Were we right in saying that her life displays the struggle of a great soul for its own level above disadvantageous circumstances? She struggled above the sad defects of early training, then above the commonplace routine of ordinary lives in the world, and finally above the clouds of infidelity and ignorance of divine things, to the bright, clear atmosphere of the faith, where the love of her ardent heart was sated, and her yearning aspirations found their lasting rest.
It may be, too, that we now have an easier clue to the wonderful character of the Apostle of Western Pennsylvania since we have become better acquainted with the mother of Prince Galitzin.
EGBERT STANWAY.
If Germany was the cradle of the Reformation, England can claim to have been its nurse, and to have fostered in it many phases even at present unknown to the land of its originators. In its last-born and perhaps most dangerous outgrowth, Ritualism, we see the English spirit that was already timidly visible long before, now fully flowering in delusive self-existence, uniting in this novel combination the cherished independence of Rome, that Englishmen are taught instinctively to regard as the only palladium of national freedom, and those æsthetic aspirations which come down to them, we venture to think, as instinctively, from their forefathers of "Merrie England" and the "Island of Saints."
But if there are in the English character great capabilities for evolving unthought-of theories out of stern dogmatic codes, there is also a strange power of assimilation by which it can engraft upon itself the alien modes of thought of other lands, and yet infuse into them something that is not their own—something that renders them unspeakably more attractive and, withal, more hopelessly earnest.
Such a power was most likely to have been encouraged and developed in Egbert Stanway by his almost foreign education and most sensitive and contemplative nature. The love of German philosophy and German literature had descended to him from his father, who had been a disciple and a friend of Goethe, and who had early sent him to the university at Heidelberg, where the boy still was at his father's death. The weird old city, with its castle overlooking the rushing Neckar, and its antique houses enshrined by woods of chestnut, was the earliest home he could remember, and as, during his holidays from the school where he had been preparing for university initiation, he had never left Germany, it was almost as a foreigner and a stranger that he visited Stanway Hall to attend his father's funeral.
The evening he arrived, the gloom of the old house, and the long shadows creeping round it, the hooting owl in the dark fir plantations, and the grim and spreading cedars nearly touching the hall-door, everything he saw, in fact, seemed to make a most painful impression on his sensitive mind. The old servants crowded round him in affectionate and mournful welcome, for they remembered the little fair-haired child that used to prattle so merrily through the house many years ago, and they thought they saw in his face the same expression that had melted their hearts within them as they had gazed on the child's dead mother the night he was born. One of his guardians, a cousin of his father's, a kind, grave man, with grizzling hair and soldier-like bearing, came and took his hand in silence, and led him to the low, wide dining-room where the coffin lay under its heavy velvet pall. There, in the gloom that the few tall candles near the bier could hardly brighten, he told the son how his father had fallen from his horse while returning at night from a distant farm where he had been to see the sick tenant, and relieve him from the rent that was due and which his family could not meet. Egbert's face glowed as he lifted it from the coffin against which he had been resting his forehead, and as he said in faltering accents:
"So like him! I am glad he died like that."