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No soldier's, statesman's, poet's, painter's name Was this, through which is drawn Death's last black line;

Until he reached the stand which they that win
A birds-eye glance o'er Nature's realm may
throw:

Whence the mind's ken by larger sweeps take in
What seemes confusion, looked at from be-

low.

Till out of seeming Chaos Order grows,

In ever-widening orbs of Law restrained,
And the Creation's mighty music flows

In perfect harmony, serene, sustained ;
And from varieties of force and power,
A larger unity and larger still,
Broadens to view, till in some breathless hour,
All force is known grasped in a central Will,
Thunder and light revealed as one same strength,
Modes of the force that works at Nature's
heart:

But one of rarer, if not loftier fame
A Priest of Truth, who lived within her And through the Universe's veinèd length
shrine.

One rule his life was fashioned to fulfil,

Bids, wave on wave, mysterious pulses dart.
That cosmic heart-beat it was his to list,
To trace those pulses in their ebb and flow
Towards the fountain-head, where they subsist
In form, as yet, not given e'en him to know.
Yet, living face to face with these great laws,
Great truths, great mysteries, all who saw

TRULY BASE. - The Americans want to buy the Danish possessions in the West Indies.

That he who tends Truth's shrine, and does Advocating the sale, a Copenhagen paper says:

"The cession might, perhaps, be disagreeable to England; but no cause at present exists to take that consideration into account."

Ungrateful Danes! When we forgave them for giving NELSON the trouble of destroying their fleet; when we gave them such good reasons for not helping them against Prussia; and when we hold Hamlet as our first favourite in tragedy. Some folks have no sense of favours. - Punch

tous d'un age mûr," said an irreproachable French matron to the English acquaintance whose eyes expressed a certain amazement at the frankness of some drawing-room narrative; "j'espère que vous ne pensez pas que je parlerais comme ça devant des jeunes gens." This idea, which is the very heart of French ideas on the subject, is quite foreign to our insular habits. We are accustomed both to read and to speak every thing that comes in our way in the presence of jeunes gens. The habit has so grown upon us, that to change it would involve a revolution in all our domestic arrangements. It would involve us in an amount of trouble which very few could face. We should require three or four packets from the library instead of one. We should have the nuisance of separating our children and dependants from our own amusements. We should no longer be able to discuss, as we do now continually, the books that we are reading and the thoughts we are thinking. This is a necessity from which we have been altogether free in the tranquil past; but it is an indulgence which only habit and the long use and wont of public security preserve to us now.

ENGLISH novels have for a long time from the days of Sir Walter Scott at least held a very high reputation in the world, not so much perhaps for what critics would call the highest development of art, as for a certain sanity, wholesomeness, and cleanness unknown to other literature of the same class. This peculiarity has had its effect, no doubt, upon those very qualities of the national mind which produced it. It has increased that perfect liberty of reading which is the rule in most cultivated English houses; it has abolished the domestic Index Expurgatorius as well as all public censorship; it has made us secure and unsuspicious in our reception of every thing, or almost every thing, that comes to us in the form of print. This noble confidence has been good for everybody concerned. It has put writers on their honour, and saved readers from that wounding consciousness of restraint or of danger which destroys all delicate appreciation. There are other kinds of literature in which the darker problems of the time can be fitly For there can be no doubt that a sindiscussed; and, with a tolerably unanimous gular change has passed upon our light consent, English writers have agreed to literature. It is not that its power has leave those subjects in their fit place. The failed or its popularity diminished. much novel-which is the favourite reading of the the reverse; it is because a new impulse young, which is one of the chief amuse- has been given and a new current set in ments of all secluded and most suffering the flood of contemporary story-telling. people, which is precious to women and We will not ask whence or from whom the unoccupied persons has been kept by influence is derived. It has been brought this understanding, or by a natural impulse into being by society, and it naturally better than any understanding, to a great re-acts upon society. The change perhaps degree pure from all noxious topics. That began at the time when Jane Eyre made Corruption which has so fatally injured the what advanced critics call her protest " French school of fiction has, it has been our against the conventionalities in which the boast, scrupulously kept away from ours. world clothes itself. We have had many It was something to boast of. We might protests" since that time'; but it is to be not produce the same startling effects, we doubted how far they have been to our might not reach the same perfection in art, advantage. The point to which we have which a craftsman utterly freed of all now arrived is certainly very far from satisrestraints, and treating vice and virtue with factory. The English mind is still so far equal impartiality, may aspire to; but we borné that we do not discuss the seventh had this supreme advantage, that we were commandment with all that effusion and free to all classes and feared by none. Men fulness of detail which is common on the did not snatch the guilty volume out of other side of the Channel, though even in sight when any innocent creature drew that respect progress is daily being made; nigh, or mature women lock up the book but there are points in which we altogether with which they condescended to amuse themselves, as they do in France. Our novels were family reading; and the result has been a sense of freedom, an absence of all suggestion of evil, in the superficial studies of ordinary society, which it is impossible to overestimate. "Nous sommes

