tic purposes, nor for the defence of our colo- | blindly and entirely to the professions of a nies, nor for the reduction of the Indian re- powerful neighboring State, or to hamper our bellion, is purely of the nature of a war ex- commerce, embarrass our finances, and rependiture, in self-defence, forced upon us by tard necessary improvements for the purthe threatening attitude of a Power which pose of keeping up a barren and unprofitable tells us in the same breath that it is our cor- force to defend us against attacks which may dial friend and sure ally. We should prefer certainly never have been contemplated, but other proofs of cordiality, friendship, and alli- which it is our bounden duty to render imance than are to be found in an attitude possible. The time has arrived when we which compels us either to trust ourselves ought to speak plainly on this matter. THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY, or a Summer | already stiffening on the shore. He was carly Ramble among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist; or Ten Thousand Miles over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland. By Hugh Miller, Author of the "Old Red Sandstone," &c. Edinburgh: Constable and Co. astir next morning, and almost the first person he met was the poor sheep-stealer, looking more like a ghost than a living man. The miserable creature had mustered strength enough to crawl up from the beach. My friend has often met better men with less pleasure. He found a shelThis book contains two sets of letters or chap-ter for the poor outcast; he tended him, preters contributed by the late Hugh Miller to the paper edited by him, the Witness, with some little omission by the editor of digressions into Scotch church controversy. One set of papers tells of exploration among fossils of the Hebrides, the other sketches Rambles of a Geologist over ten thousand miles of Scottish ground. These chapters were written with complete freedom of tone, and contain many passages equal in graphic power to the best of Hugh Miller's other writings. We may quote for example part of the story of an old man who had been in prison for sheep-stealing, and after many wanderings with a lost character from island to island in the Hebrides, squatted under an old sail on the beach at Eigg. There was a miller on the island, till one winter night, none heeded him, not even his own son, who drenched in a storm, he was dying of starvation. The minister tried then to bring him to the manse, but the night was pitch dark, and over the precipitous rocks it was found impossible to carry him "And so, administering some cordials to the poor hapless wretch, they had to leave him in the midst of the storm, with the old wet sail flapping about his ears, and the half-frozen rain pouring in upon him in torrents. He must have passed a miserable night, but it could not have been a whit more miserable than that passed by the minister in the manse. As the wild blast howled around his comfortable dwelling, and shook the casements as if some hand outside were essaying to open them, or as the rain pattered sharp and thick on the panes, and the measured roar of the surf rose high over every other sound, he could think of only the wretched creature exposed to the fury of a tempest so terrible, as perchance wrestling in his death agony in the darkness beside the breaking wave, or as scribed for him, and, on his recovery, gave him The THE SALE OF RACHEL'S SOUVENIRS.-The French papers say that the sale of Rachel's effects went off very unsatisfactorily. famous India shawl, which the Empress of Russia took from her own shoulders to wrap round those of the tragedienne, when the sound of her hollow cough distressed the kind heart of her majesty, did not fetch so much as would have been asked for the same article, without souvenir, in any shop in Paris. The bracelet given by Queen Victoria was likewise sold to vulgar hands for an ordinary price. THE CURATE. Now, through the land, his care of souls he And like a primitive apostle preached; From The Examiner. Bell and Legends and Lyrics. A Book of Verses. THIS modest" book of verses" by a poet's daughter is remarkable for its simplicity and truth. There is no strain after showy thoughts or admirable phrases visible in any line of it, there is desire to attain and success in attaining the purity and grace of speech without which verse is an impertinence, but we never can conceive Miss Procter saying to herself, when she has written any couplet, "there the reader of taste will make a pencil mark and think to himself, Fine!" The singer has in her own heart a little creed to dwell upon, it is in some form the burden of all her pleasant stories and her songs :-We come into the world with work to do, and Now is the right time for working, and the way to work is with warm faith in God and in each other. Kind little words are of the same blood as great and holy deeds. Pain is true blessing upon those who recognize its source. Each incompleteness bids us labor upward; above all, what is wanting to the perfectness of human love points to the divine end of all our labors. Learn, she says, "Learn the mystery of Progression duly : Do not call each glorious change Decay; But know we only hold our treasures truly, When it seems as if they passed away. "Nor dare to blame God's gifts for incomplete ness; In that want their beauty lies: they roll Towards some infinite depth of love and sweetness, Bearing onward man's reluctant soul." The singer warns against the false genius who can bid us "dwell apart Tending some ideal smart One by one the moments fall; Let thy whole strength go to each, Let no future dreams elate thee, Learn thou first what these can teach. "One by one (bright gifts from Heaven) Joys are sent thee here below; Take them readily when given, Ready, too, to let them go. "One by one thy griefs shall meet thee, Do not fear