Cornhill Magazine.

ON THE HILLS.

BY ISA CRAIG KNOX.

THE sheep were down upon the darkened hills,
When there the shepherd laid himself to rest;
There he had lain, with every door of sense
Open into the infinite; and there,
Pressed to the heart of darkness, he had slept
And now the darkness had dissolved, and lo,
In the new light he lay, and still he slept,
Wrapped in his plaid, a hand beneath his head.

Up rose the sheep and strayed upon the hill;
The dogs rose up and shook themselves, and then,
With watchful eyes upon the wand'ring flock,
Sat down to wait the waking of their lord.
The sunbeams hasted o'er the eastern hill,
And fell on him and kissed him as he lay,
And left upon his face their touch of light.
The face had lines as bold and beautiful

As antique sculpture: in wide arching caves
Dwelt the veiled eyes; though half the ruddy cheek,
Ruddy as David's when he kept the sheep

In Bethlehem, and all the moving mouth

Was hid, the brown beard, golden round the lips,
Seemed to let through the light of hidden smiles.

It was not yet the fair, familiar day,

And yet it had a brightness more than day,
That glory of the morning. O'er the hill

There looked a sudden sun-face, rayed with light,
Full in the man's face like an angel looked-
He of the Resurrection, who could roll
Away the sealed stone of the sepulchre.
And at that look the sleeper woke and rose
And to the radiance lifted eagle eyes,
Steadfast and clear and keen and flashing joy.

A while he stood as if to breathe the light;
Then turned a resolute and steady step

Toward the slope above him, smooth and steep.
His gait was marked. The tall, broad-shouldered form
Was heaved along with slow but gaining stride,
Breasting the slope and stooping to the steep-
A stoop that did not leave him on the plain,
For still upon the plain he seemed to climb-
And spreading out a huge hand by his side
As if it were a wing that swept the air.
The dogs ran on, to gather from the hill
The woolly wanderers and drive them down
To greener pastures, ever and anon
Returning to look up to him for word
Of praise, or of command.

And thus he reached
The ridge and fronted all the morning there.
And standing in the light and lifted up
Above the rolling world, about him surged
A sea of heavenly fire, and to himself
His own voice, as it seemed to reach his ear,
Out of the shining silence, sounded strange.

On his dumb nature, nobly framed, and yet
As silent as an unused instrument,
A sudden sense of something glorious
Behind the glory flashed; the splendor fell
Darkened, as light is darkened to the eye
That dares to look upon the source of light.
He felt as if a door had shut on him

That, for a moment open, had revealed
The face of God. The east and all the sky
Yet glowed with burning, but that golden door,
That opened straight into the blessed life,
Was closed, and he stood half disconsolate,
Chilled with the sinking rapture.

Then he turned,

And slowly down the slope went with the sheep
Toward the valley lying at his feet,

Wrapped tenderly in shadows. From the glen
Shoulder to shoulder rose the leaning hills,

Smooth slopes and heathy steeps and rugged crags,
And to their sides, their hollows green and lone,
Their rock-crowned heads and hidden places still,
Was bound the shepherd, gathering his flock.
A stony channel seemed the hillside near,
And down the channel leapt, as down a stair,
A stream of liquid diamond; where it paused
Upon a rocky platform in mid-air,

There rose a giant boulder, smooth and round,
Plaything of mighty Nature's infancy.

Here he sat down, and spreading simple store

Of oaten cake, he ate and gave the dogs

Their portion; filled a cup of heifer's horn

From the clear stream, and drank; while lower down The dogs lapped and the streamlet bounded on.

And all the morn through sunny silences

He walked, with life's pure joy in every limb,
Pulsing and glowing through untainted blood.
He crushed the wild thyme's blossoms, and his feet
Were bathed in fragrance, and the heather blooms
With honey fed the breezes as they flew.

A long white feather from the wing o' the wind
Lay thwart the blue, that deepened with the day;
And all the loneliness was full of light,

And all the loveliness was full of joy,
And but to live was to be one with bliss.
Still in his conscious soul the shepherd knew
That this was not the joy which he had known
A moment's space upon the mount with God.
Was that life's revelation, less but still
The same as Abram, Isaac, Jacob knew,
And Moses? Had his life led up to this
Its supreme moment? Would his life lead on,
And up to such a height of lasting bliss
Across the vale of death?

He asked not these
Nor other questions, but went on his way
In simple reverence, unused to probe
His spirit with life's problems, now and then
Catching a glimpse of what he might have been
From keeping of the sheep if called of God.
But with no vain self-pity. Had he not
The heights of heaven to scale? And if his soul
Attain these heights, even as the silent hills
He will be silent. Only men will catch
Glimpses of vision from him. Silver hair
Will crown him, and his aged face will beam
With benediction.

Last I saw him stand
In the small parish church, with big brown hands
And bent head holding up a white-robed babe,
His month-old babe, for baptism.

