it is a city where the houses are built of living pearls, the gates of precious stones, and the streets paved with the purest gold. Yet all these are nothing but veils of the happiness to be revealed on that most blessed day: nay, the light itself, which we have mentioned among the rest, though it be the most beautiful ornament in this visible world, is at best but a shadow of that heavenly glory; and how small soever that portion of this inaccessible brightness may be, which, in the Sacred Scriptures, shines upon. us through these veils, it certainly very well deserves that we should often turn our eyes towards it, and view it with the closest attention. 1. Now, the first thing that necessarily occurs in the constitution of happiness, is a full and complete deliverance from every evil and every grievance; which we may as certainly expect to meet with in that heavenly life, as it is impossible to be attained while we sojourn here below. All tears shall be wiped away from our eyes, and every cause and occasion of tears for ever removed from our sight. There, there are no tumults, no wars, no poverty, no death, nor disease; there, there is neither mourning, nor fear, nor sin, which is the source and fountain of all other evils; there is neither violence within doors nor without, nor any complaint in the streets of that blessed city. There, no friend goes out, nor enemy comes in. 2. Full vigour of body and mind; health, beauty, purity, and perfect tranquillity. 3. The most delightful society of angels, prophets, apostles, martyrs, and all the saints; among whom there are no reproaches, contentions, controversies, nor party spirit, because there are there none of the sources whence they can spring, nor anything to encourage their growth; for there is there, particularly, no ignorance, no blind self-love, no vain-glory, nor envy, which is quite excluded from those Divine regions; but, on the contrary, perfect charity, whereby every one, together with his own felicity, enjoys that of his neighbours, and is happy in the one as well as the other; hence there is among them a kind of infinite reflection and multiplication of happiness, like that of a spacious hall adorned with gold and precious stones, dignified with a full assembly of kings and potentates, and having its walls quite covered with the brightest looking-glasses. 4. But what infinitely exceeds and quite eclipses all the rest is that boundless ocean of happiness which results from the beatific vision of the ever-blessed God; without which, neither the tranquillity they enjoy, nor the society of saints, nor the possession of any particular finite good, nor indeed of all such taken together, can satisfy the soul or make it completely happy. The manner of this enjoyment we can only expect to understand when we enter upon the full possession of it; till then, to dispute and raise many questions about it is nothing but vain foolish talking, and fighting with phantoms of our own brain. But the schoolmen, who confine the whole of this felicity to the bare speculation, or, as they call it, actus intellectualis, an intellectual act, are, in this, as in many other cases, guilty of great presumption, and their conclusion is built upon a very weak foundation. For, although contemplation be the highest and noblest act of the mind, yet complete happiness necessarily requires some present good suited to the whole man, the whole soul, and all its faculties. Nor is it any objection to this doctrine that the whole of this felicity is commonly comprehended in Scripture under the term of vision; for the mental vision, or contemplation of the primary and infinite Good most properly signifies, or at least includes in it, the full enjoyment of that good; and the observation of the Rabbins concerning Scripture phrases, "That words expressing the senses, include also the affections naturally arising from those sensations," is very well known. Thus knowing is often put for approving and loving; and seeing for enjoying and attaining. Taste and see that God is good, says the Psalmist. And, in fact, it is no small pleasure to lovers to dwell together, and mutually enjoy the sight of one another. Nothing is more agreeable to lovers than to live together." We must, therefore, by all means conclude, that this beatific vision includes in it not only distinct and intuitive knowledge of God, but, so to speak, such a knowledge as gives us the enjoy ment of that most perfect Being, and, in some sense unites us to Him; for such a vision it must of necessity be that converts that love of the infinite God, which blazes in the souls of the saints, into full possession; that crowns all their wishes, and fills them with an abundant and overflowing fulness of joy; that vents itself in everlasting blessings and songs of praise. HOPE BEYOND THE GRAVE. 