The same fond mother bent at night
        O’er each fair sleeping brow;
      She had each folded flower in sight—­
        Where are those dreamers now’?

* * * * *

      And parted thus they rest, who played
        Beneath the same green tree;
      Whose voices mingled as they prayed
        Around one parent knee!

      They that with smiles lit up the hall,
        And cheered with song the hearth! 
      Alas, for love! if thou wert all,
        And nought beyond, O Earth.”

The lyrics of Mrs. Hemans will ever keep her memory fresh.  “In these ‘gems of purest ray serene,’ the peculiar genius of Mrs. Hemans breathes, and burns, and shines pre-eminent; for her forte lay in depicting whatever tends to beautify and embellish domestic life, the gentle overflowings of love and friendship, home-bred delights and heartfelt happiness, the associations of local attachment, and the influences of religious feelings over the soul, whether arising from the varied circumstances and situations of man, or from the aspects of external Nature.”

S.F.  HARRIS, M.A., B.C.L.

MADAME GUYON

I.

HER BIRTH AND BRINGING-UP.

[Illustration:]

Jeanne Marie Bouvieres de la Mothe, afterwards Madame Guyon, was born at Montargis, about fifty miles south of Paris, on April 13, 1648.  Her father, who bore the title of Seigneur de la Mothe Vergonville, was a man of much religious feeling.  Although Jeanne was a child of delicate health, her mother does not seem to have bestowed much trouble upon her, sending her, when only two years and a half old, to an Ursuline seminary a short time, and then committing her almost entirely to the care of servants, from whom, as a matter of course, her mental and moral culture at that highly-receptive age did not receive much attention.  ’When four years old, she was transferred to the care of the nuns in a Benedictine convent.  “Here,” she says in her autobiography,[1] “I saw none but good examples; and as my natural disposition was towards the good, I followed it as long as I met with nobody to turn me in another direction.  I loved to hear of God, to be at church, and to be dressed up as a nun.”

[Footnote 1:  La Vie de Madame J.M.B. de la Mothe-Guyon, ecrite par elle-meme, premiere partie, ch. ii., 6.  The edition from which I quote was published at Paris, in three volumes, by the “Associated Booksellers,” in 1791.  See also Life by J.C.  Upham (Sampson Low & Co., 1872).]