The Judgment of Midas [pp. 158]

APPLETONS' JO URNAL.
Words like these, so uttered and so received,
can not but beget a confidence that the country
for which they were written, and in which they
were spoken, has within it the instruments of regeneration, and the germs of future greatness.
And as they give a forcible, perhaps too forcible, representation of the dangers and the hopes
which lie wrapped up in the history of America,
so also-conscious of that affinity of which I
have before spoken, which unites the two countries together-I have ventured to quote them
here in the conviction that, by analogy, they are
applicable also to England. Not only they in
their youth and freshness, but we in our green
old age, need to be reminded that we also, in
spite of our long ancestral traditions, and "the
ancient inbred integrity" of the English nation,
have kindred dangers threatening us on the right
hand and on the left. Our safety, like theirs, lies
in listening to the voice of those few noble souls
and high intelligences who rise above the passions of party and the sordid interests of the moment, who have the wisdom not merely to denounce but to discriminate, and the desire not
merely to preserve or to destroy, but to improve
and bring to perfection the inheritance committed to our trust.
One word in conclusion. When speaking of
the common sentiment which animates a nation
in the presence of deeper and higher characters,
I am sure that I should not be doing justice to
your feelings, nor, I may add, to the feelings of
the great Republic which we have been considering, if I did not allude to the mingled grief and
respect which will ever pervade all true English
hearts, whether British or American, when they
hear of the stroke of sorrow with which the
royal family of this country has been visited on
a day already signalized as the most mournful in
the annals of their house. She who has gone
from us became first known to the public through
her noble conduct by her father's death-bed, and
she has now fallen a sacrifice, as every wife and
mother assuredly will feel, to the devoted care
with which she nursed her husband and her children. But she also belonged to that higher order of intelligence and goodness of which we
have been speaking. She cared for all that could
elevate her fellow creatures; and if her exalted
rank gave her larger means of making her beneficent influence felt, it will not be grudged her
in any home or any institution. Her life will not
have been spent in vain if it has shown what an
Englishwoman can do in the noble discharge of
the duties of her station. Her death will not
have been in vain if it has caused many hearts
to beat in closer sympathy with the solitude of a
desolate home, and with the sorrows of the family which the Anglo-Saxon race throughout the
world claims as its own peculiar property. In
that banquet at Salem to which I have already
referred, there was one moment, and one only,
when the whole assembly rose to their feet in respectful reverence. It was when, after proposing
"Our old Homes," there was sung the English
National Hymn, "God save the Queen." That
same sentiment will inspire thousands of American hearts to respond in a deeper and more solemn sense to the prayer in which we all join"God save and bless the Queen."
A. P. STANLEY (Dean of Westminster), in
Macmillan's Mragazine.
THE y7UDGMENT OF MIDASo
A PARALLEL.
r REAT names come filtered through the sands of time,
That in their time those very sands obscured;
Immortal Shakespeare, even in his prime,
From the insensate crowd neglect endured;
Vainly he sang his Orphic strain sublime,
"Dumb show and noise" to " groundlings" dearer were
Than numbers breathing of Olympian air.
Thus the dull Phrygian, when Latona's son
With Pan contended for Euterpe's meed,
Apollo's lute from him no plaudit won;
But the shrill discord of the Satyr's reed,
More consonant by far, he hung upon
With blatant glee, and, when the conflict ceased,
Ignored the god, and crowned the semi-beast.
JOHN BROUGHAM.
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