"Ten thousand times ten thousand
Are hymning the new song!
O Father, join Thy weary child
To that triumphant throng!

"But oh! I would be patient,

'My times are in Thy hand,'
And glory, glory dwelleth
In Immanuel's land."

SKETCH OF THE LIFE

OF

ANNA HARRISON.

BY HER DAUGHTER.

ANNA HARRISON was born at Uttoxeter, in Staffordshire, in 1797. She was the eldest child of Samuel Botham and Ann Wood, great granddaughter of William Wood, the discoverer of platinum and the object of Swift's fierce attack, in the famous "Drapier's Letters." A still earlier ancestor was Cardinal Du Bois's brother, who with his family fled to England at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who, the better to hide himself from all recognised connection with the old religion, or his bad old brother the Car

dinal, took the anglicised name of Wood instead of Du Bois.

From her mother, Anna Harrison inherited a buoyant temperament, and an active mind and hand-evidences of her Gallic descent. From her father she inherited the subjective and reverential bias of her mind, and a tendency towards the spiritual and poetical side of ideas. Two little traits of her childhood may illustrate these tendencies. Her father was a man of ascetic habit, a born recluse, indeed. He read daily such books as "Michael de Molinos " and the "Imitation of Christ," as well as "John Woolman's Journal," and other Friends' books, and he evinced a perhaps over-scrupulous conscience in his dress, furniture, and the rules laid down for family observance. Loud laughter he never for a moment tolerated; and although he loved his children tenderly, he had, as we should now think, a rather severe mode of cultivating their affections. But in after years his daughter used to say that he was a man that impressed those who were with him as one to whom the Divine Presence was a deep reality. He feared that intercourse with the world outside his own family might, as he said, contaminate the simplicity of his children, and he wished them to be kept from a love of luxury

or a pursuit of pleasure. For instance, the nurse was forbidden to take the little girls, when out walking, through certain streets, lest they should hear the peal of the organ in the only church of the small town! On the other hand, he cultivated their higher interests by taking the children long quiet walks into the country, and by pointing out to them the extreme beauty of buds and flowers, and even of blades of grass, and by teaching them to draw, and in the encouragement of their small endeavours. These quiet walks were a perpetual joy to the little Anna; they gave freshness and delight to her quiet guarded life. I have heard her describe these country rambles with a vividness and particularity which has reminded me of Wordsworth the same passionate love, the same spiritual insight. For the rest, Anna and her youngest sister Mary were very much left to their own devices for amusement; they played and talked together, and lived in a rich world of their own. As they grew older they read and studied together, and cultivated their own minds in a way that is almost unknown amongst the young people of the present day. This little Mary grew up to be well-known as Mary Howitt ; and not only in childhood, but through their long lives they were close companions and dear

friends. Their joys and sorrows were always told to one another, through a long and constant correspondence.

An accident threw a copy of Watts's "Divine and Moral Songs" in their way, and the children's delight was so great that they set themselves to learn all the hymns. But such was the susceptibility of the little Anna's mind, that the solemn words of the hymn beginning―

"How glorious is our heavenly King, who reigns above the sky,"

so overawed her sensitive imagination, that for years afterwards she did not dare to raise her eyes to the sky, such a sense had she that the blue vault was the dwelling-place of the Almighty.

room.

One day she found her way into a lumber There she caught sight of an old Bible, and turning over its yellow leaves she came upon words that she had never heard at the usual morning readings-the opening chapters of Luke, which her father objected to read aloud, and the closing chapter of Revelation. The exquisite picture of the Great Child's birth in the one chapter, and the beauty of the description of the New Jerusalem in the other, were seized upon by the eager little girl of six years old, with a rap

ture which, she used to say, no novel in after years ever had for her.

In childhood, as throughout life, she had an absorbing love for flowers. When about eight years old she painted a scarlet geranium, with a spray of blue larkspur lying across it. The drawing finished, she took it to her father's office, expecting, as usual, his praise and sympathy.

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See, father," said she, "how pretty the flowers are together!" The father took the little sketch, examined it, praised the drawing as correct, but added, "It is a pity, my dear, that thou should have chosen two such vivid colours ;" and then, leaving his seat and going to the fire, he quietly laid it on the flames! My mother stood and watched the painting as it curled and writhed and blackened in the blaze, until it had gone. Such was her entire persuasion that "her father knew best" that she left the room without the shadow of bitterness or resentment. Even in relating the incident to us she used always to finish the little story with the exclamation, "My dear father! " Her disposition was naturally so reverent and religious that she seemed to be one of those "on whom the voice of God fell in childhood." Her gentle, pure spirit, "did the Will, but knew it not." She was sometimes deeply impressed in