The news of the 16th of July, which we have received with a hush too deep for comment, recalls to my mind a letter from one whom we have all known as "just Arthur Smith," a name so widely quoted in the West of late years. Writing in the! winter of last year, he spoke of the "nest of hornets" around him and his friends, and said that his outlook was death, sooner or later, from the Boxer movement.
But he added that, as a college lad, he had asked Emerson to write something in his autograph album. And this is what he wrote (a5 far as T can remember the first Though the heart shrink and reason chafe, T hear a voice without reply, "Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the Truth he ought to die.
To this I found a parallel in the ancient Tooist work, Lich Tzu, and sent it to him! im one of the last letters he received before entering the doomed city. It reads "(IF you) ought to live, and do yez Heaven's blessing 5 (Of you) ought to live, and do not live Heaven's punishment you) ought to die, and do die Heaven's blessing.
(IE you) ought to die, and do not die:
Heaven's punishment.
But (the decision) is not according to man, not according to circumstances, but Decree.'
All who have enjoyed the choice friendship of Arthur Smith, will guess in what phraseology from a book he loved so well, he would have sent back his own translation of the word " Decroe," and may take that translation as his message from the realm of " Heaven's blessing.'
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.