ralities on the subject. By the clear une-ders were laid on him by his medical attendquivocal light of the after life, we are entitled ants that they must be laid aside; and there to say, that this purpose went on fulfilling is too much reason now to apprehend that in him. The chastisement was grievous; they at least tended to make his disease inless the disappointment of the hope he had curable. More than ever, too, he now bore in entertained of attaining a position so honour- every sense the burden of them all alone. able, than the sense that he had failed-With less of external help, less of direct and failed in great part through his own pre- conscious sympathy, and more precise and cipitancy, and stood forth for the time as a emphatic declaration from Nature herself, mark for suspicion and distrust; and most as to the full measure of the struggle he of all, the discovery from the character of must sustain ere he should wrest her secret his failure that his cherished work was far- from her, he stood to his post without a ther from completion than he had deemed. thought of faltering. We might enlarge on But all was most assuredly not in vain as this subject much more fully, were it necesregards higher aims and ends than mere sary on the one hand, or desirable on the external position. And taking this sorrow other; necessary, as toward those who in connexion with that long and terrible really knew him, especially after disappointdiscipline of personal suffering on which he ment and sorrow had begun to work their was ere long to enter, those who knew him healing and elevating work upon him, and most closely best can testify how his whole who, we are sure, will readily accept the nature was chastened, purified, and elevated thereby; how heart and soul entered more and more into the rest of childlike faith and trust. We can hardly help esteeming, that there may have been much cause for regret, on behalf of science and of man, that this postponement of his long-cherished hope ensued; but those to whom the man himself of a wild delusion. One word only we was more than all his work of this kind, have abundant reason, with special reference to this disappointment, to bow before a wiser than all human wisdom, a holier than all human love.

Henceforth his name was no more heard in connection with chemical inquiry; at least it was never again by himself, or conformably with his own wish, obtruded before the public in such connection. So complete was his silence on this point that, save with one or two of his most intimate friends, the general impression was that he had wholly abandoned his quest; that either he was satisfied all was a delusion, or had given up the task of the practical elucidation of the problem as beyond his powers. The truth, however, was far otherwise. This was the self-chosen burden of his scientific life, and patiently and manfully he bore it to the end. The precipitance and the failure of 1843 taught him many lessons; but discouragement was not among these, nor doubt either as to the truth he was aiming at, or as to his own power, with but adequate opportunity, to master to the full the practical elucidation of it. From this time onward, till failing health and strength compelled his abandonment of the quest, his laboratory labours were continued more strenuously and vig orously than ever. Even during the earlier stages of his long and wasting illness, they were still carried on whenever the least relief was afforded him, until imperative or-|

simple statement, that so perseveringly and courageously he wrought on; or desirable, for their behoof, who from the first looked on him at best as the self-willed follower of an idle and baseless fancy, and for whom the statement that he followed it on to the last would but mark him the persistent victim

would add for the present: if the spirit of the worker deserves our regard at all; if we are not to restrict our estimate of human worth by the mere amount of apparent and tangible success, surely each in his own sphere may hear this life saying to us, "Go thou and do likewise."

The following lines, found among Dr. Brown's unpublished papers will, we are sure, interest all our readers, even apart from their poetic force and beauty, as expressing far better than any words of ours, alike the general character of these labours, and the spirit in which they were carried on. They are a simple, unexaggerated picture of the reality :

" MY LABORATORY.
"It has been my shifting tent,
Here to-day, to-morrow there,
Where my impassioned life is spent
Still in burning hope and prayer.
Here I've ate my daily bread,
Studied, writ down all conceptions,
Fast that hurried through this head,
Aching, giving them receptions.
Like a rigid judge severe;
Trying this one in the roar
Of the furnace fierce, austere;
That one fondly watching o'er,
Fired in golden crucible,
Hung in milder spirit flame,
Seeking all deducible

Truth may glow within the same;
And another realizing
By cunning wooing flattery,

