' he answered. 'All are priests up there, and must be
clothed in fine linen, clean and white--the righteousness of saints--not
the imputed righteousness of another,--that is a lying doctrine--but
their own righteousness which God has wrought in them by Christ.' I
never knew a man in whom the inward was so constantly clothed upon by
the outward, whose ordinary habits were so symbolic of his spiritual
tastes, or whose enjoyment of the sight of his eyes and the hearing of
his ears was so much informed by his highest feelings. He regarded all
human affairs from the heights of religion, as from their church-spires
he looked down on the red roofs of Antwerp, on the black roofs of
Cologne, on the gray roofs of Strasburg, or on the brown roofs of
Basel--uplifted for the time above them, not in dissociation from them.

On the base of the missing twin-spire at Strasburg, high over the roof
of the church, stands a little cottage--how strange its white muslin
window-curtains look up there! To the day of his death he cherished the
fancy of writing a book in that cottage, with the grand city to which
London looks a modern mushroom, its thousand roofs with row upon row of
windows in them--often five garret stories, one above the other, and its
thickets of multiform chimneys, the thrones and procreant cradles of the
storks, marvellous in history, habit, and dignity--all below him.

He was taken ill at Valence and lay there for a fortnight, oppressed
with some kind of low fever. One night he awoke from a refreshing sleep,
but could not sleep again. It seemed to him afterwards as if he had lain
waiting for something. Anyhow something came. As it were a faint musical
rain had invaded his hearing; but the night was clear, for the moon was
shining on his window-blind. The sound came nearer, and revealed itself
a delicate tinkling of bells. It drew nearer still and nearer, growing
in sweet fulness as it came, till at length a slow torrent of tinklings
went past his window in the street below. It was the flow of a thousand
little currents of sound, a gliding of silvery threads, like the talking
of water-ripples against the side of a barge in a slow canal--all as
soft as the moonlight, as exquisite as an odour, each sound tenderly
truncated and dull. A great multitude of sheep was shifting its quarters
in the night, whence and whither and why he never knew. To his heart
they were the messengers of the Most High. For into that heart, soothed
an