purple moors, where we heard the crow of the gorcock, and with a glimpse on the other side, over sand-hills and furzy bents, of the bright blue sealine. The cottage was a miserable hovel with a couple of rooms-a but and a ben, as they say with us and the father and mother of the dead woman, staid homely-looking people who had seen some sixty or seventy years of this forlorn life, met us at the door. "Is't for the papers?" the old man asked us when we told him we had come to see his daughter. He had heard of the newspapers even up there; so we had to explain to him that we were not reporters. They took us into a kind of out-house or shed where the body lay. The girl, she looked five or seven and twenty, had been ill since Martinmas, "just wasting away," her mother told us; and the previous day, after complaining of a pain in her left side and arm, she fell down suddenly, and was stone Idead in five minutes. It was spasm of the heart, angina pectoris, the surgeon said at once. When they were writing down the depositions by the light of the fast fading twilight outside, I went into the kitchen. A lad, six or seven years old, was sitting on a stool beside the hearth, sobbing and moaning over the peat-fire on the floor. It was a long time before I could get the little fellow to speak; but it came out at last-the old people had said their daughter was not married-that he "was greeting for his mither "-the unwedded wife who lay dead and cold in the next room. What misery, and heart-breaking, and years of suffering even a mud-hovel can cover, you see. Surely if such things can happen in this desolate part of God's world, and be seen of men, there must be many more worthy of note, most worthy of song, in those great cities where you live. Why is it that our poets will not give us a glimpse of the real heart-break sometimes in their poetry? Alack! alack! Lancelot. The roving gipsy life has well-nigh come to an end. Already it begins to grow dim and faint-very faint indeed. Is the Past, when it is past, one whit more substantial than the stuff of which dreams are made? But before the Past is cut away, and put aside finally, I have wished to gather up a few scraps of the work-work which, if not definitely relinquished yet, is now, like the neglected muse, pursued, with failing allegiance, and an unfrequent prayer Et tamen meas chartas which occupied, not unpleasantly, these autumn and winter nights. I send them to you-my oldest friend and friendliest critic. I might have chosen others, more spirited in treatment, perhaps, and of fresher and weightier interest. But it is better as it is. I fear that few of us can look back for many years on what we have written without finding that, like the rest of the world, we have much need to ask forgiveness. It can scarcely be right to revive the harsh or hasty judgments we pronounced upon contemporaries, whose feelings we unwittingly wounded; upon the active Christian missionary, whom we thought an uncharitable theologian; upon the amiable scholar and the genial humourist, whom we thought an indifferent poet. A few years ago, it would have been a labour of love to bind these sheaves together.* It is hardly so now. For, as I glance over the yellow and well-thumbed pages, I cannot but experience at moments a keen thrill of pain. You will feel with me, I know; for, indeed, there is no sharper sorrow in this world than that which is stirred by the sight of trifles, which are associated with the once familiar presence of those who have left uswith the true and generous hearts whose love was our best recompense, and the pleasant voices which will not greet us again. No more painful duty, however, can be imagined than that of seeking a title. To write a book is a comparatively easy affair; but to find a name for it after it is written (especially when it is about nothing in particular) wearies the brain and affects the temper. A kind friend, whose little gem of a picture-the pure saintliness of Raphael, touched and intensified by the truthful and homely picturesqueness of Wilkie's genius-has been seen and loved by thousands, and tens of thousands, on either shore of the Atlantic, suggests that an author in such straits should "request the prayers of the congregation." WE and I. These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM. E sat on the Devil's-bridge, and swung our legs over the parapet, Reginald de Moreville The De Morevilles were a fine Norman family in the reign of David I., " that soir sanct for the Crown." The present representative inherits the feudal tastes of his house, without the burden of its acres. The arch of a royal dome that hangs above the blue sea! Down the storm-stained sides of the precipice we can see the marrots standing like sentries along the slippery ledges, crowding around their fantastically coloured eggs, indulging in expressions of grotesque fun and uncouth endearment. Farther off the skua gulls, "white as ocean foam in the moon," "white as the consecrated snow that lies on Dian's lap" (choose between Shakspeare and Tennyson), float along the face of the cliffs, or hover above their nests on noiseless wings. Yet lower, the blue and shining deep beats against the iron bases of the hills, and moans among the caverned fissures where the seal and the otter lodge. Reginald had been explaining to me the critical system which his experience had induced him to adopt. Like many ingenious gentlemen of the period, he cheerfully acquiesced in the inevitable. Nothing is new, and nothing is true, and it don't matter." Since his cousin had thrown him over, however, his philosophical scepticism, without affecting his general health or his zeal at "parritch-time," had taken a more gloomy turn. The universe was in a state of helpless muddle, but it was best to leave it alone. There was no saying where it might stop if we once set it a-rolling. "What do we know?" he would ask, looking benevolently into the abyss. "We have been trying to find out for six thousand years, and I don't see that we have made very much way yet. The universe will be abolished before we have proved that it exists. "We have tacked together, indeed, a number of rules by which we regulate our morality and our digestion. We have built up pasteboard walls between us and the desolate and unpeopled unknown which lies beyond the rim of our life. With these laws, traditions, religions-we fence out the infinite. "Do not suppose that I undervalue our card houses. It is good that we have them. F Without |