"The change of ministry is the only topic. Glencore's affair has worn itself out."

"And you'd have a brewing of your own, | humanity. Frail organizations, like mine, I've no doubt," responded the other. cannot brave these ordeals. What are they "I'd, at least, have foreseen the time talking of in town? Any gossip afloat?" when this compact, this holy alliance, should become impossible-when the developed intelligence of Europe would seek something else from their rulers than a well concocted scheme of repression. I'd have provided for the hour when England must either break with her own people or her allies; and I'd have inaugurated a new policy, based upon the enlarged views and extended intelligence of mankind."

"I'm not certain that I quite apprehend you," muttered Harcourt.

"No matter; but you can surely understand that if a set of mere mediocrities have saved England, a batch of clever men might have done something more. She came out of the last war the acknowledged head of Europe; does she now hold that place, and what will she be at the next great struggle?"

66

England is as great as ever she was," cried Harcourt, boldly.

"What was that about Glencore?" asked Upton, half indolently.

"A strange story; one can scarcely believe it. They say that Glencore, hearing of the King's great anxiety to be rid of the Queen, asked an audience of his Majesty, and actually suggested, as the best possible expedient, to adopt his own plan, and deny the marriage. They add, that he reasoned the case so cleverly, and with such consummate craft and skill, it was with the greatest difficulty that the king could be persuaded that he was deranged. Some say his Majesty was outraged beyond endurance: others, that he was vastly amused, and laughed immoderately over it."

"And the world, how do they pronounce upon it?”

There are two great parties-one for Glencore's sanity, the other against; but, as I said before, the Cabinet changes have absorbed all interest latterly, and the Viscount and his case are forgotten; and when I started, the great question was, who was to have the Foreign Office."

"Greater in nothing is she than in the implicit credulity of her people! sighed Upton. "I only wish I could have the same faith in my physicians that she has in hers! By the way, Stanhope, what of that new fellow they have got at St. Leonard's? They tell me he builds you up in some pre"I believe I could tell them one who will paration of gypsum, so that you can't move not," said Upton, with a melancholy smile. or stir, and that the perfect repose thus" Dine with me both of you to-day, at imparted to the system is the highest order of restorative."

seven; no company, you know. There is an opera in the evening, and my box is at your service if you like to go, and so till then," and with a little gesture of the hand he waved an adieu, and quitted the room.

"As often the fate of genius in these days as in more barbarous times," said Upton. "I read his pamphlet with much interest." If you were going back, Harcourt, I'd have begged of you to try him."

"And I'm forced to say, I'd have refused you flatly.'

"Yet it is precisely creatures of robust constitution, like you, that should submit themselves to these trials for the sake of

"I'm sorry he's not up to the work of office," said Harcourt, as he left the room; there's plenty of ability in him."

"The best man we have," said Stanhope; so they say at the Office."

"He's gone to lie down, I take it; he seemed much exhausted. What say you to a walk back to town?"

"I ask nothing better," said Stanhope; and they started for Naples.

new milk, sweet and creamy, as if it had just come from the cow; and for every purpose quite equal to it. We see that Soyer, Miss Nightingale, and Dr. A. Smith, Director-General of the Medical Department of the Army, have testified to the value of this invention from practical experience of it during the war. A company has been formed to manufacture it on a large scale, and, having tried it, we can vouch for its excel

GRIMWADE'S DESICCATED MILK.-A cow that should eat no food, and whose milk, nevertheless, should not cease to flow, would be invaluable to sailors, travellers, armies, and Londoners. All the advantages of such a cow are by an ingenious process now placed within the reach of the classes we have named. A bottle of dried milk is before us-milk in powder, which will keep in all climates, and for any length of time. We take a spoonful of it, mix it with a teaspoon-lence. ful of warm water; and, lo! there is a cup of