an armed band; One will fade as others greet thee, Shadows passing through the land. "Do not look at life's long sorrow; See how small cach moment's pain; If thou set each gem with care." Simple and pure teaching of old truths that must be told and told again for centuries to come! And seldom can they be told more effectually than in the sincere and unaffected language that comes out of a good woman's heart. There is an old truth here too : "Judge not; the workings of his brain And of his heart thou canst not see; In God's pure light may only be With some infernal fiery foo, May be the slackened angel's hand And take a firmer, surer stand; The measure of the height of pain " A few of the poems in this volume have appeared in Household Words, and it is no slight evidence of their power that they will recur as familiar strains to those who lighted on them among miscellaneous reading many months ago. Such tales as the Angel's Story, the Sailor Boy, the Tomb in Ghent, are very touching, and derive their power not so much from artistic treatment-verbal and technical objections may be raised, perhaps, a score of times in the course of the volume but because of the unstudied earnestness with which Miss Procter knows how to express warm feelings and thoughts both delicate and true. In the last volume, page 320, we copied from Household Words "A Woman's Question," which it now appears is by Miss Procter. There was a sense of incompleteness about the poem, and in a review in the Athe-"I næum we find an additional verse which satisfies the want: " Nay, answer not-I dare not hear, The words would come too late; We copy two more extracts; "All yesterday I was spinning, And the dream that I spun was so lengthy, "I heeded not cloud or shadow That flitted over the hill, Or the humming-bees, or the swallows, "I took the threads for my spinning, "The shadows grew longer and longer, "But I could not leave my spinning, I heeded not, hour by hour, How the silent day had flown. "At last the grey shadows fell round me, went up the hill this morning HUSH. "I can scarcely hear,' she murmured, Calmly still she strove to speak, I can hear a horseman ride.' 'It was only the deer that were. feeding Birds lay in their leafy nest, But Rest to the weary spirit, fatter in FLESH than all the children which did eat the portion of the king's meat. Thus Melzar took away the portion of the meat and the wine that they should drink and gave them pulse." And thus, too, pulso appears to be "a dainty dish" not only fit "to set before a king," but better than all the king's meat and all the king's wine! And, moreover, with reference to modern chemical analysis and its results, so far as regards this precise description of food, and considering the difference between heat-giving, which, in fact, is a sort of fat-yielding material, and actual solid flesh-yielding substance, how peculiarly and strictly, and even chemically, correct is the expression "fatter in flesh," when the flesh-yielding, rather than merely fat-yielding quality of the food is considered.-The Builder. PULSE A SUBSTANTIAL FOOD.-The fleshy | ten days their countenances appeared fairer and yielding qualities of all the pulse-or bean, pea, and lentil-family are very notable, but by no means a modern discovery. If Esau paid dearly for his mess of pottage, he had at least the advantage of a bowlful of the very best vegetable food for the support of his fleshy, hairy body; inasmuch as Esau's "red pottage was made of "lentils," as appears from Genesis xxv. 3034. Listen, too, ve patronizers of the "Arabic" Revelanta-Relevanta-Ervelanta and all the other change-ringing in the pulse-the pea, bean, and lentil-line, to the words of Daniel on this special subject:-"Prove thy servants, I beseech thee, ten days; and let them give us pulse to eat and water to drink: then let our countenances be looked upon before thee, and the countenances of the children that eat of the portion of the king's meat. And at the end of From The Saturday Review. GEORGE WITHER'S HALLELUJAH.* MANY generations have passed since George Wither "composed these hymns and songs, in hope that" he should "at some time, upon some occasion, in some persons, prevent or dissolve the devil's enchantments by these lawful charms." In the common wreck of all that was pure and noble at the Restoration, sacred poetry was not likely to escape. Almost every copy of the Hallelujah has perished; and the author's name has become a bye-word to express the sombre dulness of Puritan fanatics. Yet the book has some features which might in themselves have preserved it from neglect. It was to the families of the Commonwealth what the Christian Year has been to our own times-a manual of devotional song, connecting itself with all seasons and occupations. Men who went to a battle or to a marriage-feast with as much solemn earnestness of purpose as their descendants carry to a church, required a special psalmist to interpret their lives. Mr. Carlyle, indeed, tells us that the whole reality of Puritan faith has so completely passed away from among us that we cannot properly understand it, even as antiquarians. Perhaps it is true that the men of whom such abundant record exists-whom Vandyke painted, and Milton sung, and whose party watchwords on either side have become historical-were yet, by the very intenseness with which they threw themselves into the present, an unsearchable mystery to us, who have lost hope in revivals and reformations. Still the interest we feel in those times is imperishable ; and we are thankful for whatever may help us to realize them. If we cannot transport ourselves into the swarming life of an old Italian town, and walk its streets as Quirites, it is something that the forum and baths and villas have been preserved to us in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Fossil art has its value, when the conditions of growth for the type are