Teasing, ceaseless, tantalizing,
Of still galvanic battery;
Then I've laid me down and slept,
Ay! and often too have wept,
All within my shifting tent.
Study, rest-room, place of toil,
Temple too, where I have lent
All my days to noble moil;-
Shifting, homeless, blessed tent,
Here to-day, to-morrow there,
Where my impassioned life is spent
Still in burning hope and prayer."

great disinclination toward a form of publication where thought and expression were thus extraneously fettered. Yet to nearly all his contributions in this kind, as was at once his nature and principle, even more than his habit, with whatever he was engaged in, he gave himself thoroughly; they received from him all of thought, attention, and labour, he was capable of imparting or the subject under discussion of receiving. And it is not saying more of these essays than they deserve, to assert that, if the higher qualities of intellect, earnestness, and definite purpose are to be admitted at all into our estimate of such composition, some at least of his are entitled to take their place beside any that exist in our language. The varieties of topics embraced in these papers,

Amid all these silent and almost secret workings, however, he found time both for occasional contributions to literature, and for cultivation of those close and intimate personal relations and friendships for which few men have been more variously and singularly gifted. The two thoughtful, pene-remarkably illustrate at once the unusual trative, and eloquent "Lay Sermons on the flexibility of his mind, and the breadth of Theory of Christianity," belong to an earlier his interest in all that concerned humanity. epoch in his life. Even by those who most They include sketches of Davy the chemist, dissent from the daring of their thought, and and of Scott the painter; an able and prothe freedom of their criticism, they will, we found exposition of the doctrine of the are sure, be read with more than interest, Christian Sabbath; perhaps the finest crias embodying the earnest attempt of a tique on George Herbert ever penned; payoung and resolute mind to solve the fun-pers on homoeopathy and mesmerism; esdamental problem of the age, the true relations of Christianity to the entire nature and being of man. In 1850 appeared the Tragedy of Galileo;" written, as the preface intimated, during a temporary exclusion from other work; and, therefore, perhaps not to be severely criticised, had not the writer always maintained that nothing should ever be given to the public for and with regard to which the author had not done his best. While it contains passages of great power and beauty, as a whole, we cannot but regard it as unequal and unsatisfactory and we cannot but recall, in contrast to it, conversations with its writer on the character and doom of the great astronomer, that embodied what seemed to us a juster, as well as a more dramatic conception of him.

66

To periodical contribution, especially latterly, Dr. Brown entertained grave and strong objections; partly as almost inevit ably betraying into the dissipation of thought and power; and partly from the still more inevitable restriction imposed on the writer through the exigencies of editors, themselves in their editorial capacity to greater or less degree under the restraints of party or sect. From this last cause, in particular, more than one of his own papers had very severely suffered;* and this had originated very

says on the history of science generally, and. on special developments of it; and others of which the mere titles would indicate a width at once of knowledge and of sympathy seldom surpassed. The last literary work on which he was engaged, and which he only lived to see in its perfect form, was in every sense a labour of love:-a sketch of his father, done at the instance of his longwidowed mother, and designed for private circulation. The latter fact debars us from lengthened allusion to it here; but we believe we are but recording the opinion of nearly all into whose hands it may have found its way, in pronouncing it one of the most perfect little gems of biography in the language.

We are not sure, however, but that one or two of the papers Dr. Brown has left behind him will secure to him a higher place as a philosophical and theosophical thinker, than all he gave to the world before his death. One in particular we would instance

an Essay on the Philosophy of Prayercomplete in itself, though designed by its author as a section of a great work schemed and arranged in his own mind, and into which would have been wrought much he had already written. This work, which he purposed to be the magnum opus of his literary life, was intended to embrace the

* In the event of any republication of a selection one of these articles, and that among the most elabofrom these papers, we earnestly trust it will be pos-rately studied and cared for of them all, his own feelsible to restore them to the form in which they ema- ing was, that the suppressions embraced much that nated from himself. We know that in the case of to him was the very essential of the subject.

"KEPLER.