Saturday Review.

GIBBON'S MEMOIRS.*

ENGLISH literature is by no means rich in Memoirs, but it does contain a few of great merit, and Gibbon's account of his own life and writings stands very near the head of the list. It may, indeed, be doubted whether any writer of the same kind of eminence has given so complete a picture of himself and of his works. In the first place, the list of writers at all in the same line with Gibbon is by no means long; and, in the next place, of that small number a still smaller minority have betaken themselves to autobiography: Hume gave a short account of himself, which has considerable resemblance in many particulars to Gibbon's Memoirs. Clarendon's Life may also be fairly com

pared to them; but Hume's autobiography is much shorter than Gibbon's, and Clarendon's Life is rather a history of his own times than an account of himself and his pursuits. On the whole, it would certainly be difficult to find an exact, or nearly exact, counterpart in English to Gibbon's Memoirs. The book is exquisitely characteristic. The opening sentences are in themselves a miniature of all that follows:

"In the fifty-second year of my age, after the completion of an arduous and successful work, I now propose to employ some moments actions of a private and solitary life. Truth, of my leisure in reviewing the simple transnaked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of more serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative. The style shall be simple and familiar; but style is the image of character, and the habits of correct writing may produce without labor or

* Memoirs of My Life and Writings. By ED- design the appearance of art and study. My WARD GIBBON.

own amusement is my motive, and will be

of criticism or ridicule."

my reward; and if these sheets are commu-ther, and settled by the 30th of June at nicated to some discreet and indulgent friends, Lausanne, under the care of a Protestant they will be secreted from the public eye till the author shall be removed beyond the reach and his own reflections combined, reconclergyman, M. Pavillard. M. Pavillard, verted him by the end of 1754. There he remained studying in real earnest till April, 1758. He made one tour during this period, to which our modern habits give a certain interest. More than thirty years afterwards he carefully recorded a route which a tourist of our days would no more think of recollecting than of commemorating all his morning walks. It lasted a month, and led him from Lausanne to Iverdun, Neufchâtel, Bienne, Soleure, Basle, Baden, Zurich, Lucerne, Berne, and so back to Lausanne. It is odd to find him remarking, in 1789: "The fashion of climbing the mountains and reviewing the glaciers had not yet been introduced by foreign travellers." In April, 1758, he returned to London; and in May, 1760, he went into the Hampshire militia, writing his first performance, an Essay on the Study of Literature, in 1759. It was published in 1761. From May, 1760, to December, 1762, the Hampshire militia were embodied, and Gibbon led the life of an officer in a marching regiment. He was captain of the grenadier company, and of all grenadiers, past or present, he must surely have been one of the strangest. After the militia were disbanded he travelled to Paris, (January-May, 1763), and after passing nearly a year (May, 1763-April, 1764) at Lausanne, he went on to Florence, Rome, and Naples. It is in his notice of this visit that the wellknown passage occurs about the first conception of the Decline and Fall, and for once the language suits very well with the thought. "It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing among the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind." He returned to his father's house on the 25th of June, 1765, and passed the next five years in forming various literary plans, which came to little. He proposed, for one thing, to write a history of the foundation of the Swiss Republic, and it is a singular illustration of the change which has taken place in European literature,

The man who could solemnly sit down to amuse himself after this fashion, must have been no common person. Something more than the "habit of correct writing" was necessary to the production of this strange seesaw. "Truth, naked, unblushing truth" is introduced with a cross between irony and pomposity which is admirably characteristic of the halfconscious grimace which Gibbon never laid aside. There is prefixed to the quarto edition (1866) of his Miscellaneous Works a portrait taken from a figure of him cut out from black paper with a pair of scissors, in his absence, by a Mrs. Brown, which looks as if it was in the very act of uttering some such sentiment. It is the figure of a very short, fat man, as upright as if he had swallowed a poker, and surmounted by a face a little like the late Mr. Buckle's. He wears a pigtail, and holds a snuff box, which balance each other in such a manner as to give the squat figure with its big head and its little bits of legs a strange look of formality struggling with a desire to shine. Gibbon was born at Putney on the 27th of April (O. S.), 1737. As he justly observes: "My lot might have been that of a slave, a savage, or a peasant;" but, in fact, his father was a man of old family and some property. His grandfather, Edward Gibbon, was one of the directors of the South Sea Company, and was punished by Act of Parliament for the part which he had taken in that scheme by a fine of nearly £100,000, which absorbed more than nine tenths of his whole property. Such, however, was his industry and good luck, that between the ages of fifty-six, when he was fined, and of seventy, when he died, he made a second fortune nearly as large as the first. After being sent to various schools, Westminster amongst the rest, for nearly two years, Gibbon was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1752, in his fifteenth year. It was while there that he became a Roman Catholic (June 8, 1753), and in consequence of this change of religion he was removed from the University by his fa