" DUKE OF ORLEANS.

"Look not back;

'Tis that way darkness lies. God's will it was That thou shouldst faithfully strive, yet strive in vain,

That is past.

To bring the afflicted succor.
Come forth then from the past; come bravely
forth,

And bid it get behind thee. We will fly
To fields where Nature consecrates the joys
Of liberty and love. With thee to rove
Through field and pathless forest, or to lie
By sunlit fountain or by garrulous brook,
And pour love's hoarded treasures in thy lap,
Bright as the fountain, endless as the stream,
Wild as the forest glades,-oh, what were this
But to foretaste the joys of Paradise,
And by a sweet obliviousness forget

Unutterably wretched and abased,
But knowing there is yet a further fall.
Oh, spare me! save me! make me not a prey!
For I am wounded almost unto death,
And cannot fly.

"DUKE OF ORLEANS.

Enough, O Iolande !
Thy spirit in its weakest hour is strong,
And rules us both; and where thy spirit rules
Is sanctity supreme; and Passion's self
Is in thy presence purified and purged
From earthly stain, and ministers to grace.
No word nor wish shall henceforth violate
That sacred precinct."

The drama is interspersed with lighter characters and gayer scenes, which are full

That Earth bath unblest hours and dim abodes, of taste and playfulness, and relieve the

Where Pain and Sorrow dwell.

gravity of the deeper portions. Such are Flos and her dream, the advice of the duke's jester to a gay gallant of the duke's court, and a short madrigal by the duke's minstrel. But we are in no mood to quote these now. Mr. Taylor is evidently in the full zenith of his powers; and we can only hope that his next choice may fall upon a richer subject and more modern times.

they are so in the same sense in which the entireness of our human existence-our active converso with the material world from morning to night of every day-is also a violation of nature.

THE phrase Ia violation of nature," artfully put forward by infidels, and most inconsider ately adopted or repeated by Christian writers, mystifies what is very clear. Miracles are always attributed to a certain cause-not to no cause-not to a cause that is foreign to the uni- In a word, is the universe a vast machine of verse; they are not a breaking in upon order in mindless sequences, eternally fated, and thereany sense other than that in which the will of fore exclusive of whatever gives room for conman in every moment of every man's conscious ceptions of moral and religious relations? Mirexistence, is a breaking in upon the order of acles can have no place in a universe thus ruled nature. In this sense all the world is a scene by fate. Pantheism, atheism, has no room for of perpetual confusion; it is a chaos of "vio- the supernatural; for it has no room in the lences;" for wherever man comes in upon the world, either for man or God: it has no room material world, he comes in to turn aside its for man, such as he feels himself to be, free, recourse, or to interrupt, or to give a new direc-sponsible, and related to a moral government; tion to its order. The order of nature allows it has no room for God, thought of as we must the bird to wing itself from east to west, or think of him, or not think at all.-North British from tree to tree; but the shaft of the savage, Review. or the gun of the sportsman, brings its plumage to the dust. How obvious is this; and yet we hear it affirmed that the smallest imaginable intervention, disturbing the fated order of nature, linked as are its parts irrevocably from eternity, must issue, if it were possible, in breaking up the vast framework of the material universe. If only the free will of man be acknowledged, then this entire sophism comes down in worthless fragments. So long as we allow ourselves to speak as theists, then miracles which we at tribute to the will, the purpose, the power of God, are not in any sense violations of nature; or

CIRCULAR PANORAMIC PRINTS.-Mr. Sutton proposes to make the panoramic lens available for producing photographic pictures including an angle of 900, vertically as well as horizontally, by using glasses in the form of a segment of a sphere, instead of that of a cylin der now in use. The focus in such pictures would be perfect in every part except where an object happened to be nearer to the operator than ten or twelve yards, and which would rarely happen.-London Review.

From The Spectator.

