sitor will behold on one
side, to the south, the dark shadow of a mountain elevation, called the
"Camel's Back," by reason of its shape and sheer projection upwards,
typifying the wall of human sense at sight of death; and on the other
he will look out upon the ever-changing, though distant line of
perpetual snow. The snow view in India, on mountain regions, is beyond
description. No word-painting could give an idea of it; and few artists
have been able to reproduce the magical effects of sunrise and sunset
on the snows during the varying seasons of the year. The roseate tints
of dawn blush on their peaks till they become a flame, and pale into
iciest marble; and the evening splendours of purple and violet and
death-like blue are the phantasmagoria which no human hand has ever
made a living picture. Like the human life, it grows into beauty,
coruscates, and then passes into darkness.

Looked at from the purely materialistic side, doubtless, the lives of
men are mere seaweed thrown up by the mighty ocean of Creation on the
shores of Time. But from the Christian's higher standpoint, the broken
arc is made a magic circle on the side we cannot see.

_There_, let us trust, all lives which seem to us to have snapped
asunder here, in imperfect fruition of bright promise, may find their
perfect fulfilment of desire. As Faber poetically says:--"Death, after
all, is a darkening and disappearance of those we love, and we must be
content to take it so. It is only a question of more or less, where the
darkness shall begin, and what it shall eclipse first. To the others
who have loved the dying, and have gone before him, it is not a
darkening, but a dawning. Perhaps to them it is the brightest dawn when
it has been the most opaque and colourless sunset on the side of the
earth." Or as Keble, with divine humility of richest spiritual
imaginativeness, expresses it--

"Ever the richest tenderest glow
Sets round the autumnal sun--
But there sight fails: no heart may know
The bliss when life is done."

J.E.H.

20, Earl's Court Square, South Kensington, London,
October 20th, 1889.

* * * * *

_Extract from_ "THE DELHI GAZETTE," _August 19th_, 1889.

A LIFE OF PROMISE ABRUPTLY ENDED.--It was with feelings of deep sorrow
that we read in _The Pioneer_ of Friday last the death notice of Mr.
William McNair, the Kafiristan explorer. A man singularly frank and
genial, he was 33 years of age when