If he would come to-day, to-day, to-day,
Oh, what a day to-day would be!
But now he's away, miles and miles away
From me across the sea.

O little bird flying, flying, flying

To your nest in the warm West; Tell him as you pass that I am dying As you pass home to your nest.

I have a sister, I have a brother,

A faithful hound, a tame white dove; But I had another, once I had another, And I miss him-my love, my love!

In this weary world it is so cold, so cold While I sit here all alone;

I would not like to wait and to grow old, But just to be dead and gone.

Make me fair when I lie dead on my bed, Fair where I am lying:

Perhaps he may come and look upon me dead

He for whom I am dying.

Dig my grave for two, with a stone to show it,

And on the stone write my name; If he never comes, I shall never know it, But sleep on all the same.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.

From The Edinburgh Review. THE NEW SCOTTISH NOVELISTS.1 We hail the revival of the rural Scottish novel as a welcome sign of healthy reaction. In the multiplication of novel writers, we make much allowance for the intensity of competition at fever heat and the difficulty of finding attractive subjects. Sensation of every kind has been carried to excess, and it is the doom of

the sensationalist who has made a popular hit to endeavor to surpass himself in successive productions. That inevitably leads to mad outrages on common sense, as he passes from the improbable to the incredible and impossible. Of the fashionable novels we get as blasé as of the insipid gaieties they affect to reproduce, and even the conventional domestic novel, with its trivial incidents and everyday characters, can only be indefinitely repeated so as to interest, by such masters of the art of weaving webs of gossamer as the author of "The Chronicles of Barset." If absurdities or insipidities were the worst, we should have the less to complain of. A book which is merely aggravating or wearisome may be tossed aside; it can do harm to none but those who consent to be bored by it. Infinitely more objectionable are the novels of the newest school, which outrage old-fashioned notions of decency. They are Mesdames Bovary without the psychological genius of Flaubert; "Assommoirs" without the dramatic realism of Zola,

11. Auld Licht Idylls. By J. M. Barrie.

don: 1888.

Lon

2. A Window in Thrums. By J. M. Barrie London: 1889.

3. When a Man's Single. By J. M. Barrie. London: 1888.

4. The Stickit Minister and Some Common Men. By S. R. Crockett. London: 1893.

and not infrequently in feminine hands they verge on licentious audacities. For we need hardly say that with one or two exceptions which will suggest themselves to everybody, the gravest offenders are of the gentler sex. And, to quote old Mr. Weller, "very soft they must be" to fancy that these perverse and revolting fantasies will bring them either reputation or permanent profit. For assuredly we do these advanced writers no injustice when we assume that it is the latter consideration which chiefly weighs with them. The book which seeks its subjects in a museum of moral monstrosities, which launches itself with the startling or shocking title that strikes the keynote to the

offensive contents-even those which do nothing worse than reverse the relations of the sexes in imagining some ideal hermaphrodite of the futuremay have an ephemeral and discreditable success. But the success is seldom repeated, and the sensational extravagance has a depressing effect even on those who profess to admire it. We believe that the surest test of a genuinely good novel is that it leaves a pleasant flavor behind. Novelists of what Southey styled the "Satanic school" can have no touch on the chords to which our finer feelings will vibrate. The most vicious of men or the most frivolous of women have still susceptibilities for better things which it is the privilege of genius to awaken. demoralized, or unsexed as they may World-worn, be, they will be all the more grateful to the enchanter who transports them out of themselves and for the moment identifies them with ideals which had well-nigh faded from the memory.

For love of art or lust of lucre the

1894.

6. Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush. Maclaren. London: 1894.

By Ian

7. The Green Graves of Balgowrie. By Jane Helen Findlater. London: 1896.

high place in English literature. Since the days of Fielding and Oliver Goldsmith, we have had a series of vivid pictures of English country life