comfort us. One wrote
feelingly:

"When Dr. Talmage described the Heavenly Jerusalem, he seemed to feel
all the ecstatic fervour of a Bernard of Cluny, writing:

'For thee, O dear, dear Country!
Mine eyes their vigils keep;
For very love beholding
Thy holy name, they weep.'"

And it seems to me that I cannot better close this altogether unworthy
sketch of Dr. Talmage than by offering the reader as a parting
remembrance, in its simple beauty, his "Celestial Dream":

"One night, lying on my lounge when very tired, my children all around
me in full romp and hilarity and laughter, half awake and half asleep, I
dreamed this dream: I was in a far country. It was not in Persia,
although more than oriental luxuries crowned the cities. It was not the
tropics, although more than tropical fruitfulness filled the gardens. It
was not Italy, although more than Italian softness filled the air. And I
wandered around looking for thorns and nettles, but I found that none of
them grew there; and I saw the sun rise and watched to see it set, but
it set not. And I saw people in holiday attire, and I said, 'When will
they put off all this, and put on workman's garb, and again delve in the
mine or swelter at the forge?' But they never put off the holiday
attire.

"And I wandered in the suburbs of the city to find the place where the
dead sleep, and I looked all along the line of the beautiful hills, the
place where the dead might most blissfully sleep, and I saw towers and
castles, but not a mausoleum or a monument or a white slab was to be
seen. And I went into the chapel of the great town, and I said: 'Where
do the poor worship, and where are the benches on which they sit?' And
the answer was made me, 'We have no poor in this country.'

"And then I wandered out to find the hovels of the destitute, and I
found mansions of amber and ivory and gold; but not a tear could I see,
not a sigh could I hear; and I was bewildered, and I sat down under the
branches of a great tree, and I said, 'Where am I, and whence comes all
this scene?' And then out from among the leaves and up the flowery paths
and across the bright streams, there came a beautiful group thronging
all about me, and as I saw them come I thought I knew their step, and as
they shouted I thought I knew their voices, but they were so gloriously
arrayed in apparel such as I had never before witnessed, that I bowed as
stranger to stranger. But when again they c