A CHILLY NIGHT.

I rose at the dead of night,
And went to the lattice alone
To look for my mother's ghost
Where the ghostly moonlight shone.

My friends had failed one by one,
Middle-aged, young, and old,
Till the ghosts were warmer to me
Than my friends that had grown so cold.

I looked and I saw the ghosts
Dotting plain and mound:
They stood in the blank moonlight,
But no shadow lay on the ground;
They spoke without a voice

And they leaped without a sound.

I called: "O my mother dear,”— I sobbed: "O my mother kind, Make a lonely bed for me

And shelter it from the wind:

"Tell the others not to come
To see me night or day:
But I need not tell my friends
To be sure to keep away."

My mother raised her eyes,

They were blank and could not see: Yet they held me with their stare,

While they seemed to look at me.

She opened her mouth and spoke,
I could not hear a word,
While my flesh crept on my bones
And every hair was stirred.

She knew that I could not hear
The message that she told,
Whether I had long to wait

Or soon should sleep in the mould: I saw her toss her shadowless hair And wring her hands in the cold.

I strained to catch her words,
And she strained to make me hear;
But never a sound of words
Fell on my straining ear.

From midnight to the cockcrow
I kept my watch in pain,
While the subtle ghosts grew subtler
In the sad night on the wane.

From midnight to the cockcrow
I watched till all were gone,
Some to sleep in the shifting sea

And some under turf and stone: Living had failed and dead had failed, And I was indeed alone.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.

A SONG OF SNOW-TIME.

Now wends the track across the snow That once went through the daisies; Long lines of frost are lying low

Where once were fairy mazes

Where once the gorse was all aflame
In moorland nooks and hollows-
Where once the crying cuckoo came,
And lightly-skimming swallows.
O earth, thou doest all things right!
Thy very desolation

Is but a prelude to the light
Of love and new creation.

I gaze across a land of snow

I catch the skylark's greeting

I breathe the breath of flowers-I know
The pulse of June is beating.
ARTHUR L. SALMON.

PAN.

Hush! Pan is sleeping

In forest deep on leafy bed:
Oh, softly tread.

Hum lullaby, O drowsy bee:
In charmed silence every tree
His watch is keeping.

Oh, softly tread: great Pan is sleeping.
Hark! Pan is waking!

A shiver through the leaves is creeping
Before the breeze.

Oh, see the Hamadryads peeping
Behind the trees.

Their trunks glow ruddy in the sun,
And hark! the blackbirds one by one
The silence breaking

With flute-like note; for Pan is waking.
ETHEL R. BARKER.
Academy.

Versailles.

INTROSPECTIVE.

I wish it were over the terrible pain,
Pang after pang again and again;
First the shattering ruining blow,
Then the probing steady and slow.
Did I wince? I did not faint:
My soul broke but was not bent:
Up I stand like a blasted tree

By the shore of the shivering sea.

On my boughs neither leaf nor fruit.
No sap in my uttermost root;
Brooding in an anguish dumb
On the short past and the long to come.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.

From Blackwood's Magazine.

ON SOME BOOKS FOR BOYS AND GIRLS.

Most people have probably not forgotten a certain pictorial advertisement highly popular and widely diffused some twenty years ago. Entitled "The Child-What will he become?" it purported to illustrate the potentialities for good or evil latent in the young, and the vast importance of education. It started with the representation of a boy's face in profile, and went on to depict the same countenance at successive stages in a career of learning, industry, virtue, and (of course) pecuniary success, on the one hand, and at the corresponding stages in a career of ignorance, intemperance, depravity, and consequent want, on the other. The

idea, if we mistake not, was very happily parodied by Mr. Furniss, who with admirable skill and humor traced the development of the boy politician first into a Gladstone and then into a Biggar. But nowadays the question has been to some extent superseded by one equally puzzling: "The ChildWhat is he?" And indeed the inquiry | is one in which every species of man of science, as well as every school of philosophers, has a strong interest to take part. The anthropologist clutches at resemblances between the child and the savage, the biologist at resemblances between the child and the monkey or the oyster. The Darwinian and the follower of Weismann nerVously peer for symptoms, or the absence of symptoms, of the hereditary transmission of acquired qualities. The idealist or Neo-Hegelian solemnly watches the first unfolding of the content of the child's ideal (that, we believe, is, or latterly was, the correct phraseology, "innate ideas" being for the present out of fashion). With complacent satisfaction the hedonist beholds the child over-eating itself. With unctuous confusion of thought but not of face the quasi-religious evolutionist observes the child "adapting itself" to an environment of sweetmeats or the reverse, as the case may be. Above all. as we gather from a recent work of Mr. Sully, the psychologist has a su

preme interest in the matter, and is eager to enter upon a course of "childwatching." He would endeavor, of course, to secure the co-operation of all mothers, for Mr. Chillip's proposition even now holds good that "the ladies are great observers." But the child, the victim of the experiment, would, we conceive, be well-nigh ruined.