From The Spectator, 22 Nov. MRS. BROWNING'S AURORA LEIGH.*

his wife not so much as a woman whom he loves, and whose love he wants, as to be his THERE was always something of the Titan- helper in his social work. She is further ess about Mrs. Browning: her instincts offended by his slight estimate of art and were towards the vague, the vast, the inde- literature, and by his disbelief in a woman's finite, the unutterable; and the ideal world ability to attain high excellence in either. in which her imagination lived was a world So far as concerns herself, the record is one of formless grandeur, of radiant mist, in which more of feelings than of facts, a history of shapes of superhuman majesty moved and mental growth and the development of charloomed dimly glorious. In her art she was a acter rather than of fortune and outward inPythoness struggling for utterance, too full cidents. But there is no lack of incidents, of the god to do more than writhe her lips in and those of so startling a character that they convulsed agony; her speech was inarticulate, might serve for the plot of a Victoria melooften because she meant so much; the note drama. Indeed, nothing can be more evident she sounded became a hollow noise, because than that Mrs. Browning has not cared to it was so deep. In this state of mind she throw an air of every-day probability over wrote lyrical dramas on the Fall of Man her story, or to propitiate in the least that and the Crucifixion of Christ, which were sort of refinement which avoids almost with little more than hysterical spasms; poured equal horror violent emotions and eccentric herself forth in improvisations which in one actions. The two principal characters in the stanza stirred every heart and thrilled every book, besides the autobiographer Aurora soul, and in the next moved inextinguishable Leigh, are her cousin Romney Leigh, whom laughter, so strangely were strength and she refuses to marry for the motives before weakness mingled, grand thought and deep assigned, and a girl of the lowest station, feeling with nonsense, affectation, and wilful named Marian Erle, who is pure and good, puerility. Casa Guidi Windows was a great though abjectly poor and the child of brutal advance, though still there was much to do before she became mistress of her own powers -before she could guide the metal coursers of her chariot with a light finger on the silken reins of art. Aurora Leigh is in point of execution another great step forward; if the steeds still toss their heads somewhat wildly for well-bred carriage-horses, still snuff the air as if the trackless desert were their native home, it is that their mistress prefers to drive with a loose reign, and would rather ride with Mazeppa than take a ticket by the Great Western or a canter round Rotten Row.

tramps. There are other characters incidentally introduced, one of whom, a fashionable young widow, Lady Waldemar, plays a leading part in the development of the story; but the three we have mentioned are the principal dramatis personæ, and it is in their mutual relations that the interest of the poem consists. Thus we have already two very distinct elements of poetic excitement in the growth of Aurora's character, in her experience as woman and artist, and in the strange fortunes of Romney Leigh and Marian Erle. But along with these, we have on the But the old anarchic nature of the Titaness one hand, as appropriate enough to Aurora's is still discernible; still there is something of autobiography, frequent discursive reflections the old contempt for limitation and the little- on art and life in general, sketches of people ness of completeness; still the conception in society, the brilliant talk of London evenvast and vague and only half-realized; rich ing-parties, and all that might naturally enter elements of force and beauty in chaos and into the journalizing of a literary woman mixing confusion, the waters heaving and boiling in the literary and fashionable society of Lonwith life ere yet the demiurgic spirit has don; and on the other, as Romney Leigh is brooded over them and given to each thing a philanthropist to begin with, and loses his its definite form and its separate place. The wife through an overstraining on the practical poem professes to be the autobiography of a side of life and marriage, he too passes woman of genius, who early in life refuses to marry a man she likes, because he, being a philanthropist, seems to her to seek her for Aurora Leigh. By Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Published by Chapman and Hall.

through the various phases of Socialistic opinion; and the book not only abounds in discussion and allusions to the various and conflicting theories and schemes for the regeneration of society, but its deepest object

"As it was, indeed,

I felt a mother-want about the world,
And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb
Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,-
As restless as a nest-deserted bird
Grown chill through something being away,
though what

It knows not. I Aurora Leigh was born
To make my father sadder, and myself
Not over-joyous, truly. Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just),
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words;
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles: children learn by such,
Love's holy earnest in a pretty play,
And get not over-early solemnized,,
But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love Divine,
Which burns and hurts not-not a single bloom-
Become aware and unafraid of Love:
Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well,
Mine did, I know,—but still with heavier
brains,

consists, we should say, in the contrast and is a passage on mother's love, not easily to final reconcilement of Aurora's artistic culti- be surpassed. vation of the individual, with Romney's mechanical and materialistic plans for the improvement of the masses. It would require not perhaps more genius and intellect than Mrs. Browning has shown, to organize all this material, all these elements, into a poem of which each part should grow from the expanding life of the central idea, and be necessary to the completeness of the whole; but it would require a more patient endurance of intellectual toil, a more resolute hand upon the reins, more thought, more pains, less self-indulgence in composition, less wilfulness. She has succeeded in writing brilliantly and powerfully almost throughout this long poem of more than ten thousand lines of blank verse; she has touched social problems with the light of her penetrating intellect and the warmth of her passionate heart; has painted scenery with a free outline and a glowing color; has sketched characters as a sensitive and observant woman can sketch them; above all, she has dramatized passion with a force and energy that recall the greatest masters of tragedy: but these various excellences, though they make a book interesting, and prove genius of a high order, do not make a great poem, and will never be held to do so by any persons who know and feel that a work of art is something different in kind from the finest discursive talk, or even from a collection of studies however masterly, and though they may be ingeniously patchworked into a cleverly-devised frame.

