Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control,
That o'er thee swell and throng.
They will condense within thy soul,
And swell to purpose strong.
But he who lets his feelings run
In soft, luxurious flow,

Shrinks when hard service must be done,

And faints at every woe.

ture was the fruit of the long-brooding life of the Middle Ages. And the great literary era to which Mr. Gladstone referred was chiefly due to that sudden break-up of the conventionalisms of the eighteenth century, caused by the French Revolution; for the long reign of a literary oligarchy or aristocracy, and the habit which such an aristocracy forms of constraining into fixed And what is true of moral purpose is channels the life and taste of the rising equally true of literary impressions. It is generation, are at least as effective for a the age of reserve which prepares the way considerable period in restricting and, as for the age of literary splendor; it is the it were, banking up many kinds and moods youth of brooding thoughts and emotions of feeling, as that direct discouragement of which prepares the way for the manhood all literary expression which precedes the of great genius. And unquestionably the first burst of a new literature. But in our lighter pressure under which children are own day the enormous facilities for ex- now placed during the time of discipline, pressing everything that is felt, and for the larger amount of sympathy which fostering much that is not really felt, but they now attract, that cultus of children only fancied as possible to be felt, useful which makes the loneliness of childhood as they are for spreading equally among and youth comparatively so rare, while all classes the culture hitherto attained, they produce a great number of good are positive premiums on literary diffuse-effects, do also produce this bad effect, ness, feebleness, and attenuation. Just as a that there is far less opportunity than perfect system of drainage, if completed there was for the silent maturing of strong without proper arrangements for storing purposes and deep feelings. rain, carries back far too soon all the It is curious enough to note in such water-supply through millions of rivulets lives as we have just had of Miss Marto the great streams, and through the great tineau and Miss Brontë how the very constreams to the ocean, so a perfect organiza- ditions which seem to have produced the tion of facilities for expression carries off far peculiar strength they had, are just those too soon everything in the shape of literary which it is the tendency of the feelings feeling and thought into the public mind, excited by their writings to render rarer without giving it time to grow to what is and feebler for the future. Miss Margreat and forcible. And this tendency to tineau complains of the want of sympathy multiplying the dwindling runlets of liter- for children manifested in her home in her ary power, instead of multiplying those youth, and the terrible aggravation of those great reservoirs of the imagination by evils caused later by the unwise mode in which alone the highest life can be fed, is which her deafness was treated, so as to increased to a very great extent, by the isolate her even more completely from her gradual relaxation of that stern discipline fellow-creatures than she would otherwise of childhood and youth which marked al- have been isolated. Yet we strongly bemost all the ages up to our own. We are lieve that these were just the conditions far from pleading for that stern discipline, which enabled powers of not very much for it is certain that many good effects of more than ordinary calibre to produce this relaxation perhaps better in their really great results of their kind. No total result than this one evil effect doubt she "kept silence, yea, even from could be adduced. The young people good words," and "it was pain and grief" who are thus relieved from the high pres- to her, but it was during this enforced sure of discipline imposed on former gen- silence that the "fire kindled," and when erations certainly grow up in many respects at last she spoke with her tongue, she more amiable and more reasonable, less spoke with the accumulated force of years moody, less self-willed, and less passion- of brooding; and if the present writer's ate than their fathers. But they too often judgment is worth anything, it was much grow up also less strenuous and with much more this, than the natural power and less stored power. It is the damming-up breadth of her imagination and underof driblets of feeling and thought which standing, which made her what she unreally creates great supplies of such feel-doubtedly was, - a very remarkable woman ing and thought. It is the resistance to of her kind, who, with less repression in cherished purposes which accumulates these purposes into something capable of striking the eye and the imagination. As Dr. Newman long ago said,

childhood and less deprivation in youth, might have been but a clever woman, and nothing more. Yet the remarkable effect produced by repression, reticence, and re

