of ornament, and its absence gives that force and dignity which must surely prevent Miller's writing, however limited on its scientific side, from being altogether forgotten or neglected. The books in which he deals more specially with science show how strong were his imagination and sense of the picturesque, and yet how he could combine these with a force of clear-sighted and vigorous thought that preserved them against any trait of sentimentalism; and in My Schools and Schoolmasters he showed also how strongly he could grasp the dramatic elements in human life. THE EDITOR. THE READING OF NATURE'S ENIGMA THE readings already given, the conclusions already deduced, are as various as the hopes and fears, the habits of thought, and the cast of intellect, of the several interpreters who have set themselves -some, alas! with but little preparation and very imperfect knowledge to declare in their order the details of this marvellous dream-like vision, and, with the dream, the "interpretation thereof." One class of interpreters may well remind us of the dim-eyed old man—the genius of unbelief so poetically described by Coleridge-who, sitting in his cold and dreary cave, "talked much and vehemently concerning an infinite series of causes and effects, which he explained to be a string of blind men, the last of whom caught hold of the skirt of the one before him, he of the next, and so on, till they were all out of sight, and that they all walked infallibly straight, without making one false step, though they were all alike blind." With these I must class those assertors of the development hypothesis who can see in the upward progress of being only the operation of an incomprehending and incomprehensible law, through which, in the course of unreckoned ages, the lower tribes and families have risen into the higher, and inferior into superior natures, and in virtue of which, in short, the animal creation has grown, in at least its nobler specimens, rather unwittingly, without thought or care on its own part, and without intelligence on the part of the operating law, from irrational to rational, and risen in the scale from the mere promptings of instinct to the highest exercise of reason,--from apes and baboons to Bacons and Newtons. The blind lead the blind;-the unseeing law operates on the unperceiving creatures; and they go, not together into the ditch, but direct onwards, straight as an arrow, and higher and higher at every step. Another class look with profound melancholy on that great city of the dead,—the burial-place of all that ever lived in the past, which occupies with its ever-extending pavements of gravestones, and its ever-lengthening streets of tombs and sepulchres, every region opened up by the geologist. They see the onward procession of being as if but tipped with life, and nought but inanimate carcasses all behind,-dead individuals, dead species, dead dead creations, genera, -a universe of death; and ask whether the same annihilation which overtook in turn all the races of all the past, shall not one day overtake our own race also, and a time come when men and their works shall have no existence save stone-pervaded fossils locked up in the rock for ever. Nowhere do we find the doubts and fears of this class more admirably portrayed than in the words of perhaps the most thoughtful and suggestive of living poets : O life as futile, then, as frail ! O for thy voice to soothe and bless! Behind the veil, behind the veil. The sagacity of the poet here that strange sagacity which seems so nearly akin to the prophetic spirit-suggests in this noble passage the true reading of the enigma. The appearance of man upon the scene of being constitutes a new era in creation ; the operations of a new instinct come into play-that instinct which anticipates a life after the grave, and reposes in implicit faith upon a God alike just and good, who is the pledged "rewarder of all who diligently seek Him." And in looking along the long line of being-ever rising in the scale from higher to yet higher manifestations, or abroad on the lower animals, whom instinct never deceives—can we hold that man, immeasurably higher in his place, and infinitely higher in his hopes and aspirations, than all that ever went before him, should be, notwithstanding, the one grand error in creation,—the one painful worker, in the midst of present trouble, for a state into which he is never to enter, the befooled expectant of a happy future, which he is never to see? Assuredly no. He who keeps faith with all His humbler creatures—who gives to even the bee and the dormouse the winter for which they prepare-will to a certainty not break faith with man, -with man, alike the deputed lord of the present creation, and the chosen heir of all the future. We have been looking abroad on the old geologic burying-grounds, and deciphering the strange inscriptions on their tombs; but there are other burying-grounds, and other tombs-solitary churchyards among the hills, where the dust of the martyrs lie, and tombs that rise over the ashes of the wise and good; nor are there awanting, on even the monuments of the perished races, frequent hieroglyphics and symbols of high meaning, which darkly intimate to us that, while their burial-yards contain but the debris of the past, we are to regard the others as charged with the sown seed of the future. (From Testimony of the Rocks.) A HIGHLAND SCENE and I ROSE to a little window which opened upon a dreary moor, commanded a view, in the distance, of a ruinous chapel and solitary burying-ground, famous in the traditions of the district as the chapel and burying-ground of Gillie-christ. Dr. Johnson relates, in his "Journey," that when eating, on one occasion, his dinner in Skye to the music of the bagpipe, he was informed by a gentleman, "that in some remote time, the Macdonalds of Glengarry having been injured or offended by the inhabitants of Culloden, and resolving to have justice, or vengeance, they came to Culloden on a Sunday, when, finding their enemies at worship, they shut them up in the church, which they set on fire; and this, said he, is the tune that the piper played while they were burning." Culloden, however, was not the scene of the atrocity: it was the Mackenzies of Ord that their fellow-Christians and brother-Churchmen, the Macdonalds of Glengarry, succeeded in converting into animal charcoal, when the poor people were engaged, like good Catholics, in attending mass; and in this old chapel of Gillie-christ was the experiment performed. The Macdonalds, after setting fire to the building, held fast the doors until the last of the Mackenzies of Ord had perished in the flames; and then, pursued by the Mackenzies of Brahan, they fled into their own country, to glory ever after in the greatness of the feat. The evening was calm and still, but dark for the season, for it was now near midsummer; and every object had disappeared in the gloom, save the outlines of a ridge of low hills that rose beyond the moor; but I could determine where the chapel and churchyard lay; and great was my astonishment to see a light flickering amid the grave-stones and the ruins. At one time seen, at another hid, like the revolving lantern of a lighthouse, it seemed to be passing round and round the building; and, as I listened, I could hear distinctly what appeared to be a continuous screaming of most unearthly sound, proceeding from evidently the same spot as the twinkle of the light. What could be the meaning of such an apparition, with such accompaniments-the time of its appearance midnight, the place a solitary buryingground? I was in the Highlands: was there truth, after all, in the many floating Highland stories of spectral dead-lights and wild supernatural sounds, seen and heard by nights in lonely places of sepulture, when some sudden death was near? I did feel my blood run somewhat cold, for I had not yet passed the credulous time of life—and had some thoughts of stealing down to my master's bedside, to be within reach of the human voice, when I saw the light quitting the churchyard, and coming downwards VOL. V 2 I |