path by the Aviary, and through the little wicket. You need not return the same way, but cross the field and enter the wood by the boat-house on the great lake, (there are three lakes, upper, middle, and lower). Following the path, you come to two or three cascades and a natural bridge. The trees in the wood are of great magnitude: some apparently 100 feet high. The scenery here is wild and lonely, and evidently not much frequented; at least, f the paths may tell any tale, one must judge from their moss-covered carpet, that human feet are not wont to linger here. In this spot many a dark picture might be conjured up (especially after such a book as Bulwer Lytton's Eugene Aram') of robbers' haunts in unfrequented places. It was while walking here that a heavy shower of rain began to descend; yet so thick was the leafy canopy above us, that we suffered not the slightest inconvenience. Emerging from the wood, the gardens produce quite a magical effect on the beholder-the scene is most striking. The eye sees at once flowering shrubs, serpentine walks, ribbon borders, lakes, fountains, and vases. Very unwilling were we to bid adeau to this earthly paradise; but stern necessity compelled us once more to take our homeward way. One object of attraction that has lately been added to Enville ought to find a place here. The present Countess, whose kindness and interest in the welfare of the villagers appears to have won all hearts, has just completed, at her sole expense, a new school for the benefit of the village children. It is the most beautiful building of the kind I have ever seen, and the master's residence is in perfect keeping with the school. The gentleman to whose courtesy we were indebted for the inspection of the interior, informed us that the cost of the building was about £3,000. A noble deed, worthy of an illustrious name, and worthy of honourable mention! The shadows of twilight once more found us amid smoke, dust, and dirt; but we forgot the fact in thinking over, and talking of the pleasant scenes that had come under our individual notice during the day. Must not Bishop Heber have experienced the pleasure and happiness of a country life, when he composed those exquisite lines, "Oh God! O good beyond compare, St. Stephen's, Willenhall. If thus Thy meaner works are fair, Where Thy redeemed shall dwell with Thee." P.S." The Liverpool Albion of the 25th inst., which has fallen under my observation since writing the above, contains the following extract from the "Court Journal."-"The beautiful gardens and pleasure grounds of Lord Stamford's princely seat, Enville Hall, Staffordshire, one of the "sights" of England, were never seen to greater advantage than at the present moment; and some idea of their extent may be formed when we state that no fewer han 35,000 plants of one sort alone-Geraniums-have been set this summer, whilst the "ribbon bordering measures close upon seven miles!" The Near and the Heavenly Horisons. BY MADAME DE GASPARIN. (Hamilton, Adams, and Co., London, 1861. AMIDST the stream of publications which now issue from the press, one very rarely meets with a book at once fresh and attractive and free from vain conceits. Now that civilisation is so all-pervasive, and the interchange of thought so frequent, there is a tendency to monotony and sameness in the world of mind. As the poet says, "For ground in yonder social mill, we rub each other's angles down, and merge, he said,' in form and gross, the pictu resque in man and man.' Only a very strong mind, or a very simple and childlike one, can escape this levelling influence. Some try to achieve originality by violent efforts to disengage themselves from the ordinary modes of thought, and we have the spasmodic school. Some, by a happy hit, take the popular fancy once, and work on the capital so gained, adhering in a sort of mechanical way to the form and phrases of their first success, when the mood which first inspired it has for ever fled. There is a vast amount of cant-literary cant-and affectation, and set forms of speech. There is novelist's cant, artist's cant, critical cant, the cant of special correspondents and leader writers, of commercial prospectuses and testimonials, of learned and scientific societies, of charitable and religious associations. By cant, I mean the everlasting repetition of certain set phrases, to which there is no responsive thought in the mind of the speaker or writer; which, in fact, by frequent use, have become dead and meaningless, hiding poverty of ideas in the utterer, inspiring no fresh idea in the mind of the hearer. It would be easy to fill a page with illustrations of this, but we forbear in deference to the many readers of this magazine, who, in the course of their readings, have become well acquainted with the evil complained of. To the work abovenamed-an excellent translation from the French-we would accord the praise of being an exception to the ordinary run of books. Freed, apparently, from narrow preconceptions of things, coming to them with a simple, teachable spirit, bound down by no rigid conventionalities, the authoress speaks a language taught by nature and unschooled by art. From the depths of her heart she speaks to that of the reader, now in passionate outbursts of sorrow for human suffering, now in childlike gushes of joy at nature's summer beauty, now in calm contemplation of heaven's glories. With a mind sensitive enough to discern many of the striking analogies between the material and the spiritual, the flowers of earth were to her an outward type of that unrevealed beauty; the singing of the lark at heaven's gate, the first low imperfect rehearsal of a rich celestial music; the glories of a setting sun, a faint foreshadowing of that future dawning. As a traveller through some primeval forest, filled with dim