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"None are so gross, as to contend for this,

That Souls from bodies may traducéd be; Between whose natures no proportion is, When root and branch in nature still agree.

"But many subtile wits have justified,

That Souls from Souls spiritually may spring; Which (if the nature of the Soul be tried)

Will even in nature prove as gross a thing."

Reasons against this opinion he draws first from nature. All things are made of nothing or of stuff already formed. There is no stuff or matter in the Soul, she must be created out of nothing, "and to create to God alone pertains." After more reasons drawn from nature, follow others from divinity, which treat of Adam's fall, foreknowledge, freewill, and the grace of God. The next topic is the reason of the union of Soul with Body—

"That both of God and of the world partaking, Of all that is, man might the image bear."

There was need of a creature to knit into worship the enjoyment of this lower creation, to rule over it, and unite the world to God. How, it is next asked, are Soul and Body joined?

"But how shall we this union well express?

Nought ties the Soul, her subtilty is such; She moves the Body, which she doth possess, Yet no part toucheth, but by virtue's touch.

"Then dwells she not therein as in a tent;
Nor as a pilot in his ship doth sit;
Nor as the spider in her web is pent;
Nor as the wax retains the print in it;

"Nor as a vessel water doth contain ;

Nor as one liquor in another shed; Nor as the heat doth in the fire remain; Nor as a voice throughout the air is spread:

"But as the fair and cheerful morning light Doth here and there her silver beams impart, And in an instant doth herself unite

To the transparent air, in all and part:

"Still resting whole, when blows the air divide,

Abiding pure, when th' air is most corrupted, Throughout the air, her beams dispersing wide, And when the air is tost, not interrupted:

"So doth the piercing Soul the Body fill,

Being all in all, and all in part diffused; Indivisible, uncorruptible still;

Not forced, encountered, troubled, or confused.

"And as the Sun Above the light doth bring,

Though we behold it in the air below; So from th' Eternal Light the Soul doth spring, Though in the Body she her powers do show."

But the operations of the Soul are diverse as the operations of the sun and its visible effects, in dif

ference of season, daylight, climate, form of man; she also has a quickening power, and a power also that she sends abroad, her sense, which through five organs "views and searcheth all things everywhere." The poem dwells on the eyes, guides to the body here "which else would stumble in eternal night,"

"Yet their best object, and their noblest use,
Hereafter in another world will be,
When God in them shall heavenly light infuse,
That face to face they may their Maker see.”

It dwells on the other gates of sense by which outward things enter the Soul, hearing, taste, smelling, perceptions were brought together for transmission feeling, and the common sense by which their several to the brain. Fancy and memory, the passions and affections of the soul are then passed in review; and after them the intellectual powers, wit, reason, understanding, opinion, judgment, and, through knowledge brought by understanding, at last wisdom. The poet then ascribes to the Soul innate ideas,

"For Nature in man's heart her laws doth pen Prescribing truth to wit and good to will; Which do accuse or else excuse all men,

For every thought or practice, good or ill."

He sings next of the Soul's power of will, and of the relations between wit and will; of the intellectual memory surviving after death of the body; and of the mutual dependence of all powers of the Soul.

"Our wit is given Almighty God to know;

Our will is given to love Him, being known: But God could not be known to us below

But by His works, which through the sense are shown.

"And as the wit doth reap the fruits of sense,

So doth the quick'ning power the senses feed: Thus while they do their sundry gifts dispense, The best the service of the least doth need.

"Oh! what is man, great Maker of mankind! That Thou to him so great respect dost bear! That Thou adorn'st him with so bright a mind, Mak'st him a king, and even an angel's peer!

"O what a lively life, what heav'nly power,

What spreading virtue, what a sparkling fire, How great, how plentiful, how rich a dower Dost Thou within this dying flesh inspire!

"Thou leav'st Thy print in other works of Thine,
But Thy whole image Thou in man hast writ:
There cannot be a creature more divine,
Except like Thee it should be infinite.

"But it exceeds man's thought, to think how high God hath raised man, since God a man became : The angels do admire this mystery,

And are astonished when they view the same.

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"Nor could the world's best spirits so much err, If death took all, that they should all agree, Before this life, their honour to prefer:

For what is praise to things that nothing be?"

Again, if the Soul stood by the Body's prop,

"We should not find her half so brave and bold,
To lead it to the wars, and to the seas,
To make it suffer watchings, hunger, cold,

When it might feed with plenty, rest with ease."

Another reason is that as the good Soul by scorn of the Body's death shows that she cannot die, the wicked Soul proves her eternity by fear of death.

