in some expressions in the following lines from "In Memoriam"

Thy voice is on the rolling air;

I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun;
And in the setting thou art fair.

What art thou, then? I cannot guess.
But though I seem in star and flower
To feel thee some diffusive power,

I do not therefore love thee less.

My love involves the love before;

My love is vaster passion now,

Though mixed with God and nature thou,

I seem to love thee more and more.

Perhaps another suggestion may be offered, as to the charm the idea of absorption seems to possess to the Eastern mind, if what has been said above be not deemed appropriate. The idea of each human spirit being endued with a separate immortality, and destined to an eternal individual history, seems quite alien to the general strain of all speculative philosophisings. The prevailing idea seems to be that this whole great system of things must come to an end, and its materials be used again in shaping the new system that shall take its place. Every separate philosophy had its own theory of the nature of the dissolution and the recreation, but all agreed pretty fairly in the point of an ultimate resolution of all things into their primal elements, whether these were material atoms or diviner essence, previous to the commencement of a new grand epoch. The cyclic revolutions of Eastern speculation include this idea, as we have already explained. It therefore became necessary to accept the idea of the extinction of our personal existence. Perhaps, after all, the conception of our ultimately ceasing to be is not so alien to us as some have supposed.

It might fairly be argued that the necessity of eternal being, of a life which we never can throw off, is much more appalling. Under this view, we feel that last resource cut off by which we might escape from the evils that befall us. If we cannot cease to be, our misery also may have no end. The thought of dropping into nothingness may therefore have its charm. Once accepted, the mind proceeds to idealise it, and invest it with beauty and power. What is the noblest, sweetest life, but that which is most stedfast, serene and tranquil, where agitations all have ceased, and passions do not stir. That perfect rest is blessedness. Is not death even such a rest? Not the baser death that resolves the fleshly frame into its kindred dust, but the nobler step by which the spirit passes from its separate prisoning, to be lost in the infinity of its kindred spirit. We know how powerfully this feeling has been wrought out in splendid works of art, in which death is idealised as the great friend of man, the soother of the sorrowing, and releaser of the weary and toil-broken. May not such a feeling lie under the yearning of the Eastern devotee for that absorption which shall make cease to be the suffering and burdened creature, because he shall be lost in God. As illustrative of the feelings we have touched on, let me add another quotation or two from our own poets. In his Ode to a Nightingale, Keats has the following stanza :—

'Darkling, I listen; and for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death;
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain
To thy high requiem, become a sod.”

From that

new masterpiece of Tennyson's genius

"Lucretius," the following lines are taken :

"The Gods, who haunt

The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts, to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm! and such,
Not all so fine, nor so divine a calm,
Not such, nor all unlike it, man may gain,
Letting his own life go."

"And therefore now

Let her, that is the womb and tomb of all,
Great Nature, take, and, forcing far apart
Those blind beginnings that have made me man,
Dash them anew together at her will

Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity,
Yearned after by the wisest of the wise.
Who fail to find thee, being as thou art
Without one pleasure and without one pain,
Howbeit I know thou surely must be mine
Or soon or late, yet out of season thus

I woo thee roughly, for thou carest not

How roughly men may woo thee, so they win.

Thus, thus: the soul flies out and dies in the air."

I cannot pursue these topics any further at present, and am afraid I have trespassed on your patience too long. Let me say, in conclusion, what is of itself sufficiently obvious, that it is not the object of this paper to guide the learned in their researches, but that I have endeavoured to seize some general

ideas which have struck me in a desultory study of the subject, and to develop these freely from our own point of view; to the intent that it may be seen that, besides their mythological absurdities, Eastern systems contain some philosophic elements. The proper religious aspects of the subject cannot of course be entered on here.

TWELFTH ORDINARY MEETING.

ROYAL INSTITUTION, 6th APRIL, 1868.

J. BIRKBECK NEVINS, M.D., VICE-PRESIDENT,
in the Chair.

The routine business of the Society having been transacted, the following Paper was then read: