the angels down." And Mrs. Browning's House of Clouds includes a spacious hall,

"Branched with corridors sublime, flecked with winding stairs

Such as children wish to climb, following their own prayers."

Lamartine's Jocelyn is enraptured of the rainbow and its suggestive significance:

"Est-ce un pont pour passer tes anges,

O toi qui permets à nos yeux

De voir ces merveilles étranges,

Est-ce un pont qui mène à tes cieux ?"

In Spenser's vision of the city of the Great King, the seer beholds "The blessed Angels to and fro descend from highest heven in gladsome companee." Milton's fallen archangel, wandering after he has alighted on the bare convex of this world's outermost globe, comes anon to the gate of heaven with an ascent by stairs; and

"The stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw
Angels ascending and descending, bands

Of guardians bright, when he from Esau fled
To Padan-Aram, in the field of Luz

Dreaming by night under the open sky,

And waking cried, 'This is the gate of heaven.'"

And then again, reader, "Have you read in the Talmud of old, in the Legends the Rabbins have told of the limitless realms of the air,”—have you read it,—the marvellous story of Sandalphon, the Angel of Glory, Sandalphon, the Angel of Prayer, told by the Rabbins aforesaid, and by Longfellow retold; with whose initial note of interrogation we are content to end :

"How, erect, at the outermost gates
Of the City Celestial he waits,

With his feet on the ladder of light,
That, crowded with angels unnumber'd,
By Jacob was seen, as he slumber'd
Alone in the desert at night"?

XI.

THE SEVEN YEARS' SERVICE THAT TO JACOB seemed BUT A FEW DAYS.

SEV

GENESIS xxix. 20.

EVEN years served Jacob for Rachel, in her father Laban's service; "and they seemed unto him but a few days for the love he had to her." Omnes mihi labores, quos cepi, leves, affirms an attached "labourer," in Terence,for the labour we delight in physics pain. Fiction but follows fact when it pictures such a day-labourer, to whom, when he forged, his hammer felt a feather in his hand; the mountains in the way looked molehills, and life itself became a sweet delirium. There is in another work of fiction an aspirant who takes Jacob for his exemplar in working for his Rachel, all through the long years-long in the prospect, short in the retrospect; and who, with a changed mode of life, and with full purpose of heart, set himself to accomplish his allotted task, and had need even to exercise restraint over himself, lest, in his eagerness, he should overtask his strength-so anxious was he to push on upon the road "whose goal was so fair a temple," and so light seemed that labour of love which was performed that he might win his Rachel. Desire is the spring of diligence, says Dr. South, and the heart infallibly sets both head and hands and everything else to work. "Great desire is like a great fire, and all difficulties before it are like stubble, it will certainly make its way through them and devour them." Or like Hannibal in his march, it cuts through rocks and mountains, till it either finds or makes a way to its beloved object. "What made Jacob think those seven years of hard service for Rachel but a few days, but the extraordinary and invincible love which he bore to her?" To apply a line of Odysseus in Sophocles,

Κᾀγὼ θελοντὴς τῷδ ̓ ὑπεζύγην πόνῳ.

The toiling young prince in the Tempest can encounter the

heaviest of his irksome labours smilingly, for Miranda's

sake:

"There be some sports are painful; but their labour
Delight in them sets off . . .

This my mean task would be

As heavy to me as 'tis odious; but

The mistress, which I serve, quickens what's dead,
And makes my labours pleasures."

And presently Ferdinand tells Miranda that but for her he would no more endure "this wooden slavery," of fetching logs, than he would suffer the flesh-fly blow his mouth.

"Hear my soul speak ;—

The very instant that

saw you, did

My heart fly to your service; there resides

To make me slave to it; and for your sake
Am I this patient log-man."

So, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, when Julia is bent on undertaking a journey to her (supposed) loving Proteus, Lucetta's "Alas! the way is wearisome and long," is at once dismissed with the reflection,

"A true-devoted pilgrim is not weary

To measure kingdoms with his feeble steps.

. . Then let me go, and hinder not my course:

...

I'll be as patient as a gentle stream,

And make a pastime of each weary step,

Till the last step have brought me to my love."