gone irrevocably. But a prejudice exists against sacred poetry. Dr. Johnson, in passing judgment on the finest lines that Waller ever wrote, gave sentence against all attempts of the kind. Yet the sublime pathos which gives dignity even to Dryden's feeblest effort, and the bold *Hallelujah; or, Britain's Second Remembrancer. Composed in a threefold volume by George Wither. With an Introduction by Edward Farr. London: John Russell Smith. lyrics with which Charles Wesley constructed a popular liturgy, might alone plead with more moderate critics against any general view. Indeed, there seems no reason why religious love, and faith, and doubt, should not find a poetical expression as well as their secular counterparts. Unhappily the terms " scriptural" and "religious" are too often used as convertible. But Oriental scenes and imagery are in themselves so foreign to our habits of thought, that it is difficult for any untrayelled Englishman to give what may pass for local coloring with success. Besides, there is something tame in any paraphrase, and few centuries produce a poet who could rival the simple beauty of Ruth or Isaiah. Imitations of the Psalms and devotional parts of Scripture must always be crude and poor for another reason. The abrupt transitions, and logical parallelisms, and antithetical repetitions in which Hebrew writers delighted, are faulty in thought and bad in taste when they appear in an English dress. Take, for instance, the passage which Mr. Farr has quoted : "God came from Teman, And the Holy One from Mount Paran, His glory covered the heavens, And the earth was full of his praise, And his brightness was as the light; He had horns coming out of his hand, And there was the hiding of his power." It is poetry, as he says, of the most exalted nature; but no Englishman, and no European, would naturally express his thoughts in that order or by such imagery. It must be admitted that much of Wither's poetry is Scriptural rather than religious, and for this reason it can never, we think, become extensively popular. But the age in which Wither wrote was one when Hebrew thought had penetrated every class of society. Jewish names were given at the font; texts and Bible phrases were the garnish of common talk; Judaism had leavened the current Christianity: and men looked forward at no distant time to realize in England a Divine commonwealth on the model of that which they found in the books of Judges and Samuel. For these reasons Wither wrote in what may be regarded as a foreign tongue naturally and well. It was under similar conditions that our great Scriptural epic was conceived and written by a vastly greater poet. George Wither published his Hallelujah "in the interval between the war which Charles I. waged against the Scotch Covenant ers and that of the Parliamentarians against the King. Himself probably a Royalist at heart though he served in the army of the Parliament, and passionately fond of peace though by accident a soldier, he seldom speaks of war or the prospects of it without lamentation. He loved the plains of Beulah rather than the battle-field of Armageddon. Yet there is something of the sound of a trumpet in the straightforward vigor of his "Hymn for Victory," which is prefaced with the direction, "Sing this as the Ten Commandments." "It was alone Thy Providence Which made us masters of the field; This is a good average specimen of Wither's powers, and its merits are not of the highest order. There is no great fancy or power; but he is favorably distinguished from the poets of his own time by not sinning flagrantly against taste, and from those of the nineteenth century by being intelligible. Ocsionally he rises with his subject; and some of his poems about love are among his best. Take, for instance, one "For Lovers being constrained to be absent from each other: "— "Now that thou and I must part, * ** * * "If thou fear lest death may bar Death our meetings cannot let, Rest, my dear, in His embrace." We have quoted these stanzas at length, because they throw light on the inner life of that great party whose ideas had already inspired Wither, and which he soon afterwards joined. We are too apt to judge the Puritans by reference to the dregs of the Genevan faction in our own time. But what is now the watch-word of a party was then the faith of a people. The whole compass of Puritan theology exhibits no such wretched compromises between religion and thought, or the worship of God and Mammon, as are displayed in the favorite manuals of our dayThe Religion of Geology; or, "How to Make the Best of Both Worlds. Men now ask themselves whether saint and citizen are not incompatible terms; and preacher and divine, uneasily conscious of this latent scepti cism, address themselves to show that after all religion is not irrational, and may even be a good investment in money matters. Such thoughts as these never troubled the Puritan. He was simply the country gentleman or citizen, who thought, like all the rest of his time, that Church and State were one. English love of liberty and isolation from the Continent had made him prefer the Genevan model of a divine republic to the Romish or any other hierarchy. The question, which should conquer, was one of life and death to him-for Rochelle had fallen, and Gustavus Adolphus was dead, and a Stuart was King. But no man ever doubted that the dominant party had a right to impose the unity of its own preference. It was not Laud's persecu tions that outraged the moral sense of the times, but the fact that he persecuted on the wrong side, and to restore the kingdom of the Beast. Christianity on either side was understood to embrace every sphere of political action, and to color every phase of a citizen's life. Puritan religion was not simply to be found in the closet and the meetinghouse. A larger justice will be done to both parties when these facts are more fully recog |