serve in accumulating power is still more | that weird, wild tale, not merely than in all curiously illustrated in the lives of the the pinchbeck novels Lord Lytton ever Brontës, especially Emily and Charlotte. wrote (which is saying nothing), but than Of course, reserve and slow accumulation in any single story known to us in the Enwill do little for powers which are from glish language. The capacity for expressthe beginning thoroughly commonplace, ing imaginative intensity surpasses to our as was apparently the case with Anne mind any achievement in the same space Brontë. But how much they will do for in the whole of our prose literature. We women of real genius, who are yet not should rank "Wuthering Heights". women of such great breadth and luxu- eccentric and lurid as it is - as an effort riance of imagination that, spread them- of genius, far above not only “Villette,' selves as they may, their imagination would which seems to us Charlotte Brontë's still work vividly, the very interesting greatest effort, but "The Bride of Lamstory which Mr. T. W. Reid has just told mermoor," which is the nearest thing to it us of the Brontës, by way of supplement in Sir Walter Scott's imaginative writings. to Mrs. Gaskell's biography of Charlotte, In “ Wuthering Heights" the concenshows with very great force. The high-trated power of a great imagination gave est power of reserve which was probably one brilliant flash and disappeared. No ever concentrated in any human life whose doubt the repressive force of Emily outlines are well known to us, was that under the steady stress of which Emily Brontë's short career was passed. She, like her sisters, lived with a father of whom they were afraid, amidst wild and gloomy moors, where they had no companions but themselves, yet, unlike her sisters, she could hardly tell even to them the imaginations of her own heart. We are told by Mr. Reid how hopeless her efforts proved to enter into anything like the ordinary intercourse with her fellow-creatures, how again and again she returned home after efforts to gain her own bread, which failed solely from her complete failure to open easy relations with her kind, how in her last illness she would not admit even to her sisters her illness till within two hours of her death, but then whispered faintly, "If you send for a doctor, I will see him now," when she was almost in the agonies of death. In Emily Brontë the restraining power of reserve assuredly amounted to something very near mental disease. Yet what a wonderful force it gave to her genius! Highly as Mr. Reid appreciates "Wuthering Heights," he almost makes one laugh at him as if he were thoroughly unable to appreciate it, when he compares it even for a moment with such trash as Lord Lytton's "Strange Story." The passage he quotes, for instance, from "Wuthering Heights" as to the way in which Catherine's image haunted Heathcliff after her death, is, when compared with anything Lord Lytton ever achieved, like a stroke of lightning to the glimmer of a rush-light. There is more concentrated fire and power in

--

Brontë's reserve was something like a disease, but it had the effect of storing imag. inative power as nothing else in the world could have stored it, and no one who reads all that is told of her could suppose for a moment that had her reserve been less than it was, we should ever have had that one great flash of genius. Doubtless she would have been broader, happier, in many respects a truer woman, than she was, if she had had more channels of communication with her kind, but her genius would hardly have effected any one thing so great; she might have been far wider; she could not have been so intense; she would never have gazed so deeply into those evil eyes of Heathcliff's-eyes seen only in her reveries, and never in real life - which she so finely describes as “the cloudy windows of hell," if she had not stored up all the elastic force of her reverie into that one single creative effort. And so with Charlotte Brontë's genius; it certainly reached its acme when her life was at its loneliest, when she was robbed of the sympathy of both of her sisters. "Villette" is almost as much greater than "Shirley" or "Jane Eyre" as " The Bride of Lammermoor," written in pain and under stress of illness, was greater than "Ivanhoe" or "Kenilworth."

We hold, then, that the great facilities for expression - the great stimulus given to expression by our intensely literary age, and to expression which anticipates the proper ripening of the feeling and thought to be expressed are really considerable obstacles to the development of that high literary power for which Mr. Gladstone is compelled to look back to a generation when the intellectual life was far more Reid. With Illustrations. London: Macmillan and sharply kept under, and far less constantly

Co.

Charlotte Brontë: a Monograph. By T. Wemyss

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WHAT, gentle Spring, and art thou come? WOULD this sunshine be completer,

Yield, then, fair nymph! for, goddess as thou Down the wood-nymph's warm white shoulder

From The Edinburgh Review. of the army, or of the finances, or of commerce, or of the imperial administration.