outdo our French neighbours. To a French girl fresh from her convent, the novels of her own language are rigorously tabooed; whereas we are all aware that they are the favourite reading of her contemporary in this country, and are not unfrequently even the production, with all their unseemly ref

She

-

erences and exhibitions of forbidden knowl-off from husbands and homes they hate
edge, of young women, moved either by the women, at the very least of it, who give
wild foolhardiness of inexperience, or by and receive burning kisses and frantic em-
ignorance of everything that is natural and braces, and live in a voluptuous dream,
becoming to their condition. It is painful either waiting for or brooding over the
to inquire where it is that all those stories of inevitable lover, such are the heroines
bigamy and seduction, those soi-disant rev- who have been imported into modern fic-
elations of things that lie below the surface tion. "All for love and the world well lost,"
of life, come from. Such tales might flow was once the motto of a simple but peren-
here and there from one morbid imagina- nial story, with which every human crea-
tion, and present themselves to us as moral ture had a certain sympathy the romance
phenomena, without casting any stigma upon that ended pleasantly in a wholesome wed-
society in general; but this is not how they ding, or pathetically in a violet - covered
appear. They have taken, as it would seem, grave. But the meaning has changed now-
permanent possession of all the lower strata adays. Now it is no knight of romance
of light literature. Above, there still re- riding down the forest glades, ready for the
mains, it is true, a purer atmosphere, for defence and succour of all the oppressed,
which we may be thankful; but all our for whom the dreaming maiden waits.
minor novelists, almost without exception, waits now for flesh and muscles, for strong
are of the school called sensational. Writers arms that seize her, and warm breath that
who have no genius and little talent make up thrills ber through, and a host of other
for it by displaying their acquaintance with physical attractions, which she indicates to
the accessories and surroundings of vice, the world with a charming frankness. On
with the means of seduction, and with what the other side of the picture, it is, of course,
they set forth as the secret tendencies of the amber hair and undulating form, the
the heart, tendencies which, according to warm flesh and glowing colour, for which
this interpretation, all point one way. When the youth sighs in his turn; but, were the
the curate's daughter in Shirley' burst forth sketch made from the man's point of view,
into passionate lamentation over her own its openness would at least be less repulsive.
position and the absence of any man whom The peculiarity of it in England is, that it
she could marry, it was a new sensation to is oftenest made from the woman's side
the world in general. That men and that it is women who describe those sensu-
women should marry we had all of us ac- ous raptures that this intense apprecia-
knowledged as one of the laws of humanity; tion of flesh and blood, this eagerness of
physical sensation, is represented as the
natural sentiment of English girls, and is
offered to them not only as the portrait of
their own state of mind, but as their amuse-
ment and mental food. Such a wonderful
phenomenon might exist, and yet society
might be innocent of it. It might be the
fault of one, or of a limited school; and the
mere fact that such ravings are found in
print might be no great argument against
the purity of the age. But when it is add-
ed that the class thus represented does not
disown the picture; that, on the contrary,
it bangs it up in the boudoir and drawing-
room; that the books which contain it
circulate everywhere, and are read every-
where, and are not contradicted, then
the case becomes much more serious. For
our own part, we do not believe, as some
people do, that a stratum of secret vice
underlies the outward seeming of society.
Most of our neighbours, we know, are very
good sort of people, and we believe un-
feignedly that our neighbours' neighbours
resemble our own. It is possible to be-
lieve that very fine people or very shabby
people are profoundly wicked; out, as for

but

up to the present generation most young women had been brought up in the belief that their own feelings on this subject should be religiously kept to themselves. No doubt this was a conventionalism; and if a girl in a secluded parsonage is very much in earnest about a husband, there is no effectual reason we know of why she should not lift up her "protest" against circumstances.