"Teutonic Kepler! spurning dull control,
Pythagorean wild, harmonious soul!
To what strange couch didst thou apply thine ear,
And catch the music of the solar sphere?
Or was the sphere itself that mystic shell,
Brought hither from the ocean-shore divine,
Still crooning o'er its secret like a spell,
To other ears a hum, a song to thine?
Rapt in harmonic ratios, laws, and rhymes,
Thou couldst not watch the turns, nor keep the

entire mutual relation of God, Man, and exquisite treatment of it, will be the folNature. Another of these great schemes lowing:laid down by him would, perhaps, have been even more generally attractive, had life and health been granted him for its completion. It was a poetic history of all the sciences; a series of sonnets, each embodying an era of development, as represented in a race, or by an individual. Of this noble design, however, only a fragment was accomplished; indeed, he himself has recorded, on commencing the work, his impression that he should not live to realize the plan. In illustration of the method proposed, as well as of his fitness for the task, we cannot refrain from presenting to our readers three of these sonnets, for which we are sure they will thank us. The first is from the " Overture," or introduction to the entire series, and is selected, not as the finest among the nine composing it, but as almost the only one that will fully bear isolation. The other two are from the Astronomical Series, the only section completed.

"Long have I studied Nature, as thou know'st;
First as my queenly mistress, and supreme;
Then as my beauteous foe, although a dream;
Now as my equal sister, and my boast.
My sister now, my all-confiding host,
Her various self my various entertainment,
But doomed, they say, to shrivel and be lost;
A thing beyond the eye of ascertainment,
And therefore all unwelcome to my soul.
She may be younger; for my first-born Brother,
My Joint-heir, said, who ne'er traduced another,
'I AM BEFORE THE WORLDS BEGAN TO ROLL!'

O Jesus, keep my trembling faith above!
My sister almost hurts me with her love."

The condensation of thought and concentration of expression in the following are not surpassed in anything of the kind we know in the English language:

"THE PERSIAN.

"Drunk with the wine of life, and blind with
leaves

He pluckt in Eden to adorn his head,
The shepherd soon forgot his Lord, and said,
'I cannot see my God; the soul deceives.'
He staggered on amid the tawny sheaves;
Grape-clusters ruddy, and sleek cattle bred
Among the corn and wine, his senses fed
Unto intoxication, not his soul.

But night still came and came with cooling breath,
And sighed, 'Look up, O red-eyed life-in-death!'
Prostrate and fond, he worshipt HER, and stole
A slave's quick glances at the glories spread
In sphere sublime above his spheral head.
Man first forgets, then doubts, then misbelieves."

More acceptable still, perhaps, to most readers, alike because of its subject, and the

times

of life prosaic, and therefore wert thou poor;
Thy bread uncertain, thine ambrosia sure :—
This low-lived world might lift her head again,
Could she but rear a race of such poor men."

As a public lecturer, Dr. Brown was ever warmly welcomed and highly esti mated. He was not in the more ordinary sense of the word a popular lecturer, and would have shrunk from being so; for he never forgot that it is the sacred duty of the teacher, not to bring down his theme to the dead level of his audience, but so far as in him and in them lies to raise them to it. Hence no ordinary miscellaneous audience could fully appreciate him; and hence also those who craved in such scenes as the popular lecture-room the mere amusement of showy experiments, and brilliant but easy superficialities, were almost certainly disaudiences never failed in some degree appointed in him. Still, even such mixed to be impressed and carried along by his own deep enthusiasm, and sympathetically to kindle to the sustained eloquence of the speaker. His was, however, the eloquence of thought, rather than of oratory; and this from choice and on principle, not from inability to achieve the latter; for, when he chose or his subject required it so, few could more powerfully electrify his auditors by outbursts of impassioned poetry. doubtedly, the most remarkable course he ever delivered was that one to which we have already referred, as delivered in 1843 before one of the most select and intellectual audiences that ever listened to so young an aspirant. On this occasion knowing well whom he was to address, seeing around him Hamilton and Ferrier, Chalmers and Welsh, John Davy and John Goodsir, George Combe, and the most illustrious names in every sphere of knowledge Edinburgh then could boast, he felt wholly free and unrestrained to follow the bent of his own inclination; his style was purged, severe, and rigidly critical to the last degree; and he did that noble auditory the justice of esteeming truth more to them than orna

