died in her seventieth year, 1771, in the ancient city of Blois, on the Loire.

A convent-educated girl of high family, a wife at the age of fifteen, and a widow at twenty-eight, her early piety, ridiculed in the dazzling but corrupt society of Louis XIV's time, blossomed through a long life in religious ministries and flowers of sacred poetry.

She became a mystic, and her book Spiritual Torrents indicates the impetuous ardors of her soul. It was the way Divine Love came to her. She was the incarnation of the spiritualized Book of Canticles. An induction to these intense subjective visions and raptures had been the remark of a pious old Franciscan father, "Seek God in your heart, and you will find Him.”

She began to teach as well as enjoy the new light so different from the glitter of the traditional worship. But her "aggressive holiness" was obnoxious to the established Church. "Quietism" was the brand set upon her written works and the offense that was punished in her person. Bossuet, the king of preachers, was her great adversary. The saintly Fenelon was her friend, but he could not shield her. She was shut up like a lunatic in prison after prison, till, after four years of dungeon life in the Bastile, expecting every hour to be executed for heresy, she was banished to a distant province to end her days.

Question as we may the usefulness of her pietistic books, the visions of her excessively exalted

moods, and the passionate, almost erotic phraseology of her Contemplations, Madame Guyon has held the world's admiration for her martyr spirit, and even her love-flights of devotion in poetry and prose do not conceal the angel that walked in the flame.

Today, when religious persecution is unknown, we can but dimly understand the perfect triumph of her superior soul under suffering and the transports of her utter absorption in God that could make the stones of her dungeon "look like jewels." When we emulate a faith like hers-with all the weight of absolute certainty in it-we can sing her hymn:

My Lord, how full of sweet content
I pass my years of banishment.
Where'er I dwell, I dwell with Thee,
In heaven or earth, or on the sea.

To me remains nor place nor time:
My country is in every clime;

I can be calm and free from care

On any shore, since God is there.

And could a dearer vade mecum enrich a Christian's outfit than these lines treasured in memory?

While place we seek or place we shun,

The soul finds happiness in none;

But, with a God to guide our way,

'Tis equal joy to go or stay.

Cowper, and also Dr. Thomas Upham, translated (from the French) the religious poems of Madame Guyon. This hymn is Cowper's translation.

THE TUN E.

A gentle and sympathetic melody entitled "Alsace well represents the temper of the wordsand in name links the nationalities of writer and composer. It is a choral arranged from a sonata of the great Ludwig von Beethoven, born in Bonn, Germany, 1770, and died in Vienna, Mar. 1827. Like the author of the hymn he felt the hand of affliction, becoming totally deaf soon after his fortieth year. But, in spite of the privation, he kept on writing sublime and exquisite strains that only his soul could hear. His fame rests upon his oratorio, "The Mount of Olives," the opera of "Fidelio" and his nine wonderful "Symphonies."

"NO CHANGE IN TIME SHALL EVER SHOCK."

Altered to common metre from the awkward long metre of Tate and Brady, the three or four stanzas found in earlier hymnals are part of their version (probably Tate's) of the 31st Psalmand it is worth calling to mind here that there is no hymn treasury so rich in tuneful faith and reliance upon God in trouble as the Book of Psalms. This feeling of the Hebrew poet was never better expressed (we might say, translated) in English than by the writer of this single verse

No change of time shall ever shock

My trust, O Lord, in Thee,

For Thou hast always been my Rock,

A sure defense to me.

THE TUNE.

The sweet, tranquil choral long ago wedded to this hymn is lost from the church collections, and its very name forgotten. In fact the hymn itself is now seldom seen. If it ever comes back, old "Dundee" (Guillaume Franc 1500-1570) will sing for it, or some new composer may rise up to put the spirit of the psalm into inspired notes.

"WHY DO WE MOURN DEPARTED FRIENDS ?"

This hymn of holy comfort, by Dr. Watts, was long associated with a remarkable tune in C minor, "a queer medley of melody" as Lowell Mason called it, still familiar to many old people as "China." It was composed by Timothy Swan when he was about twenty-six years of age (1784) and published in 1801 in the New England Harmony. It may have sounded consolatory to mature mourners, singers and hearers in the days when religious emotion habitually took a sad key, but its wild and thrilling chords made children weep. The tune is long out of use-though, strange to say, one of the most recent hymnals prints the hymn with a new minor tune.

Why do we mourn departed friends,

Or shake at death's alarms?