But things have gone very much further since the days of Shirley.' We have grown accustomed to the reproduction, not only of wails over female loneliness and the impossibility of finding anybody to marry, but to the narrative of many thrills of feeling much more practical and conclusive. What is held up to us as the story of the feminine soul as it really exists under neath its conventional coverings is a very fleshly and unlovely record. Women driven wild with love for the man who leads them on to desperation before he accords that word of encouragement which carries them into the seventh heaven; women who marry their grooms in fits of sensual passion; women who pray their lovers to carry them

the world as represented on our own level, are such as they are therein described, one we know that it is not so. The girls of our book or another will do them little harm; acquaintance in general are very nice girls; and, if the picture is false, why do they they do not, so far as we are aware, not accept it? So far from showing any diffiwithstanding a natural proclivity towards culty on this point, it is those very books, the society, when it is to be had, of their according to all appearances, which are natural companions in existence,pant for most in demand. The Times' deals them indiscriminate kisses, or go mad for unat- the crowning glory of its approval. The tainable men. And yet here stands the critical journals, if they do not approve, at problem which otherwise is not to be solved. least take the trouble to discuss; and "the It is thus that Miss Braddon and Miss authorities at the great circulating libraries," Thomas, and a host of other writers, explain as somebody says those sublime critics their feelings. These ladies might not who sit at the fountain-head of literature, know, it is quite possible, any better. and enlarge or choke up at their pleasure They might not be aware how young wo- the springs of our supply-find it impossimen of good blood and good training feel. ble to resist the public craving for its The perplexing fact is, that the subjects of favourite food. Mr. Mudie, too, may utter this slander make no objection to it. Pro- a "protest;" but it is futile in face of the tests are being raised everywhere in abun- protests of fiction. We confess to having dance; but against this misrepresentation felt a sense of injury in our national pride there is no protest. It seems to be accept- when our solemn contemporary, the 'Revue ed by the great audience of the circulating des Deux Mondes,' held up in one of its libraries as something like the truth. Mr. recent numbers the names of Miss Annie Trollope's charming girls do not, now that Thomas and Mr. Edmund Yates to the adwe know them so well, call forth half so miration of the world as representative much notice from the press as do the Auro- novelists of England. And yet, after all, ra Floyds of contemporary fiction. Is, though the acknowledgment naturally then, the picture true? or by what extraor- costs us a pang, the Frenchman was right. dinary impulse is it that the feminine half Such writers are purely, characteristically of society thus stigmatises and stultifies its English. They are not brilliantly wicked own existence ? like their French contemporaries. The consciousness of good and evil hangs about them, a kind of literary fig-leaf, a little better or worse than nothing. Though it is evident that the chatter of imaginary clubs or still more imaginary studios is their highest idea of social intercourse, still the guardsmen and the painters do not talk so freely nor half so cleverly as they would have done on the other side of the Channel. That sublime respect for sentimental morality and poetic justice which distinguishes the British public stands forth in them beyond all question. The wicked people are punished and the good people are rewarded, as they always should be; and there are exquisite bits of pious reflection which make up to the reader for a doubtful situation or an equivocal character. This, however, is what we have come to in the eyes of our neighbours. It is not so serious as the moral question; but it is in its way very serious. A critic, indeed, may deceive himself when he looks across the mists and rains of the Channel; but if he is guided by what English papers say, by what advertisements say, by the evidence of circulating libraries and publishers' announcements how can he judge otherwise? The glories of the moment are in the hands of Miss Thomas and her class. Whether it

The question is one at which we may wonder, but to which we can give no answer; and it is a very serious matter, let us look at it as we will. It may be possible to laugh at the notion that books so entirely worthless, so far as literary merit is concerned, should affect any reader injuriously, though even of this we are a little doubtful; but the fact that this new and disgusting picture of what professes to be the female heart comes from the hands of women, and is tacitly accepted by them as real, is not in any way to be laughed at. Some change must have been wrought upon the social mind ere such things could be tolerated at all; and even now we are not awakened out of our calm to a full consciousness of the change. When we are so, then we will, of course, according to our natural English course of action, take tardy measures of precaution. We will attempt, in the face of all our traditions and habits, to establish the Index Expurgatorius; we will lock up the books which are not for the jeunes gens; we will glance, ourselves, with curiosity and a sense of guilt, "just to see what it is like," over the objectionable portion of our library parcel; and we will make up our minds to say nothing of it before the girls. Vain thought! If the girls