Un

ment, and reasoning of more avail than ora- did not originate with the sacrifice by an tory. In striking contrast to these appear- iota of his own individuality; or the surances may be instanced one of his last of rendering, even to appearance or for the this kind in Edinburgh, itself on other ac- time, of one article of his own firm faith. counts a memorable one. At the eleventh Whether in presence or by letter he was hour, without opportunity for preparation, true to himself, faithful to his own convicand at a time when his disease had assumed tions, prompt to maintain them, and to dea very serious aspect, he was requested to clare, wherever need called and against occupy before the Philosophical Institution whatsoever antagonism, what to him was the the place of his friend Professor Nichol, true and right. He was in no sense a conwho had been prevented by domestic af formist. The spirit of his maternal grandfliction from coming forward to complete mother was strong within him; and like his engagement. He accepted the task at her, and perhaps through her for very once; and from beginning to end held the dimly as yet can we apprehend this mystery assembled crowd enchained by eloquence of transmitted temperament and tendency rarely surpassed within that hall. -he had caught the "rare and ill-beloved Still we believe it was in social inter- trick" of thinking for himself, and of trustcourse with a large and very warmly at- ing his own thought, even though he might tached circle of friends, and in his corre- be alone in it. But with all this combined spondence with these, that the whole charac- not only respect for the true convictions of ter and powers of the man were most fully others, howsoever widely parted from his shown. Neither such appearances in litera- own, but also recognition of all these forms, ture as he made, nor public lecturing, was in some direction partial and obscure, of ever recognised by him as his true vocation; that truth whereof man's utmost realizations and while the spirit of the boy-the doing on earth must be "the seeing as through a whatever he did heartily-actuated him in glass darkly." these as elsewhere, he never ceased there to feel restricted and constrained. It was In the first rude approach to a laboratory otherwise in the private and intimate inter- which the boy-chemist occupied, there hung, course to which we have referred. There roughly sketched by his own hand, what he he felt perfectly free; and the sense of that had chosen as the presiding symbol of freedom gave alike to his conversation and the place. It was the distinguishing symbol his letters a richness, buoyancy, and fluency, of Christianity, the cross, inscribed with the that forced the attention of all with whom legend, "Perfect through suffering." At he was brought thus into contact. His con- that time, undoubtedly, the more immediate versational powers, in particular, were more reference of this in his own thought was to than remarkable. Years before this time the specific work to be there pursued. It they had fascinated one so peculiarly capa- was one way in which he sought to keep ble of estimating this form of manifestation ever present to his mind his sure conviction as Lord Jeffrey; and equally they threw that there, too, in that daring and ardent their spell over the matchless monologist, scientific quest, the path to victory lay De Quincey. through suffering; that trial and struggle, That circle of friends and correspondents temptation and difficulty, disappointment included more than one eminent as thinkers and sorrow, intervened between him and and doers in the cause of humanity. The the goal on which his aim was set. But mere mention of some of them indicates at the evolving and deepening experience of life once the flexibility of nature which could soon began to give it a wider, a universal refind something of correspondence for each ference; and the early adoption of that of these so different minds, and the catho- cross and its legend became for him as an licity of spirit which could at once identify unconscious prophecy. In some form or truth and goodness under forms of manifest- other, to one extent or another, true for ation so varied and almost antagonistic. each one of the "many sons" led on and Such much have been among the peculiar home at last by "the Captain of our salva characteristics of one who could strongly tion," these words, describing the deepest attach to him at once Emerson and George and most sacred actuality of earthly life, Combe, Archdeacon Hare and Harriet Mar- seemed peculiarly and emphatically true for tineau, Margaret Fuller and De Quincey, him. He who is of purer eyes than to Mrs. Crowe and Dobell, to say nothing of behold evil saw his need of such a discipline, private friends as broadly distinguished from how blind soever the partiality of human each other as the most so among these. friends might be thereto; saw, too, his Where the secret of this fascination lay, it capability of sustaining it; and that more were not easy to define. Most certainly it faithful than all human love did not with

hold it. Suffering, in addition to those who might be less emphatically than he, forms of it which may be held as included were it but for these agonies and struggles in "the common lot," had already come to of soul, numbered among those who have him, in the shape of a great hope disappoint- come out of great tribulation. ed and postponed. The last long trial now drew near, which, with merely slight variations of intensity, was to be his portion for what remained to him of earthly life.

