shown over the famous actor's
splendid mansion: "Ah, Davie, Davie, these are the things that make a
death-bed terrible!"

Few passages of Shakspeare are more admired than these lines:

And this our life, exempt from public haunts,
Finds _tongues in trees_, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.[23]

[23] Cf. these lines, from Herrick's "Hesperides":

But you are _lovely leaves_, where we
May read, how soon things have
Their end, tho' ne'er so brave;
And after they have shown their pride,
Like you, a while, they glide
Into the grave.

Saadi had thus expressed the same sentiment before him: "The foliage of
a newly-clothed tree, to the eye of a discerning man, displays a whole
volume of the wondrous works of the Creator." Another Persian poet,
Jami, in his beautiful mystical poem of _Yusuf wa Zulaykha_, says:
"Every leaf is a tongue uttering praises, like one who keepeth crying,
'In the name of God.'"[24] And the Afghan poet Abdu 'r-Rahman says:
"Every tree, every shrub, stands ready to bend before him; every herb
and blade of grass is a tongue to mutter his praises." And Horace Smith,
that most pleasing but unpretentious writer, both of verse and prose,
has thus finely amplified the idea of "tongues in trees":

Your voiceless lips, O Flowers, are living preachers,
Each cup a pulpit, every leaf a book,
Supplying to my fancy numerous teachers,
From loneliest nook.

'Neath cloistered boughs, each floral bell that swingeth,
And tolls its perfume on the passing air,
Makes Sabbath in the fields, and ever ringeth
A call to prayer;--

Not to the domes where crumbling arch and column
Attest the feebleness of mortal hand,
But to that fane, most catholic and solemn,
Which God hath planned:

To that cathedral, boundless as our wonder,
Whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon supply;
Its choir, the winds and waves, its organ, thunder,
Its dome, the sky.

There, amid solitude and shade, I wander
Through the green aisles, and, stretched upon the sod,
Awed by the silence, reverently ponder
The ways of God.

[24] "In the name of God" is part of the formula employed by
pious Muslims in their acts of worship, and on entering
upon any enterprise of danger or
unce