'TIS night, and the landscape is lovely no more; 'Twas thus, by the glare of false science betrayed, My thoughts wont to roam, from shade onward to shade, Oh pity, great Father of lights, then I cried, Thy creature, who fain would not wander from Thee; Lo, humbled in dust, I relinquish my pride; From doubt and from darkness Thou only canst free. And darkness and doubt are now flying away, No longer I roam in conjecture forlorn, So breaks on the traveller, 'faint, and astray, The bright and the balmy effulgence of morn. See Truth, Love, and Mercy, in triumph descending, And nature all glowing in Eden's first bloom! On the cold cheek of Death smiles and roses are blending, An English Cathedral and St Mark's. RUSKIN. [IN 1843, John Ruskin, a graduate of Oxford, twenty-four years of age, com menced that remarkable career of art-criticism, which has gone steadily forward in the assertion of peculiar opinions which at first were considered a danger ous heresy, opposed to all established rules for the guidance of the public taste. But the mere assertion of the right of thinking for himself upon the subjects of Painting and Architecture, hemmed round as they were by the conventionalities of the ordinary art-critics, would not have secured Mr Ruskin his great reputation and widely-spread influence, had he not possessed a power of eloquent and picturesque writing, almost unequalled by his contemporaries. There is a volume, published in 1865-of "Selections from the Writings of John Ruskin, Master of Arts, Oxon.," author of "Modern Painters; "Seven Lamps of Architecture;" "Stones of Venice," &c., &c., in making which selection his publishers say that the Author of these works has taken no part,—which is well calculated to extend the knowledge of his originality of thought and beauty of expression. From every one of the chapters of this volume might be selected a "Half-Hour" that might worthily stand by the side of any one of the great prose writers of any period of our literary annals. The variety of the subjects with which Mr Ruskin deals in his range over the world of Art may be gathered from the titles of the divisions of this volume, viz. :—' "Scenes of Travel;" "Characteristics of Nature;' Painting and Painters ; "Archi. tecture and Sculpture;" "Ethical; "Miscellaneous." The extract which we give is in the division of "Scenes of Travel," and is taken from the "Stones of Venice," vol. ii. ,, 99 66 I wish that the reader, before I bring him into St Mark's Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet English cathedral town, and walk with me to the west front of its cathedral. Let us go together up the more retired street, at the end of which we can see the pinnacles of one of the towers, and then through the low gray gateway, with its battlemented top and small latticed window in the centre, into the inner private-looking road or close, where nothing goes in but the carts of the tradesmen who supply the bishop and the chapter, and where there are little shaven grass-plots, fenced in by neat rails, before old-fashioned groups of somewhat diminutive and excessively trim houses, with little oriel and bay windows jutting out here and there, and deep wooden cornices and eaves painted cream colour and white, and small porches to their doors in the shape of cockle-shells, or little, crooked, thick, indescribable wooden gables warped a little on one side; and so forward till we come to larger houses, also oldfashioned, but of red brick, and with gardens behind them, and fruit walls, which show here and there, among the nectarines, the M vestiges of an old cloister arch or shaft, and looking in front on the cathedral square itself, laid out in rigid divisions of smooth grass and gravel walk, yet not uncheerful, especially on the sunny side where the canon's children are walking with their nurserymaids. And so, taking care not to tread on the grass, we will go along the straight walk to the west front, and there stand for a time, looking up at its deep-pointed porches, and the dark places between their pillars where there were statues once, and where the fragments, here and there, of a stately figure are still left, which has in it the likeness of a king, perhaps indeed a king on earth, perhaps a saintly king long ago in heaven; and so higher and higher up to the great mouldering wall of rugged sculpture and confused arcades, shattered and gray, and grisly with heads of dragons and mocking fiends, worn by the rain and swirling winds into yet unseemlier shape, and coloured on their stony scales by the deep russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold; and so, higher still, to the bleak towers, so far above that the eye loses itself among the bosses of their traceries, though they are rude and strong, and only seen like a drift of eddying black points, now closing, now scattering, and now settling suddenly into invisible places among the bosses and flowers, the crowd of restless birds that fill the old square with that strange clangour of theirs. so harsh and yet so soothing, like the cries of birds on a solitary coast between the cliffs and the sea. Think for a little while of that scene, and the meaning of all its small formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities, and its evidence of the sense and steady performance of such kind of duties as can be regulated by the cathedral clock; and weigh the influence of those dark towers on all who have passed through the lonely square at their feet for centuries, and on all who have seen them rising far away over the wooded plain, or catching on their square masses the last rays of the sunset, when the city at their feet was indicated only by the mist at the bend of the river. And then let us quickly recollect that we are in Venice, and land at the extremity of the Calle Luna San Moisè, which may be considered as there |