It may be that Mrs. Browning cares little for this distinction; and that she would tell us, that, provided the wine be good, the shape of the glass matters not-that she never aimed at writing a great poem in our sense of the word, but only at writing fine sense and deep feeling. Be it so, if she really is satisfied with that explanation. We do not understand an artist who ignores art, especially when the consciousness of high moral and artistic aims is evidently present, and only the patient effort, the resolute will to conquer difficulties, is wanting. For the rest, she has succeeded in saying a number of beautiful things in a free and natural manner, that loses little of its ease and lightness in the more prosaic parts of the poem, and gains in much larger proportion in the impassioned parts by being in verse. Here, for instance,

And wills more consciously responsible,
And not as wisely, since less foolishly:
So mothers have God's license to be missed."
Here too is a shrewd criticism on
"moral
and intellectual systems."

"A fool will pass for such through one mistake,
Through said mistakes being ventured in the
While a philosopher will pass for such

gross

And heaped up to a system."

Quotations are not easy to find that suit our space and do justice to the poem from which they are torn. Mrs. Browning takes full room for her powers. But here is a letter, in which Marian Erle, whom Romney Leigh in his Socialist enthusiasm was going to marry, announces to her bridegroom her flight on the morning that was to be the mar riage morning.

"Noble friend, dear saint,
Be patient with me. Never think me vile,
But that I loved you more than such a name.
Who might to-morrow morning be your wife
Farewell, my Romney. Let me write it once,—
My Romney.

"Tis so pretty a coupled word,

I have no heart to pluck it with a blot.
We say 66 my God" sometimes upon our knees,
Who is not therefore vexed: so bear with it..
And me. I know I'm foolish, weak, and vain;
Yet most of all I'm angry with myself
For losing your last footstep on the stair,
The very first time I lost step of yours
That last time of your coming,-yesterday!
(Its sweetness comes the next to what you speak),

3

For that day. After, some one spoke of me
So wisely, and of you so tenderly,
Persuading me to silence for your sake
Well, well! it seems this moment I was wrong
In keeping back from telling you the truth:
There might be truth betwixt us two, at least,
If nothing else. And yet 'twas dangerous.
Suppose a real angel came from heaven

To live with men and women! he'd go mad,
If no considerate hand should tie a blind

Across his piercing eyes. 'Tis thus with you:
You see us too much in your heavenly light;
I always thought so, angel,-and indeed
There's danger that you beat yourself to death
Against the edges of this alien world,
In some divine and fluttering pity.

Yes,

It would be dreadful for a friend of yours
To see all England thrust you out of doors
And mock you from the windows. You might
say,

Or think (that's worse), 'There's some one in
the house

I miss and love still.'

Most kind of all,

Dreadful!
66 6 Very kind,
I pray you mark, was Lady Waldemar.
She came to see me nine times, rather ten-
So beautiful, she hurts me like the day
Let suddenly on sick eyes.
Your cousin!-ah, most like you! Ere you
She kissed me mouth to mouth: I felt her soul
Dip through her serious lips in holy fire.
God help me, but it made me arrogant;
I almost told her that you would not lose
By taking me to wife: though, ever since,
I've pondered much a certain thing she asked..
"He loves you, Marian?". in a sort of mild

came

Derisive sadness. . as a mother asks
Her babe, "You'll touch that star, you think?"
"Farewell!

I know I never touched it.

"This is worst:

Babes grow, and lose the hope of things above;
A silver threepence sets them leaping high-
But no more stars! mark that.

"I've writ all night,
And told you nothing. God, if I could die,
And let this letter break off innocent
Just here! But no-for your sake
"Here's the last :

I never could be happy as your wife,
I never could be harmless as your friend;
I never will look more into your face,

weep

And keep me happier.. was the thing to say,..
Than as your wife I could be!-0, my star,
My saint, my soul! for surely you're my soul,
Through whom God touched me! I am not so lost,
I cannot thank you for the good you did,
The tears you stopped, which fell down bitterly,
Like these the times you made me weep for joy
At hoping I should learn to write your notes,
And save the tiring of your eyes at night;
And most for that sweet thrice you kissed my lips
And said " Dear Marian."

""Twould be hard to read
This letter, for a reader half as learn'd;
But you'll be sure to master it, in spite
Of ups and downs. My hand shakes, I am blind;
I'm poor at writing, at the best,-and yet
I tried to make my g's the way you showed.
Farewell-Christ love you.-Say "Poor Marian"

now.'"