uncertain light, catches momentary glimpses through the chinks of the foliage, of the cloudless sky above, so to her quick perceptions and oft-lifted gaze, there came, ever and anon, through the chinks of this Earthly, through the momentarily-rifted clouds of the Material, sudden gleams of that cloudless Heavenly-of that changeless Immaterial-beyond. The book is divided into two portions: Near Horizons, Heavenly Horizons. The first part consists of eleven short chapters, wherein the view of men and things is confined to this life, is bounded by the Near Horizons. These introduce us to various characters and various scenes, exemplifying to some extent the actual variety of joy and sorrow, of beauty and sterility which this world exhibits to the eye of the observer. Take a sentence or two from the introduction: "There is nothing here for utilitarians, nothing for so-called realists, for lovers of the dramatic, for acute connoisseurs. It is not a series of pictures, it is still less romance. It is that unknown something which sings within, the wide undulations of whose voice expand as we advance, and sometimes blend ideal melodies with the most common details of the most prosaic life." Do you want a sketch of a character? here is one: "Lisette, as well as her husband, has run her fourscore years or thereabouts. Lame of one leg, but erect and well made, there she is on her old, straight-backed arm chair. Slender, as I said, rather thin, with noble features, a pale complexion, colourless without being withered, grey hair almost hid under a cap of the thick lace our great grandmothers used to wear, black eyes as young as they were at twenty; soft, limpid eyes, which lock into and allow you to look into the soul. A smile completes the face. It is not an inadvertant, it is not a triumphant smile: it is a smile in which blends such freshness, such exquisite delicacy, such sweet graciousness, that, once seen, it floats eternally in the memory. * Lisette was a spiritualist; there are such in villages. She had been an excellent manager in her day; had baked, fed her cattle, worked hard in haytime. She had taken her part in the vintage, wielded the rake, dug the garden, spun enough to fill all the presses in her cottage from top to bottom. On washing days, the hedges round were rich with her treasures; no one more apt to labour, more prudent as to expense; but while her arm was employed, her brain was active. And now, that all she could do to amuse herself was to mend clothes, or wind thread, thought had got the upper hand. Lisette had a soul; she was conscious of it, nay, she was anxious about it. This is not common in our days, in the country any more than in towns. Lisette belonged to that austerely brought-up generation, kept under by their fathers-grand, grave men, who governed by a look, without waste of words. Ten years might have passed without a new book drifting into their dwellings. Nevertheless, the peasant read on winter nights, read the Bible, that history of nations, that philosophy of the heart, that divine poetry, that speech of God to man; and he made his children read it, their little fingers following each word. For her, Ruth and Naomi, Sarah, Moses, and Rachel who would not be comforted, were personages more living, more real than the great Napoleon and his twelve marshals. * * * Above the beautiful region she inhabited, and beyond the limits of her actual life, a world had opened to Lisette, even from her earliest days. It was the Hebrew world. There the camels and caravans of the Ismaelitish merchant-men passed through the desert; there Hagar wept under the palm tree; there the transparent waters of the Red Sea stood on a heap; there more golden sheaves and richer ears of corn waved on the fields of Bethlehem, beneath a softer breeze which has kissed the pomegranates in blossom. * * * Had an angel, palm in hand, appeared before her there under the great pine, it would not have surprised her; she would have prostrated herself, would humbly have laid her basket of strawberries at his feet. Oh! if it might but have been. * * With her bodily eyes she never saw anything but the fields, the cows, and the blue sky overhead; but she believed, moved, and lived calm and thoughtful in the realms of faith." * * * * * As an example of her power of language, take the following paragraph, which cuminates in a perfect strain of eloquence. But "For my part I hold in reverence all who lead a life of thought. To eat, drink, sleep, dress well, and to-morrow die, has never prepossessed my fancy much; nor Lisette's either. To go through life like a great burly drone, knocking up against flowers, burying his proboscis in their cups, without looking or wondering at anything, without even inhaling the perfumes of the blossoms he pierces; then, when evening comes, to die concealed beneath the leaves or to be killed in a matter-of-fact way by a bee who has done with him. Whatever may be said for it, neither Lisette nor I find any sense or poetry in a course like this. dreamers-I do not mean by this empty dreamers, I mean the dealers with ideas, those who go digging in some rich vein, deep down in the mine, or soar on daring wing beyond the skiesthese, however poor their condition or outward man, we-Lisette, who knows none of them, and I, who know but few-hold these to be true sages, great poets. In fact, it is just they who take the world in tow. Not easy going people, elastic, satisfied with themselves and with all else, because seeing little beyond their particular peck of oats; but souls with vigorous griefs and mighty joys; men of the daytime, who want light everywhere, who prefer suffering wakefulness to a truth-haunted sleep, who feel themselves travellers, pilgrims, wrestlers, always under arms, on the march, in the battle, often bruized, harassed, losing