NEW TALES BY HANS CHRISTIAN AN-
DERSEN.*

us how Rudy's father and mother and uncle had all perished in the snow of the Alps and in the embrace of "Our Lady of the Ice." THE many admirers of Hans Andersen in The picturesque name has a household interEngland will be glad to hear that he has est to Andersen, who heard it first from his lately published a little volume of new tales, own father, predicting his death from a chill which will, doubtless, in due course of time in the Danish fogs. But the Erl King's be translated. They are worth reading, but daughter, whose kiss is death, does not bear they are not equal to his earlier efforts: to be metamorphosed into a weird ladyThere is the same naif and pleasant style, half giantess, half sorceress-who floats up lighted up with touches of the old humor, over the cliffs on the north wind, and bears but the author has followed an unfortunate an angry grudge against the sons of men inspiration in turning his inimitable sketches who scale her rocks for eagles' eggs and of animal life into novellettes of veritable pierce her mountains for railways. She men and women. It is the old blunder, looks out scornfully through her veil of mist which his autobiography exhibits in almost on the first train. They are amusing themevery page, of mistaking a playful and cre- selves, the gentlemen, down there-the powative fancy for imagination. We regret the ers of thought," said our Lady of the Ice; error almost more than we wonder at it; "but the powers of nature will prevail in Hans Andersen has a strange power of the end;" and she laughed, she sang, till skimming the surface of deep thought, which it rang again in the valleys. "There fell an he has not unnaturally confounded with phil- avalanche," said the people below. Between osophical insight, much as he has mistaken" Our Lady" and Rudy is a wager of life quick and manifold perceptions for wide and death; for Rudy, when a child, has been sympathies. He is at home with children snatched as if by a miracle from her emand animals precisely because he is unable brace. More than once she seems to reclaim to understand strong passion or the prob- him; always her own cold touch and the lems of genuine speculation; and if he can strokes of her sisters, the powers of dizzimake a china image talk like a man it is at ness, fail against the steady foot and eye of the price of appreciating men and women the stout-hearted mountain climber. Even like china images; they have color and form, when he scales the eagle's nest, on a jutting and even movement, but we feel that they brow of icy cliff, and guarded by the furious have not life. He speaks himself of the mother bird, his courage and skill carry him powerful influence Heine has exercised on through. He wins the rich reward an Enghim, but he does himself injustice if he sup- lishman has promised for the eaglets, and is poses that he has copied more than a certain able to claim the hand of Babette, the milbizarre trick of style from the thoughtful ler's daughter. After a little jealous quarGerman poet. After all, we have no reason rel with his betrothed, all seems to be to complain when M. Andersen has done so smoothed over, and the lovers start for Gemuch so well. Even his failures are re-neva that the marriage ceremony may be deemed by touches which no one but him- performed. They stop on the way at Chillon self could have imagined, and the execution almost atones for the faulty composition of

his sketches.

The first of the "New Tales" is founded on the true story of two Swiss lovers who went the day before their marriage to a little island near Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva. Their boat drifted away from its moorings, and the young man was drowned before his betrothed's eyes in trying to bring it back. From this incident Hans Andersen works back to the history of their lives. He tells Nye Eventyr og Historier af H. C. Andersen. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel.

and the catastrophe happens. The story would be almost without a plot, if our Lady of the Ice were not introduced; and the half supernatural machinery only serves to lengthen and perplex a tale of real life. descriptions of Alpine climbing and the conversation of the two cats at the mill are the best part of the story. The history of Rudy's first visit, when the miller turns him out of doors as too poor, is full of genuine humor. The parlor-cat is the first to speak. "Do you know, you from the kitchen, the miller knows everything? That was a rare ending it had. Rudy came here towards evening,

me.

and he and Babette had a lot to whisper I, too, perched on a stalk like the flowers," and tattle about; they stood in the passage said the swallow. "It is not altogether just outside the miller's room. I lay at their pleasant, but it is like being married; one feet, but they had no eyes or thoughts for is fixed fast; " and he comforted himself with 'I will go at once in to your father,' this. "That is poor comfort," said the said Rudy, 'that is acting honorably.' flowers in pots in the windows. "But 'Shall I follow you?' said Babette, that flowers in pots cannot be quite trusted,” will give you courage.' 'I have courage thought the swallow; "they are too much enough,' said Rudy; but if you are there, about with men." he must be good-humored, whether he likes it or not.' And so they went in. Rudy trod heavily on my tail. Rudy is very awkward. I mewed; but neither he nor Babette had any ears to listen with. They opened the door, and both went in, I first; but I sprang up on the back of a chair; I could not conceive how Rudy would kick out. But the miller kicked out; that was a jolly row; ' out at the doors, up on the mountains to the chamois; Rudy may now aim at them, and not at our little Babette.' And Babette said good-by to him as demurely as a little kitten that cannot see its mother." Pity a man who can write like this should mistake his genuine knowledge of cats for sympathy with human sorrows and love!

The third story, "Psyche," is the most ambitious of the series, and is more like a sketch by Hawthorne than like Andersen's earlier works. A young painter is living in Rome during the great days of the Renaissance, when Michael Angelo and Raphael were contemporaries. In spite of the times, in spite of Raphael's example, although his companions constantly urge him to enjoy life, and take "cakes and ale" like his fellows, the sculptor remains faithful to his better nature, and is kept from all uncleanness by a feeling for some unachieved, unknown ideal. Suddenly his dreams seem to be realized in the garden of a great Roman palace, where "the large white lallaes shoot up with their green fleshy leaves in the marble basin, where the clear water was plashing." He sees a young girl, graceful and pure as he has seen no woman yet, except in a picture of Psyche by Raphael. He returns home to breathe his new feeling into his work, and a statue of Psyche grows gradually under his hand, in which his friends see that his genius has at last found play. Rome

among the visitors to his studio is the father of the unconscious model. The prince is struck with the likeness to his daughter, and commissions the artist to execute it in marble. The workman's task is at last done, and the sculptor goes to announce the result to his patron. Unhappily he is allowed to see the young girl alone; there has been no