The essential fault of this book is that the plan is too large and complex for the inental power brought to bear upon it; that the characters do not sufficiently act upon cach other, and are too stationary in their own development. They neither grow from mutual influence nor from the expansion of their own individuality. Aurora is much the same person at thirty as at twenty; the accident which finally brings about the denouement would have brought it at any period in her mental growth. Marian Erle is a statue of heroic goodness, out of whom circumstances bring the varying expressions of that goodness, but who can scarcely be said to change, to learn any thing, to develop powers or virtues though she manifests them. And Romney Leigh is a somewhat vaguely-conceived type of a particular kind of self-sacrifice and intellectual narrowness, invested with the outward form and circumstances of an English gentleman. All this comes of not conceiving the work as a whole, but looking mainly to the separate effect of particular The characters have passages and scenes.

no true continuity and development of life in the book, because the writer never conceived them from beginning to end of their careers

Till God says, "Look!" I charge you, seek me in one coherent effort of imagination.

not,

We do not know whether Mrs. Browning good taste of introducing the Clarissa Harhas ever read "Clarissa Harlowe," Mrs. lowe calamity under any amount of reserve, Gaskell's "Ruth," and Miss Bronte's "Jane or for any emotional effect, in poem or novel. Eyre; "but in the story of Marian Erle she has joined together the central incident of Clarissa Harlowe with the leading sentiment of Ruth-that healing and reconciling influence of the maternal passion for a child whose birth is, according to common worldly feeling, the mother's disgrace. The combination is striking and original, not to say courageous in a lady. We mention it to disavow any feeling of repugnance to the moral, though we certainly do question the propriety and

The bar of the Old Bailey is the only place where we wish to hear of such things. The same objection does not of course apply to the incident borrowed from Jane Eyre. But it is disagreeable to be so forcibly reminded of a recent and popular work, when a small expenditure of ingenuity would have avoided the resemblance; which is enhanced by the fact that the incident proves in each case the solution of the story's knot.

Their duration, in some instances, has not exceeded two or three years; and on some of the earliest constructed lines in England, the rails have been changed twice, or even three times, since their opening. Where the conditions are favorable and the bars themselves perfectly sound, it is believed that the traffic which rails of ordinary quality are capable of bearing will not fall short of the large figure of twenty millions of tons.

GALVANIC ACTION IN THE EARTH. An bars were subject to lamination and disintegraeminent London cutler, Mr. Weiss, having tion from the repeated rolling of heavy loads. observed that steel seemed to be much improved when it had become rusty in the earth, and provided that the rust was not factitiously produced by the application of acids, made the experiment of burying some razor-blades for nearly three years, and the result fully corresponded to his expectation. The blades became coated with rust, which had the appearance of having exuded from within, but were not eroded, and the quality of the steel was decidedly improved. Analogy led to the conclusion that the same might hold good with respect to iron, under similar circumstances. He accordingly purchased fifteen tons of the iron with which the piles of London bridge had been shod. Each shoe consisted of a small inverted pyramid, with four straps, rising from the four sides of the base, which embraced and were nailed to the pile; the total length, from the point which entered the ground to the end of the strap, being about sixteen inches, and the weight about eight pounds. The pyramidal extremities of the shoes were found to be not much corroded, nor indeed were the straps; but the latter had become extremely and beautifully sonorous. When manufactured, the solid points in question were convertible into very inferior steel, also the bolts; but the straps produced steel of unequalled superiority.

DURATION OF RAILROAD IRON.-The London Mining Journal says that the complaints respecting the inferior quality of recently manufactured rails, naturally attributable to the attempts made by companies to reduce the price, have attracted attention both in England and the United States, and have led to some practical and scientific inquiries. On the first introduction of railroads it was confidently asserted that the rails would last for indefinite periods; but experience soon demonstrated that railway

THE AURORA BOREALIS AND THE TELEGRAPH.The effect of the aurora on the electric telegraph is generally to increase or diminish the electrio current used in working the wires. Sometimes it entirely neutralizes them, so that, in effect, no fluid is discoverable in them. The aurora borealis seems to be composed of a vast mass of electric matter, resembling in every respect that generated by the electro-galvanic battery. The currents from it change coming on the wires, and then disappear as the mass of the aurora rolls from the horizon to the zenith.

IMPROVEMENT IN BLASTING ROCKS.-A mode

now adopted in blasting rocks consists in placing the powder or charge within a tube or a case, between two heads provided with a suitable packing, and attached to a rod, by which ar rangement the charge is prevented from "blowing out," or obtaining vent in the direction of the line of the hole in which the tube and charge are placed, and the whole effect of the charge is exerted against the sides of the tubes or case. By this method it is represented that rocks may be blasted with much greater facility than by the ordinary mode, no tamping or packing of clay being necessary to confine the powder within the hole.