closed, apparently in a sort of trance, singing over and over again the verse of the song she was singing when the cholera struck her down.

Of old Jacques, in the story called Hedged In, from a pen which took so many notes of things seen, or guessed at, through gates ajar, this account is given by the rough help whose help he could almost as well have done without: "As fast as he grew worse, he took to singin'; and at the last,— at nine o' the clock this day nicht, in a fearsome, still kind o' nicht, a' munelicht an' stars, he sang as you mought hear him across the street, an' sang as he war bent on singin' o' himsel' to sleep like; . . . . an' sae singin' an' playin' in the air wi' his fingers on guitars as nae mon but himsel' could see, he dropped off, plump! wi' the stroke o' nine." (ch. xviii.)

The Romance of War tells us of a Gordon Highlander in one of the Peninsular campaigns, who, in delirious agony, as he lay quivering in the grasp of death, chanted in low mur

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SONGS OF THE DYING.

But Millevoye's lines had in their own day, and in his own land, an acceptance as cordial as, in ours, have had those of the laureate on her who, robed in snowy white, floated down to Camelot; and as the boat-head wound along, the willowy hills and fields among, they heard her singing her last song, the Lady of Shalott."

"Heard a carol, mournful, holy,
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darken'd wholly,
Turn'd to tower'd Camelot ;
For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott."

When the time was come for Bunyan's last band of pilgrims to cross the swellings of Jordan, Mr. Despondency's daughter, Much-afraid, “went through the river singing, but none could understand what she said.”

muring tones a plaintive Gaelic dirge, probably the deathsong of his race; and how, as his voice sunk and died away, the spirit of that " son of the mist" seemed to pass with it. Tradition relates that Rob Roy was visited on his death-bed by a person with whom he was at enmity, and that as soon as the visitor, whom he treated with a cold, haughty civility during their short conference, had departed, the dying man said, "Now all is over-let the piper play Ha til mi tulidh (we return no more) ”—and he is said to have expired before the dirge was finished.

SONGS OF IMMORTALITY.

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And across the river, on the other side, they sing a new song. For as surely as if the soul of man is immortal, death hath no dominion over it, and effects no solution of continuity in its existence, so surely, if the Christian creed be true, and truly interpreted, the voice of praise shall renew its strength in other worlds than this.

"I'll praise my Maker with my breath;
And when mine eyes are closed in death,
Praise shall employ my nobler powers :
My day of praise shall ne'er be past,
While life and thought and being last,

Or IMMORTALITY endures."