WALLACE'S "RUSSIA."*

IF Mr. Wallace had published this book But these are the four pillars of the edifice. The life and manners of the peas

under the more modest title of "Rural

Russia," it might deserve to be consid-antry are interesting, and very unlike any

ered the best work we possess in English
on the peasantry and country life of that
vast empire. The writer has unquestion-
ably some qualifications unusual in a for-
eigner. He is well acquainted with the
Russian language. He has lived for sev-
eral years, not only in St. Petersburg and
Moscow, but amongst the people; and in
his zeal for the acquisition of a thorough
knowledge of the country, he braved the
discomfort of a Russian parsonage and the
dulness of a provincial town. Applying
himself more especially to the study of the
communal tenure of land and the results
of the recent emancipation of the serfs,
he has published, on those subjects, a
large amount of valuable information. He
writes in a spirit of fairness and good tem-
per, not always to be found in the books
relating to the institutions of the Russian
empire; and if he is biassed at all, it is by
a kindly sense of the hospitality he has met
with and by a lively appreciation of the
good qualities of the Russian people. He
has collected with scrupulous care all that
it is possible to say in their favor, but un-
fortunately his benevolent theories are not
always borne out by the facts which his
candor compels him to disclose. We re-
ceive his evidence, however, with pleasure
and confidence as far as it goes. But it is
impossible not to remark that the scope of
this work is very limited. We are struck
at once by surprising omissions of the
most important subjects, which affect the
whole social and political condition of the
empire. Mr. Wallace has nothing to

say

1. Russia. By D. MACKENZIE WALLACE, M.A. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1877

2. Russische und Baltische Characterbilder aus Geschichte und Literatur. Von JULIUS ECKARDT. 1 vol. 8vo. Leipzig: 1876.

3. Etudes sur l'Avenir de la Russie. Par D. K. SCHEDO-FERROTI. Quatrième Edition. Berlin: 1859. 4. Aus der Petersburger Gesellschaft. Von einem Russen. Berlin: 1874.

5. Savage and Civilized Russia. By W. R. don: 1877.

6. La Russie Epique. Heroiques de la Russie. Paris: 1876.

haps the time may come when their primthing that exists in western Europe. Perin the State. But at present they are enitive institutions may exercise some power tirely subject to the exigencies of a vast military establishment, to an oppressive and demoralizing system of finance, to a prohibitive commercial system, and to the A book on Russia which omits these subabsolute control of a despotic government. jects appears to us, therefore, to be essentially defective and incomplete. The author tells us that he hopes in a third volme to repair some of these omissions. the obligations of military service, the But he has failed to show the bearing that

mode of taxation, commercial restrictions, and the application of arbitrary power have on all the subordinate institutions of the country; and this deficiency can never be supplied.

If therefore the object of the readers were to obtain a knowledge of Russia, as a State and a power in Europe, he would' derive much fuller and more accurate information from several works recently published on the Continent, such as M. Schédo-Ferroti's "Etudes sur l'Avenir de la Russie," or the "Petersburger Gesellschaft," by a Russian; or Herr Julius

Eckardt's "Russische und Baltische
Characterbilder; not to mention
Prince Dolgoroukow's somewhat defama-
tory volume on the state of his own coun-
The peasantry of Russia, though
try.
they exceed by incalculable numbers the
population of the towns, are still an inert
mass. The communal institutions which
have existed for some centuries among
them are confined to their own very limited
sphere of action. They have not as yet
shown the slightest aptitude for political
power or even the slightest desire to exer-

* A translation of the first edition of this work was Lon-published in London in 1870, under the title "Modert Russia; " but a second edition has since appeared in Germany, considerably enlarged. It is a most valual and instructive work, and far superior, in our estima tion, to that of Mr. Wallace.

Etudes sur les Chansons
Par ALFRED RAMBAUD.