ing unusually severe even for his case, and their sure consequent of failing strength and increased emaciation; followed in turn by rallyings to such a degree as seemed to justify the fondest hopes. He, too, refused to admit that hope was wholly over; and brave

After various removals from place to place, in the hope that change of air might benefit him, he finally, in June 1856, left Haddington for Edinburgh, chiefly that he The year 1849 brought to him marriage, might be more regularly under the eye of and the introduction to all the sweet and his kind physician and friend, Professor sacred lessons of that relation. It brought Henderson. "A sweet spot to live in," was also the marked commencement-for it had his remark on reaching the locality that had been for some time hovering about him- been selected for him; but immediately of that long wasting illness which, after a there followed, " and a sweet spot to die in." seven years' course, closed the scene with For a week or two there appeared decided death. Henceforth the life-story acquires a amendment; then came a sudden and alarm. sad monotony; though that sadness is more ing crisis, during which for several days he than relieved by a calmer and purer light than seemed hovering between life and death. ever shone forth from created sun. There He again rallied, however, and with wonderwere, indeed, intervals of comparative re-ful rapidity; though never to the re-attainlease for the best was but comparative- ing the point of strength from which this in which he was still able to carry on his si- attack had brought him down. So it went lent strenuous laboratory labours, and on week after week: paroxysms of suffer write and occasionally lecture also; but his private journal incidentally records, as a unique experience during those seven long years, one single night's unbroken sleep. Into the details of these sufferings we shall not enter; and the tale of how all wrought upon himself seems almost too sacred a one ly and conscientiously struggled for life as a for the common ear. Suffice it to say, that sacred trust committed to him. Yet continthey whose place it was most closely to ual intimations escaped him, that with all watch beside him saw most fully month by hope of life stood ever associated and inmonth, and year by year, patience having woven the thought of death; and that hope its perfect work in him; submission, born itself stood more and more clearly revealed "not of blood nor of the will of the flesh," as ever pervaded by the now paramount more and more glorifying these latter years temper of his mind-quiet and deep subfar above all intellectual achievement; and mission. With every interval of release thoughtful care and tender consideration from his severer suffering-intervals gradmore and more knitting their hearts to him. ually becoming less frequent and more brief Words addressed to him by a revered cor-his wonted cheerfulness and vivacity respondent," Thy will be done, is better than broke forth unshadowed, and his subtle and health," with increasing power and truth ex- delicate humour played about everything as pressed the deepest aspiration of his heart, of old; only all was chastened and mellowed and depicted the most growing and steadfast now as by the near presence of that solemniexperience of his life. But not at once was ty of death and life, which was moving this rest attained. This earth-mansion of swiftly on to wrap him away from our eyes. our Father's house was very fair to him: fair "Pray for me," was his parting request with promise and prospect of honourable and one evening, about a fortnight before the worthy achievement; fair, perhaps, most of close; "often I can little command my own all, especially latterly, by reason of the ten-thoughts now; pray for me; not for cure or der sanctities and sweet influences and sacred alleviation--these are mean things to ask duties of home. As if inch by inch he had from a Father in heaven-but that His perto struggle on toward that peace of faith fect will may be accomplished in me." That and trust and quiet submission; against will, in the unsearchable mystery of its holy natural temperament which made the mere love, now drew on toward its earthly confeeling of life to him a joy unutterable; and summation. With the beginning of Sepagainst longings for life prolonged passionate tember, a change unequivocally in the direcbeyond what most men know, less for its tion of death betrayed itself; and though own than for his work's sake, and for their's whom he so tenderly loved. Martyrs have gone hence from the scaffold and the stake,

there were still occasional rallyings to an almost startling extent, yet it was too manifest, on the whole, that the life was wearing