The Soul's craving for continuance is shown also "by tombs, by books, by memorable deeds," and by care for posterity; true notes of immortality written by Nature herself in our heart's tables. Finally, even those who reason against the Soul's immortality use the Soul's power to conceive its immortality, and prove it by the act of reasoning against it.

"So when we God and angels do conceive,

And think of truth, which is eternal too; Then do our minds immortal forms receive, Which if they mortal were, they could not do. "And as if beasts conceiv'd what reason were,

And that conception should distinctly show, They should the name of reasonable bear;

For without reason none could reason know.

"So when the Soul mounts with so high a wing As of eternal things she doubts can move, She proofs of her eternity doth bring

Even when she strives the contrary to prove."

After arguing that the Soul is indestructible, the poet answers objections to faith in her immortality, from the intellectual dotage of old men, idiocy, madness. The defects are in the sense's organs. The Soul does not lose her power to see, "though mists and clouds do choke her window light."

"These imperfections then we must impute Not to the agent but the instrument : We must not blame Apollo, but his lute,

If false accords from her false strings be sent."

After following the Soul a little way beyond the gates of death, thus the poem closes :

"O ignorant poor man! what dost thou bear, Lock'd up within the casket of thy breast? What jewels, and what riches hast thou there? What heavenly treasure in so weak a chest?

"Look in thy Soul, and thou shalt beauties find

Like those which drown'd Narcissus in the flood: Honour and pleasure both are in thy mind, And all that in the world is counted good.

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siderable attainments, and to mistake his own goodhumoured shrewdness for the statesman's grasp of thought. He meant well, and sought to deal wisely with the pressing questions of his day, but he had no aspiration strong enough to lift him up out of himself; he had no motive of action so continuous as a complacent wish to maintain his personal position as a phoenix of intelligence, and the supremacy in Church and State of his own office of king. He did not regard the supremacy of the Crown in England as means to an end, but as in itself the end towards which he should shape his policy. He had no wish to oppress subjects who did not thwart him. Though he was bred a Protestant, the Roman Catholics might reasonably expect from the son of Mary Queen of Scots relief from a tyranny under which they all incurred the punishment of death for hearing mass, and priests of theirs who led pure and exemplary lives, as well as those who plotted the overthrow of the Protestant rule in England, were sent to the gallows. James was treated with, before his accession to the throne, and gave good hope to the Roman Catholics. No quiet subject, he said, should be persecuted for his religion. That also was his private purpose, though it implied only toleration to the laity. The Roman Catholic priests being, as he felt, natural enemies to the supremacy of the crown in Church matters, he meant to send them all abroad if possible. Desire for the subversion of Protestant rule in England had been, of course, intensified by penalties of death for celebrating mass, and fines on recusants.

There were two under-currents of Roman Catholic plotting when James came to England: one was set in movement by the Jesuits, who looked for help from Spain in setting a Roman Catholic upon the throne; the other was a wild scheme of a secular priest, William Watson, who hated the Jesuits, and had a plan of his own for carrying the king off to the Tower, and there converting him. Discovery of Watson's plot implicated other men in suspicions. Lord Cobham was arrested, and from him accusation passed on to Sir Walter Raleigh, whom James had promptly begun to strip of honour and possessions. After a trial, in November, 1603 (at which Raleigh, of all men in England the one least open to such a charge, had been denounced by the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, as "a monster with an English face, but a Spanish heart"-Raleigh, whose ruling passion might almost be said to be animosity to Spain, and whom James eventually caused to be executed at the wish of Spain), Sir Walter Raleigh was condemned to death as guilty of high treason by sharing in a plot to depose James, and make Arabella Stuart queen. Raleigh was respited, but detained during the next twelve years as a prisoner in the Tower of London. It was there that he resolved to write a History of England, prefaced by the story of the four great Empires of the World; his design being to take a large view of the life of man upon earth that should set forth the Divine wisdom. In his Preface, Raleigh says "The examples of Divine Providence everywhere found (the first divine histories being nothing else but a continuation of such examples) have persuaded me to fetch my beginning from the beginning of all things:

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to wit, Creation." He does, in fact, in the five books | pleased God to take that glorious Prince out of the which form the substantial fragment of his work, published in 1614, carry the History of the World from the Creation to the end of the second Macedonian war. As critical history, Raleigh's work abounds with erudition of his time; but the detail of events, wherever the matter commanded Raleigh's fullest interest, is, from time to time, kindled with vigorous and noble thought, and flashes out the glory and the praise of God from depths of the religious life of an Elizabethan hero.