courage; but sometimes visited by such fulness of joy, believing so boldly what they do believe, reigning so absolutely in the realm of soul, sowing so richly the soil they tread, conquering so triumphantly the adverse circumstances barking at their heels,- we feel that they are indeed the masters, the living men, and all others slaves, dead!" Speaking, in the tale of The Three Roses,' of a young girl on her deathbed, who had spent long years in a sullen despair and discontent, and between whom and her parents little love had been lost, but over whose mind at length a wonderful change had passed, she says: "But as for her, an ineffable rapture filled her heart. Heaven awaited her; earth, before relinquishing, lavished on her all its treasures. In an instant, like one who gleans in haste, her hand snatched all the richest sheaves. A moment is as a thousand years to one about to enter on eternal day. She had reaped all; she regretted nothing. Of the love of her father and mother, nothing henceforth could ever deprive her; the love of her God shone round about her. In this glory she departed. The Lord has sudden unfoldings such as these for souls long closed. For beaten down stalks He has looks which ripen into a golden harvest; He has warm rain for parched-up ground; He has royal compassions at which the hosts of angels break into hallelujahs of praise that sing from heaven to heaven!" As a description of natural scenery, the following from the tale of 'The Tilery,' is deserving of quotation : "The pines are in flower. Do you know the flower of the pine? I fancy that it was from it that the old gods of Olympus used to extract the odorous resin with which they perfumed their nectar. The pines, as far as the eye can reach, lift up their little wax candelabravirgin granulated wax. Each branch bears its own; it seems as though the forest were preparing some marvellous illumination for the fairies, and when a puff of wind comes, and the boughs swing slowly, the golden dust of the pollen floats around in soft clouds, and sinks gently down upon the moss. * # The forest, the real forest lies before us. Do you wish for songs? let us go under the old oaks. Do you prefer silence, with a vague stir in the air? let us keep below the pines. First of all, then, under the oaks. There, where the grass grows, and brambles interlace; where the sweetbriar stops up the way, and creeping plants abound; there along that shining track, where footsteps have trodden down the vegetation. The very light is green, the shade all interpenetrated with sun. Not a breeze, except every now and then indeed a mere puff, you know not whence, which just lifts the branches, wafts here and there still sweeter scents, then dies away, and leaves you half intoxicated with perfume. What charming mysteries there are in these nooks! Millions of insects, all dowered with intelligence, dressed for a festival, displaying between the blades of grass, the purple, the ebony, the ultramarine of their elytra, their armour of malachite and gold, delicate antennæ and little feathered crests. There are artizans among them, who lead a hard life, hewing, sawing, storing, night and day. There are idlers, who go to and fro, climb to the top of a stalk, look upon the world below, move right and left without any particular purpose, take things as they find them. There are thinkers, too, motionless for hours beneath a sunbeam. There are busy bodies, who fly in haste, make sudden starts, long journeys, and prompt returns, without very well knowing why. There are musicians, who for hours together go on repeating their monotonous song. There are swarms of ephemera, waving hither and thither in some brilliant spot, neither too high nor too low, seeking no sustenance, in a very ecstacy of life, light, and harmonious motion. * * A dead tree is lying in the shade; it is cool here, let us seat ourselves. Fit retreat for a philosopher; fit occasion for communing with one's self. Commend me to these green studios, these sylvan fortresses, this deep isolation. * * The forest is still the same. In the spring, the bee orchis displays her velvet robe at the foot of the great pines; in the summer, the pink, with slashed petals of grey hue, balances itself at the end of a slender stalk-singular flower, whence exhales a perfume that makes the very heart faint. The shade is the same, the freshness great as ever. Nothing has changed; only that I have been going on. Be it so; this immutable aspect of nature, the perennial character of seasons, flower, birds' nests, I like it; it does me good. It is the eternity of God's goodness, the eternity of youth; the eternal ideal affixed by the Lord's hand on creation's brow." We must content ourselves with these extracts. Into the second portion we cannot now enter. Suffice it to say, that it excels in depth of thought and expressiveness of language the beauty of the first. We can heartily recommend the work, a cheap edition of which is to be had, to all our readers who claim to be possessed of a refined mind and pure taste. The veil once rent, though seamed with costliest care, Hides from the tribes no shining cherub's face, No heavenly presence there; Not there; nor where afar, Pilgrims through desert lands, seek Mecca's shrine; Nor where the Hindoo bows to mystic car, He worships as divine; Nor more, where stately rise The sculptured glories of cathedral towers, The Holy is not there. Though there, it may be, joyful tokens fall, As answers rich, to some low-bowed one's prayer, He who doth order well The wayward motions of a thousand spheres, In temple mortal rears. Yet doth He gladly come When men will make Him room, a willing guest: Whether 'neath lowly roof or lofty dome, His presence there is blest. Whether earth's little ones Stammer in broken accents words of praise, |