< 



322 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. VII. 



changing aspects of the sky, I shall never be able to make 

 any one understand. I can give it no utterance in words. I 

 am sure, however, that it is innocent, healthful, and though I 

 am slow to use solemn words needlessly, even holy, for this 

 garden has been to me an oratory, such as no other place has 

 been. I spent this forenoon reading the story of Joseph and 

 his brethren, onwards to the end of Genesis. It is long since 

 I read it through, and though no part of the Bible is better 

 known to me, or more tenderly remembered in connexion with 

 happy childhood (perhaps indeed for that very reason), it moved 

 me almost to tears. I felt the hysterica passio, the gulp in the 

 throat, and should have fairly wept had I attempted to read 

 it aloud. The dignity, simplicity, and pathos of the scene have 

 never, I imagine, been excelled, and the wonderful way in 

 which the old romantic story momentarily reveals God himself 

 shaping all its events to the most important but far- distant 

 issues, and yet leaves the human interest in the tale to go 

 forth unchecked by the awe or even sense of the supernatural, 

 struck me to-day as it never did before. I spent two hours, 

 which fleeted away, in reading the account and thinking over 

 it, ending with the grand prophecy of Jacob as to the destinies 

 of his descendants, which always seems to me to resound like 

 the triumphal march of an army going forth conquering and to 

 conquer. For the blessing of Jacob on Ephraim and Manasseh 

 I have another and a more subdued feeling. Many a time, 

 when I was a child, and in early youth, has mother invoked on 

 my head and my twin -brother's, as we slept together, the bene- 

 diction, ' The Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the 

 lads.' That prayer has been answered in full for one of them, 

 who bade me farewell some twelve years ago, in assured hope of 

 a blessed resurrection, and the other rejoices to know that he is 

 the child of many prayers." 



A pleasant week, at the close of the holidays, was spent at a 

 farm-house in East Lothian, where he " made the acquaintance 

 of a great many nice dogs," and was touched to learn that his 

 own terrier took his absence sorely to heart, and refused food. 

 " Give the dear beast," he writes, " a taste of cream, or some- 

 thing good, in reward thereof;" and so back to town arid to 

 work. 