The first chapter of the History opens with argument that the Invisible God is seen in His Creatures, and ends by saying, "Let us resolve with St. Paul, who hath taught us that there is but one God, the Father; of whom are all things, and we in Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by Him; there are diversities of operations, but God is the same, which worketh all in all." The last chapter of Raleigh's History as far as it was written closes with these thoughts on

THE ELOQUENCE OF DEATH.

Kings and Princes of the World have always laid before them the actions, but not the ends, of those great ones which preceded them. They are always transported with the glory of the one, but they never mind the misery of the other, till they find the experience in themselves. They neglect the advice of God while they enjoy life, or hope it; but they follow the counsel of Death, upon his first approach. It is he that puts into man all the wisdom of the world, without speaking a word; which God with all the words of His law, promises, or threats, doth not infuse. Death, which hateth and destroyeth man, is believed. God, which hath made him and loves him, is always deferred. I have considered, saith Solomon, all the works that are under the sun, and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit: but who believes it, till Death tells it us? It was Death which, opening the conscience of Charles the Fifth, made him enjoin his son Philip to restore Navarre; and King Francis the First of France, to command that justice should be done upon the murderers of the Protestants in Merindol and Cabrieres, which till then he neglected. It is therefore Death alone that can suddenly make man know himself. He tells the proud and insolent, that they are but abjects, and humbles them at the instant; makes them cry, complain, and repent; yea, even to hate their forepassed happiness. He takes the account of the rich, and proves him a beggar; a naked beggar, which hath interest in nothing, but in the gravel that fills his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful, and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness; and they acknowledge it.

O eloquent, just, and mighty Death, whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man; and covered it all over with these two narrow words: Hic jacet.

There remains one added paragraph. "Lastly, whereas this book, by the title it hath, calls itself the First Part of the General History of the World, implying a Second and Third Volume, which I also intended and have hewn out; besides many other discouragements persuading my silence, it hath

world to whom they were directed; whose unspeakable and never-enough lamented loss hath taught me to say with Job, Versa est in luctum cithara mea, et organum meum in vocem flentium' (My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep)." The reference is to the death, in November, 1612, of the king's popular eldest son, Prince Henry, who had not long before obtained his father's promise that Raleigh should be set free at Christmas. Raleigh was set free in January, 1616, to prepare for the voyage to Guiana, by which he expected to enrich the English Crown with a discovery of gold. The voyage was disastrous, and Raleigh, "with English face and Spanish heart," could not resist a chance it gave him of again attacking Spain. The King of Spain asked for his head; and James I. decreed his execution, without trial, upon the fifteen-years-old conviction of treason. Raleigh was executed in October, 1618.

Raleigh's conviction had arisen from events connected with the earliest Roman Catholic plots against Protestant sovereignty in England. They were associated at the opening of his reign with other incidents that confirmed James in one of his views of policy, and on the 22nd of February he issued a proclamation ordering all Jesuits and seminary priests to leave the realm before the 19th of March. But he forgave the Roman Catholic laity their fines as recusants; he had placed a Roman Catholic upon his Privy Council; and he was making peace with Spain. The proclamation for expulsion of the priests immediately produced another plot. The day of issue of the proclamation was the day after Ash Wednesday, 1604; and in the beginning of Lent, Robert Catesby called Thomas Winter to London to join with himself and John Wright in a plot for blowing up the Parliament House. At the end of April, an Englishman of known audacity, Guido Fawkes, was brought from Flanders. brought from Flanders. Thomas Percy, who was related to the Earl of Northumberland, completed the number of five, who were first bound by an oath of secrecy to united effort for attainment of their purpose. On the 24th of May, 1604, Percy took a house adjoining the Parliament House, and Guido Fawkes, under the name of John Johnson, lived with him as a servant. The house at Lambeth in which Catesby lodged was taken for use in storing materials. At the end of the year, Parliament being expected to meet in February, 1605, underground boring was begun at the wall of the Parliament House, which was nine feet thick. When Parliament was prorogued until October, the work was relaxed; it was then resumed again under difficulties, till the conspirators heard that there ran under the Parliament House a cellar from which a stock of coals was being sold off, and of which they could obtain a lease. Thomas Percy bought the lease of the cellar, which he said he needed for his coals. They soon placed in it twenty barrels of powder from the house at Lambeth, and covered them with billets of wood and fagots. Then they rested till September, when fresh powder was brought in to make good any damage by damp. But Parliament was prorogued to the 5th of November, and they had again leisure

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