For the truth is, we suspect, that if the mothers, fathers, grandparents, and uncles and aunts, once commence Smorltork with note-book and pencil, there is not a single child of average sharpness but will "smoke" them in a minute. The inevitable result will be that the child will lose all sincerity, ingenuousness, and candor; it will at least pose, if it does not deceive, of set purpose; and that result no one would deplore more heartily than Mr. Sully, for the stream of information would then be tainted at its source. At the present day, moreover, such a consequence would be especially lamentable. It is a rash thing to generalize-a rash thing to make sweeping accusations—a rash thing to assert with confidence that the former days were better than these. For the last three hundred years and more, for example, it has been a commonplace that the good old-fashioned type of servant has disappeared, and been replaced by one palpably inferior. Orlando thought so in "As You Like It," and Swift's "Directions to Servants" will ever remain as a perpetual warning against cherishing the illusion that there is anything new under the sun. The children of to-day are like enough no more spoiled than many of their predecessors. But, at the risk of being guilty of the rashness we have just censured, we cannot help thinking that the temptation to be self-conscious assails the young idea of the present age more artfully, more attractively, and with a greater prospect of success, than at any former period. Children's parties are more frequent, and are kept up much later, than in the days when Leech's delightful boy scowled at young Albert Grig for polking with the darling of his heart, and muttered, "He had

a

likeable; he has a whiff of the country, a dash of the true bucolic stolidity, about him. Moreover, in the case alluded to he shows the instinct of all honorable boys, "not to tell," and the sportsmanlike desire to give puss law. Besides, he never took his walks abroad "with a book of poetry in his hand;" while Gerald's character, we fear, is aptly enough summed up in the harsh and invidious epithets of pleurnicheur and “prig." To resume the story: Gerald and Venniker share a room at St. Anselm's - scantily furnished apartment, which contained "all the conventional phenomena of a dual existence:" a somewhat imposing periphrasis (reminding one of the Miss Pecksniffs' staggering and tailless sparrow borrowed from the kitchen) for two bookcases, two washstands, and two basins. Nevertheless, their room was "the virgin soil, as it were, which they were destined to cultivate." Though each boy strikes out a different line for himself-Gerald preferring work and ultimately a Balliol scholarship, Venniker choosing cricket and the eleven-their friendship becomes closer, and Gerald goes to stay at the “ancestral seat” in the holidays. This introduction to new people and new ways of life, combined with a smattering of infidelity which he had somehow picked up, makes his home, his father, his stepmother, and his belongings in general less congenial to him every day. "Not that Gerald ever referred in censorious language to his home," magnanimous fellow! The life at school passes on through conventional incidents narrated in no very striking or convincing way, until it brings us to a chapter entitled "The Crisis of Faith," where "the spiritual agonies of a soul" (Gerald's, to wit) are recorded with some detail in the usual manner. That is to say, the arguments for agnosticism and for revelation are alternately presented with so thorough a lack of reality and force, with so calm an ignoring of the fundamental points at stake, with so complacent and self-satisfied an assumption that they are not the old arguments

at all, but brand-new ones absolutely "up-to-date," that the reader in a paroxysm of irritation is all but driven by the case for scepticism into faith, and by the case for faith into scepticism. Have the people, we sometimes wonder, who think they read this kind of thing with instruction and profit, ever heard of David Hume on the one side, or Dean Mansel on the other? Half an hour with "the daring boy who fairly floored both mind and matter," or with the Bampton lecturer, might help to dissipate the thick vapors of their minds. Fortunately, even "the volcanic upheavings of a soul's fiery unrest" cannot go on forever, and the tale resumes its course onward to a most melancholy ending which we need not recount.

The lamentable thing is, that the book is redeemed by little that is excellent in the way of character-drawing or of humor. The personages flatly refuse to come to life, though their creator plays the sedulous Frankenstein for all he is worth; the style is turgid and uneasy; trite and ponderous reflections on life abound; not a hint of the atmosphere or spirit of public-school life is successfully communicated. It is curious to note that one incident in the "comic relief," which turns on the immense trouble required to make a deaf person catch a perfectly trivial remark, was anticipated by Miss Catherine Sinclair some sixty years ago in "Modern Accomplishments”—a novel of which no one has ever heard, and which still fewer, as the Irishman said, have read. At almost every point. indeed, "Gerald Eversley's Friendship" must yield to a much shorter and much less pretentious book by Mrs. Forsyth Grant, which, crude and unsatisfactory as in some respects it certainly is. and plainly as it may disclose the hand of an artist who is not yet completely mistress of her craft, displays much keen discrimination of character, and holds out the promise of better things in the future. Meantime, let Mr. Welldon look to it. Facilis descensus; and

1 The Story of Crampton School. Edinburgh : Nimmo, Hay, & Mitchell.