superior chiefs terminate in the dissylable lani.' The word means both a chief' and 'the heaver,' its radical notion being that of height or elevation. Kaleleo-kalani may consequently be rendered either the flight or evanishment of the chief' or the 'removal or disappearance of the heaven:' and each version expressed in sympathetic and poetic language the loss sustained by the mother who received and the father who inscribed this epitaph of the heart.

Ere the coffin-lid which was to hide his child was finally attached, the King tore from his breast the star of diamonds he wore, and laid it on the bosom of his son. It descended with the corpse into the tomb; and those lustrous gems are as dark and rayless as the deep night which envelopes them.

Where

Johnson, in his censure of Milton's Lycidas, says, 'Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethusa and Mincius. there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.' But grief, like other great passions, is capricious, and cannot be confined to a uniform rule of conduct. The King was quite sincere in his sorrow, yet he sought out a name for his partner in affliction which prosaic persons may consider too fanciful. And he was equally sincere when in consecrating the richest jewel he possessed, he was committing in the eyes of utilitarians an extravagance, because the act led to no useful end. But it is not the first time that the most precious possession has been sacrificed at the passionate impulse of a devoted heart; and this waste' been reproved by those who could not see the beauty of an uncalculating action.

6

As for the Queen's sorrow, it was deep instinctive anguish, alleviated by Christian faith. It is woman's power or privilege to suffer and yet survive: and

Kaleleo-ka-lani outlived this blow to endure yet deeper waves of sorrow. For four days and nights she never stirred from the little grave beneath the tamarind-tree. There, not farther intrusive into the sanctity of grief, we leave her for the present, fixed in her attitude of mourning, like 'Rizpah the daughter of Aiah' watching beside her dead. There is something peaceful, at this distance of time, in the picture: the princely child sinking gently asleep; the mother beneath the loving sky of heaven, beautiful by day and yet more beautiful by night, with fixed gaze, seeing the flickering shadows of the leaves cast in turn by sun and by moon on the little spot of earth, more dear to her than all the world, where her innocent child reposes motionless and still—

'A lovely beauty in a summer grave.'

CHAPTER XXVII.

BROKEN-HEARTED.

HE strong nature of the King had received by the death of his child a blow the momentum of which could not at first be estimated by others, or, probably, by himself. It had shaken his whole being; but the insidious fractures did not show themselves till time had brought the disintegrating power of its heats and chills, and especially its stormy rains. For the present he returned into himself, and did not know that his wound was incurable. He resumed the work he had undertaken before the Prince's illness, and retiring with the Queen to a residence they possessed some twenty miles from Honolulu, he proceeded with the translation of the English Book of Common Prayer into his native tongue. So, in their several literary occupations, Cowper strove against his deathlike despondency, Burton against the melancholy he anatomized, and Cruden against his fits of intermittent madness. The King's translation of our book of offices is in every respect a very remarkable work. It is remarkable in its origin; that he should of his own mere notion have designed such a labour; and without help and without fearfully weighing the difficulties of transfusing into his own language, deficient in words, and more deficient in abstract ideas, the moral and theological conceptions of the Church, should have

THE TRANSLATION OF THE PRAYER-BOOK.

429

proceeded at once to his successful accomplishment of the task proposed to himself. It is remarkable for the original manner in which the King, exercising his own discretion, arranged the contents of the volume, placing the services in an order corresponding with what he conceived to be their importance and their frequency of use. The book commences with the sentences of morning prayer; the beginning of the Exhortation being rendered Ena hoahanau aloha!'-the last word, one of great significance and frequency in the mouths of Hawaiians, conveying, as has been already mentioned, love, salutation and good wishes. It is their universal word at greeting and at parting. Like the poi which the Hawaiians of every class eat, they could not go on without the word 'aloha.' It most fitly makes its appearance there thus early, when the congregations are joined together to serve the Lord. Matins are followed by the order of evening prayer; the Litany,—in which the names of Kaméhaméha and Queen Emma, take the place of those of our royal family;-the occasional prayers and thanksgivings. These are immediately succeeded by the catechism and the baptismal services. Then come the collects and the epistles and gospels; the administration of the holy communion; the burial service; matrimony; the churching of women; rules for finding the dominical and epact; the calendar, and the table of Feasts, &c.

The execution of the book is also remarkable. The King took extreme pains in the translation; and persons well acquainted with the Hawaiian language and competent to judge, inform us that the work has a right to be entitled a good translation, and that they are satisfied with the general truth and beauty of it. As an instance of the good taste with which Kaméhaméha

proceeded, it may be mentioned that no foreign words are employed, except a few Latin titles to psalms. Not the least curious parts of the work are the calendars, tables for finding Easter, &c., presented in Polynesian garb.

The book is remarkable also for what it omits. The name of Halelu Davida' appears on its title-page, but the King's hand was cold in death before this part of his task was completed. The other omission to notice is that of the Athanasian Creed. Its absence is to be accounted for, in the first place, from the insuperable difficulties which would have encountered the King in trying to give expression and meaning to its language. The King knew his people well, and what the native mind was capable of apprehending. He was himself well acquainted with the history of the Church and the heresies which successively assailed it in its early course. He had even, it is said, described the progress of the Church in a series of letters in a native paper: but in preparing a book of offices for all classes of his subjects, young and old, inveterately ignorant or partially instructed, he (we think wisely) left unsaid what he knew would be uncomprehended, and might be perverted. The Hawaiians, so lately heathens, had never conceived the erroneous ideas combated in the ancient Athanasian symbol, against which false views it was to be a doctrinal bulwark. They had not even words in which to clothe those ideas. From the very form of this creed, to have taught his subjects by its means speculative truths would have been to make them scholars in speculative errors, and to have presented to minds requiring to be fed upon milk, doubts and questionings which they could not have digested. Indeed, the very application of the remedy would have