Abraham. Where art thou, Lord? and who is it

that speaks

So sweetly in mine ear, to bid me turn

And dare to face his presence?

The Voice.

Who but He

Whose mightiest utterance thou hast yet to learn?

I was not in the whirlwind, Abraham;

I was not in the thunder, or the earthquake;

But I am in the still small voice.

Where is the stranger whom thou tookest in?

Abraham. Lord, he denied thee, and I drove him forth.

The Voice. Then didst thou do what God himself forebore.

Have I, although he did deny me, borne

With his injuriousness these hundred years,

And couldst thou not endure him one sole night,

And such a night as this?

Abraham.

Lord! I have sinn'd,

And will go forth, and if he be not dead,

Will call him back, and tell him of thy mercies

Both to himself and me.

The Voice.

Behold, and learn!

[The voice retires while it is speaking; and a fold

of the tent is turned back, disclosing the FIREWORSHIPPER, who is calmly sleeping, with his head on the back of a house-lamb.

Abraham. O loving God! the lamb itself's his pillow, And on his forehead is a balmy dew,

And in his sleep he smileth. I, meantime,

Poor and proud fool, with my presumptuous hands, Not God's, was dealing judgments on his head, Which God himself had cradled!-Oh, methinks There's more in this than prophet yet hath known, And Faith, some day, will all in Love be shown.

DEATH AND THE RUFFIANS.*

MODERNIZED FROM CHAUCER.

Ir is becoming less and less necessary to inform new readers of books, that the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, from two of which the following modernizations are made, are stories supposed to be told by a set of pilgrims, under the guidance of their tavern host, as they are journeying on horseback to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket.

The reader will do me great injustice, if he thinks that modernizations like these are intended as substitutes for what they modernize. Their only plea for indulgence is, that they may act as incitements towards acquaintance with the great original. Chaucer's stories are all complete of their kind, all interesting in their plots, and surprising in their terminations; and the satirical stories are as full of amusement, as the serious are of nobleness and pathos. It is therefore scarcely possible to repeat any one of them, in any way, without producing, in intelligent readers, a desire to know more of him; and so far, and so far only, such ventures as the first of the two following become excusable. I heartily agree with those

*The story of Death and the Ruffians is the tale told by the "Pardoner;" who was an officer of the Papal church for the sale of pardons and indulgences; one of the set of men whose enormities precipitated the Reformation. He tells this admirable story in the tone of a good man, though he has prefaced it (in the original) with an impudent confession of his knavery.

critics who are of opinion, that no modernizations of Chaucer, however masterly they might be, could do him justice; for either they must be little else but re-spellings (in which case they had better be wholly such at once, like Mr. Clarke's, and profess to be nothing but aids to perusal), or, secondly, they must be something betwixt old style and new, and so reap the advantages of neither (which is the case, I fear, with the one just mentioned); or lastly, like the otherwise admirable versions by Dryden and Pope, they must take leave in toto of the old manner of the original, and proceed upon the merits, whatever those may be, of the style of the modernizers; in which case Chaucer is sure to lose, not only in manner, but in matter.

"Conscience," for example, is now a word of two syllables. In Chaucer's time it was a word of three,-Con-sci-ence. How is a modern hand to fill up the concluding line in the character of the Nun, without spoiling it?

"And all was con-sci-ence and tender heart."

"A tender heart" would not do at all; nor can you find any monosyllable that would.

So, still more emphatically, in the use of the old negative n'as (was not) in the exquisite couplet about the officious lawyer

"No where so busy a man as he there n'as,

(Pronounce noz),

"And yet he seemèd busier than he was."

Here the capital rhyme with those two smart peremptory monosyllables (noz and woz) and consequently the perfection of the couplet, and part of the very spirit of the wit, must be lost in the necessity for turning the old words into new.

Readers, therefore, will be good enough to take one of the stories here modernized, simply for what I describe it. They are to suppose it told on the railway, only as an imperfect specimen of what they will hear better from the lips of our great acquaintance himself, when they come to know him.

But what am I to say of the other specimen, or rather nonspecimen, the fragment of the story of Cambus? All I can say is the truth; and so leave it to shift for itself, as it best may. It was the beginning of an attempt, many years ago, to make a complete story for Chaucer's fragment out of my acquaintance with stories of the East. Never, for an instant, did the preposterous idea of emulation enter my head. I could not pretend to complete the fragment in Chaucer's manner; and therefore intended, with many loving apologies, to relate the whole story, as well as I could, in my own. Chaucer's words, however, as the reader may perceive, would still haunt me; Milton's wish to have heard the rest of the story from the old poet, began to haunt me too, and to frighten me; and in spite of many longings to bring my beloved Arabian Nights into play on the subject, I let the project go from me, with the assistance of many cares.

Why then do I here republish it? Because, apart from the perilous shade which it conjures up, I think there is something of "tropical blood" in it, not too common, or undesirable, in English verse-making; and because also there is something in Eastern stories of all kinds, which, being loth to part with it myself, I am apt to suppose equally in favour with the lovers of story-telling in general.

Three drunken ruffians, madly believing Death to be an embodied person, go out to kill him. They meet him in the shape of an old man, who tells them where Death is to be found; and they find him accordingly.

IN Flanders there was once a desperate set

Of three young spendthrifts, fierce with drink and debt, Who, haunting every sink of foul repute,

And giddy with the din of harp and lute,