A little short story, how the swallow would have a love, is a gem in its way. The unhappy bird was fastidious. He first rejected the spring flowers, snowdrops, and crocuses; "they are too neat,-tidy girls, just confirmed, though fresh enough." Like all young men, he was sweet upon ripe beauties. So he flew to the anemones, but they were too prudish; the violets were too ro-rings with the report of a new sculptor, and mantic, the tulips were too gorgeous, the daffodils too homely. He was on the point of courting the sweet-pea; but, on coming up, saw a pod hanging on a tendril close by. "Who is that?" he asked. "That is my sister," said the sweet-pea. "Then you will look like that when you are older." The suitor was frightened and flew away. Autumn came, and it was time, if ever, to make thought of social "convenance" where the a choice. The swallow fixed on mint. "She difference of rank is insuperable; and the has no flower exactly, and yet is a flower artist in a moment of madness tells everyevery inch of her, and smells from the root thing and pleads for hope. "He knew not to the top." But the mint stood stiff and what he was saying; does the crater know still, and at last said, "Friendship, but really that it is vomiting glowing lava ?" A look nothing more. I am old and you are old; of scorn and abhorrence, an indignant order we can very well live for one another, but to leave the room, end the interview. He marriage-no, do not let us play the fool in rushes half-frenzied to his studio, and is our old age." Winter comes, and the swal- about to shiver the statue to pieces, when a low lingering too long, is caught, stuffed, friend interferes, and hurries him off to a and put in a case as a curiosity. "Now am bacchanalian carouse in a tavern outside the

priate to the thought of spiritual beauty. These, it may be said, are mere faults of style, but they are faults that indicate deeper deficiencies. That the purpose of a life may subsist when the life itself is wrecked, as the soul may outlast its tenement, is undoubtedly true. But the story could not well have been worse told than in "Psyche." For we require some evidence that the artist's sense of the beautiful was indeed a serious conviction, interwoven with his very existence, out of which a great work might grow naturally, and not a mere borrowed opinion or vagrant dream. He falls too easily and completely to have had in him the stuff of which men and artists are made. The man who is exhausted by one feeling would be incapable of even one immortal work. Precisely the history of his long, shattered after-life-the miserable years during which he might have risen again, and did not-make it impossi ble to believe in him as a sculptor. His true life, his real Psyche, if his story has been rightly told, was at the foot of the Cross.

walls. He seems to have shaken off the old | tist's presumption, he tells us that her face sickness of unquiet aspiration, and to be had an expression "as if she had suddenly living in every pulse for the first time. Next touched a wet, clammy frog." He describes morning the "light of the clear star fell in in a passage that reads like a reminiscence the rosy tinted dawn upon himself and the of Hamlet, how a maggot wriggled and marble Psyche; he trembled to look on the crawled in the skull of a dead artist, as if image of the incorruptible; it seemed as if the same quaint humor that draws its occahis glance were pollution." He veils it; but sion in Shakspeare from the contrast of the he cannot be easy while its presence, speech-gravedigger and the churchyard, was approless and reproachful, is in the room. There is an old well in his yard, half choked with rubbish and overgrown with creepers; he casts the statue into it. But the shock of disappointed passion and moral revulsion has been too much for him; he is prostrated by fever, and when he wakes again it is as a strange man in a new world, with only a few ghostlike memories from his old life, which seems nothing to the ever-present realities of Heaven and Hell. The thought of passing from trouble and change into God's peace upon earth overpowers him, and he becomes a monk. His friends tell him that he has betrayed the trust given him by God in forsaking art; he crosses himself, "avaunt Satanas," and goes on his way praying. Visions of his buried Psyche rise before him, but he kneels before the crucifix till they depart. So years glide on, and at last the cloister bell tolls for him, and he is laid in earth brought from Jerusalem, among good men gone before him. Nothing seems to be left of his work or of his name on earth. But after many years the workmen who are laying the foundations of a new street disinter the statue of a beautiful girl with butterfly wings from the rubbish of an old well; and critics know it for a noble work of the Renaissance time. "What is earthly is blown away, disappears; only the stars in the infinite know of it. What is heavenly shines in its own light, and when the light is quenched, even then the thought lives."

We have tried to do justice to the real beauty of this story without criticising it in detail as we went on. We think it Andersen's best effort of the kind, but we must repeat that we think him unequal to the work. The very peculiarities of his style, the power of homely illustration and fanciful allusion, which make him the poet of common life, have a tendency to degenerate into farce in a higher region. When he wishes to paint the disgust of the young princess at the ar

But M. Andersen has his revenge upon us and all critics in his last story. It tells how the snail reproached the dog-rose for its luxuriant bloom and frivolous life. "You have given the world all you have had in you; whether that had any worth is a question I have not time to think over, but the serious point is, you have done nothing for your inner development." The rose humbly admits its inferiority. "You are one of those thoughtful, deep natures, one of the highly gifted, who will astonish the world." "That is not my idea," said the snail. "The world does nothing for me; what should I do for the world? I have enough to do with myself, and enough in myself." And years went on. The snail was earth in the earth; the rose tree was earth in the earth; but new flowers were blooming in the garden, and new snails grew there; they crept into their houses and spat ; what was the world to them?