the eye of the spirit, and tries to teach us to see it so too. As Brimley says, nature has ever been to the poet a "mystic book, written by the finger of God, whose characters were indeed discernible by the senses, but whose meaning was only to be deciphered by the imagination,

By observation of affinities

In objects where no brotherhood exists
To passive minds.”

We common men love this beauty of the world, but do not comprehend it. We yearn towards it. Our heart has deepest affection for all the gentleness and awfulness of the world, for that graciousness of nature revealed in every bud and dewdrop, in the wavy range of the mountains; revealed alike in the stream, and the trees that bend down to it, and the flowers that grow brighter for it, and the bird that sings with it. We cannot help getting sentimental; we wrap ourselves round with this beauty, or at least with something to remind us of it. We have flowers woven in our carpets; we hang flowers on our walls; our girls shall have rosebuds figured on their delicate morning dresses.

But the poet sees this beauty more clearly than we, feels it more deeply. We are dumb, but he can tell of it, can sing a divine song about it. And see as well as we may, we do not look into the innermost shrine as he does, do not see the high significance, beginning with the daisy, and ending at the throne of God, the symbolisms, the history, the science, the theology.

He sings us a divine song about it; for true poetry is not sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal; not pretty follies, nor spasmodic incomprehensibility; but love in its utterness, truth in its simplicity, and therefore in its beauty.

Poetry is conscientious. The poet is the utterer of truth. He stands between God and man as an interpreter, and dares not attempt to deceive either.

God made things good, and the poet reveals them good, and makes other things good also. He reveals; he creates; for love fills his soul, and love makes known all secrets. Faith and hope are his; they are high and great, but love is highest and greatest.

It

This love of his is a key to more than nature. opens up to him those secresies of the human heart, which in his own experience had not been observed, if they had existed. Hence it is, that, in his Essay on the "Angel in the House," Brimley looks to poets to do what has long been neglected,-broadly, and for all time, to sing of the sacrament of marriage, the blessing of the home, the beauty of domestic life. Too long have poets sung of frail beauties, of the delights of early love, of the romance of courtship. They write poetry for the young; poetry is needed also for the mature. Fathers and mothers despise the strains they loved in youth, and, because of this, depreciate all poetry; it remains for some poet to write poems for them.

The other papers in Mr. Brimley's volume are on various and less important subjects. In one on " My Novel," the failure of the Pall Mall novelist to delineate country life is exposed in a very happy manner. Another is a worthy and appreciative tribute to Mr. Kingsley's "Westward Ho!" The other papers are worthy of the rest, and of the author; and the contents of this volume fully justify the high estimation in which Mr. Brimley was held.

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE GERMAN,

BY THOMAS CARLYLE. London: Chapman and Hall.

(PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1858.)

ST. CHRISTOPHER, being the strongest of men, vowed he would serve only a being stronger than himself. He sought Satan, but finding he feared. Christ, left him, not knowing what to do. So he lived beside a deep and dangerous river, and lent his great strength to aid those who had need to cross. And one night came a little child to be carried over, who proved an awful burden, so that with difficulty they reached the other side. And the little child was Christ, and Christopher served Him.

We remembered this legend, witnessing the career of Thomas Carlyle. Too strong to serve Cant and Formalism, he tried Unbeliefs, but they were too weak ; so he occupies himself with what practical work is to his hand; with his strong words aiding men. day, we trust, the little child will come to him.

Some

Those of our readers who know little of this man will be glad to hear of him; and those who have read his books will not despise a few remarks on his merits and defects as a teacher. His renown proves him worthy of such an exposition; for if he were not great and strong, he would not be so strongly loved by some, and hated by others as he is. Wherefore, we have taken this opportunity, now that the popular edition of his works approaches completion, to say a few words upon one whose influence is great for good and for evil, and whose works are especially regarded by the thinking youth of this country.

We shall, first, give an account of his various works,

accompanied with extracts; and then deduce therefrom his chief teachings, endeavouring to point out their truth and error.

His chief work is the " History of the French Revolution." It is a prose epic, with an interest so intense, that one cannot pause in its perusal; a picture so life-like, that one is present in all the scenes it describes with an unconscious pathos, so terrible, that one is in an agony while he reads. It is an awful tragedy, a bitter mystery, a great, strange riddle, -that French revolution. The reddened earth and sky, that seemed a glorious sunrise for the world, proves to be the glare of incendiary fires and streets flowing with blood, alas, no baptism of fire and blood, but a mockery, shame, and a sin. We cannot stay to trace the story of this book, from the flush of its brave beginning to the despair of its shameful end; from the hush round the dying bed of Louis the Wellbeloved, that prophesied the coming storm, to the last full fury of that storm, when the royal and the princely, the beautiful and the brave, shed their blood in an awful sacrifice which brought no redemption. Never was the lesson so terribly taught of the folly of striving to destroy that which exists, with nothing better to put into its place. Let sceptics see to it ere they attack Christianity; and Nonconformists, ere they threaten the Church; Chartists also, ere they undermine the throne.

In the "Letters and Speeches of Cromwell," the great Puritan is left to plead his own cause, and tell his own tale. The editor contents himself with "elucidations" -connecting links of history, explanations of obscure passages, exquisite word-pictures of locales connected with Cromwell's history. By such means he has cleared away the prejudices and calumnies of centuries, and the mighty Protector is revealed to us as he was, a natural king, a God-accredited hero, not without faults of belief and life,-yet a man, working in sight

of God, and for God; fearing Him, but fearing nothing else.

Mr. Carlyle's conclusion is somewhat despairing :

"Puritanism, without its king, is kingless; anarchy falls into dislocation, self collision, deeper anarchy: king, defender of the Puritan faith, there can none now be found."

Puritanism is dead now, he says; long years of hypocrisia have intervened, and ours is an age of

cant.

"Sartor Resartus" is a wild, strange book, not only original, but intensely interesting, with the additional recommendation that in the hero thereof, Mr. Carlyle seems partially, at least, to have depicted himself. It is not only the history of a philosopher-his education, sorrows, scepticisms, and fire-baptism into belief, but, under the name of the Philosophy of Clothes, a mine of somewhat heterogeneous wisdom on the inward and the outward, and their inter-relations :

"It is written, the heavens and the earth shall fade away like a vesture, which, indeed, they are, the time-vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatever represents spirit to spirit, is properly a clothing, a suit of raiment, put on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus, in this one pregnant subject of clothes, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been; the whole external universe, and what it holds is but clothing, and the essence of all science is in the Philosophy of Clothes."

Thus Church Clothes signify the outward manifestations of the religious principle:

"In our era of the world, those same church clothes have gone sorrowfully out at elbow; nay, far worse, many of them have become mere hollow shapes or masks, under which no living figure or spirit any longer dwells."

The book is full of wisdom de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis, put forward in what seems to us a very attractive form. There is much genial humour, and some keen irony. There is eloquence also, and poetry, especially in the accounts of the hero's love passages.