For Festo's sad sweet song, in Twelfth Night, "Come away, come away, Death," the Duke offers him money payment: "There's for thy pains." "No pains, sir; I take pleasure in singing," Festo replies. But then, as Clitipho muses, in the Heautontimoroumenos, "Nulla est tam facilis res, quin difficilis siet, quam invitus facias." If there be but the willing mind, there is love's labour; and love's labour is not lost. Euripides said, and showed, that "love esteems no office mean." The Italian proverb runs, Amor non conosce travaglio: love knows nothing of labour. To Mr. Reade's ill-starred but stout-hearted clergyman on the desert island, labouring with all his might for his delicate companion, that "feverish labour

was an unmixed joy. He was working, not only for the comfort, but the health, and even the life, of the lady he loved;" and this feeling made his homeliest work poetical, his heaviest work light.*

"For the man that lo'es his mistress weel,
Nae travel makes him weary,"

sings Robert Burns, and sings it not from the throat merely, but in those deep chest notes of his which are so musically sympathetic. A later poet might tell of days and nights of painful patientness and toilful tendance, in pinching cold, and on short commons,

66

"But love makes warmth and fulness everywhere;

The lover lives on love luxuriously,

And lacks for nothing."

There is a passage in John Evelyn's Diary, in which, after recording some cheerfully undergone extreme of "drudgery," he breaks into, or breaks off with, the note of interrogation, "But what will not love and friendship make one do?" A woman of genius has said that household toils are a drudgery only when unpervaded by sentiment: when they are an offering of love, a ministry of care and devotion to the beloved, every detail has its interest. Kirby the entomologist points a moral to his description of certain insects doomed to arduous and incessant toil, to exertions apparently so disproportioned to their size. It would be a mistaken inference, he cautions us, to conclude that with these laborious little creatures the pains of life must far outweigh the pleasures. What strikes us as wearisome toil, is to the tiny agents, labouring for their young, delightful occupation. "Like the affectionate father, whose love for his children sweetens the most painful labours, these

* St. Francis Xavier has spiritualized in his own experience a more sacred work and labour of love. "The toils I undergo," he said of himself, as a missionary in the Spice Islands, “are an inexhaustible source of spiritual joys; insomuch that these islands, bare as they are of all worldly necessaries, are the very places in the world for a man to lose his sight through excess of weeping-but they are tears of joy."

little insects are never more happy than when thus actively engaged." Paley affirms a bee amongst the flowers in spring, when it is occupied without intermission in collecting farina for its young or honey for its associates, to be one of the cheerfullest objects that can be looked upon. That no man loves labour for itself, is a rule to which Johnson would admit of no exception, and when Boswell suggested one,-"Yes, sir, I know a person who does: he is a very laborious Judge, and he loves the labour."-"Sir," replied Johnson, "that is because he loves respect and distinction. Could he have them without labour, he would like it less." "He tells me he likes it for himself," urged Boswell; only to be answered, "Why, sir, he fancies so, because he is not accustomed to abstract." An old divine puts the question and answer, What makes many men so strangely immerse themselves, some in chemical, and some in mathematical inquiries, but because they strangely love the things they labour in? Their intense study gives them skill and proficiency; and their particular affection to these kinds of knowledge puts them upon such study. According to æsthetics, as expounded by Kenelm Chillingly, man arrives at his highest state of moral excellence when labour and duty lose all the harshness of effort-when they become the impulse and habit of life; when, as the essential attributes of the beautiful, they are, like beauty, enjoyed as pleasure; and thus "each day becomes a holiday." By his model pastor, labour and duty are so taken up

"In den heitern Regionen

Wo die reinen Formen wohnen,"

that they become joy and beauty. When Trefalden, in another work of fiction, declares himself to be as firmly chained to Chancery Lane for the next five months as any galley-slave to his oar, "But, my dear sir," objects the Earl who has asked for his company out of town, "is it worth any man's while to be a galley-slave, if he can help it?" the answer comes that all depends on the motive, and that self-imposed chains are never very heavy to' the wearer. In the activity of Phoebe, sprightly inmate of his drear House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne