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been originally published in the periodical form; and in 1859, Round the Sofa. In 1860 appeared Right at Last; and in 1863, Silvia's Lovers. These novels were all popular. The authoress was a prose Crabbe-earnest, faithful, and often spirited in her delineations of humble life. By confining herself chiefly to the manufacturing population, she threw light on conditions of life, habits, and feelings comparatively new and original in our fictitious literature. Her Life of Charlotte Brontë, 1857, has all the interest of a romance, and is worthy of the authoress of Mary Barton. Mrs Gaskell died at Alton, November 12, 1865, aged fifty-four.

Yorkshiremen of the West Riding.

From Life of Charlotte Brontë.

Even an inhabitant of the neighbouring county of Lancaster is struck by the peculiar force of character which the Yorkshiremen display. This makes them interesting as a race; while, at the same time, as individuals, the remarkable degree of self-sufficiency they possess gives them an air of independence rather apt to repel a stranger. I use this expression 'selfsufficiency' in the largest sense. Conscious of the strong sagacity and the dogged power of will which seem almost the birthright of the natives of the West Riding, each man relies upon himself, and seeks no help at the hand of his neighbour. From rarely requiring the assistance of others, he comes to doubt the power of bestowing it from the general success of his efforts, he grows to depend upon them, and to over-esteem his own energy and power. He belongs to that keen, yet shortsighted class who consider suspicion of all whose honesty is not proved as a sign of wisdom. The practical qualities of a man are held in great respect; but the want of faith in strangers and untried modes of action, extends itself even to the manner in which the virtues are regarded; and if they produce no immediate and tangible result, they are rather put aside as unfit for this busy, striving world; especially if they are more of a passive than an active character. Their affections are strong, and their foundations lie deep; but they are not -such affections seldom are-wide-spreading, nor do they shew themselves on the surface. Indeed, there is little display of any of the amenities of life among this wild, rough population. Their accost is curt; their accent and tone of speech blunt and harsh. Something of this may, probably, be attributed to the freedom of mountain air, and of isolated hill-side life, something be derived from their rough Norse ancestry. They have a quick perception of character, and a keen sense of humour; the dwellers among them must be prepared for certain uncomplimentary, though most likely true observations, pithily expressed. Their feelings are not easily roused, but their duration is lasting. Hence, there is much close friendship and faithful service. From the same cause also come enduring grudges, in some cases amounting to hatred, which occasionally has been bequeathed from generation to generation. I remember Miss Bronte once telling me that it was a saying round about Haworth: 'Keep a stone in thy pocket seven year; turn it and keep it seven year longer, that it may be ever ready to thy hand when thine enemy draws near.'

...

The West Riding men are sleuth-hounds in pursuit of money. These men are keen and shrewd; faithful and persevering in following out a good purpose, fell in tracking an evil one. They are not emotional; they are not easily made into either friends or enemies; but once lovers or haters, it is difficult to change their feeling. They are a powerful race both in mind and body, both for good and for evil.

The woollen manufacture was introduced into this

district in the days of Edward III. It is traditionally said that a colony of Flemings came over and settled in the West Riding to teach the inhabitants what to do The mixture of agricultural with with their wool. manufacturing labour that ensued and prevailed in the enough at this distance of time, when the classical West Riding up to a very recent period, sounds pleasant impression is left, and the details forgotten, or only brought, to light by those who explore the few remote parts of England where the custom still lingers. The idea of the mistress and her maidens spinning at the great wheels while the master was abroad ploughing his fields, or seeing after his flocks on the purple moors, is very poetical to look back upon; but when such life actually touches on our own days, and we can hear particulars from the lips of those now living, there come out details of coarseness-of the uncouthness of the rustic mingled with the sharpness of the tradesman-of irregularity and fierce lawlessness-that rather mar the vision of pastoral innocence and simplicity. Still, as it is the exceptional and exaggerated characteristics of any period that leave the most vivid memory behind them, it would be wrong, and in my opinion faithless, to conclude that such and such forms of society and modes of living were not best for the period when they prevailed, although the abuses they may have led into, and the gradual progress of the world, have made it well that such ways and manners should pass away for ever, and as preposterous to attempt to return to them, as it would be for a man to return to the clothes of his childhood.

A uniform edition of Mrs Gaskell's novels and tales has been published in seven volumes.

WILLIAM WILKIE COLLINS.

This gentleman's first work was a Life of his father, William Collins, the celebrated English painter. It was published in 1848, and was universally recognised as a valuable addition to our art biography. MR COLLINS then tried another field. He turned to fiction, and in 1850 published a classic romance of the fifth century, entitled Antonina, or the Fall of Rome. Though much inferior to Bulwer's historical romances, the work evinced Mr Collins's art in constructing an interesting story, and this dramatic faculty-rather than skill in depicting character-has distinguished his subsequent productions. These are-Rambles beyond Railways, or Notes in Cornwall, 1851; Basil, a novel, 1852; Mr Wray's Cash-box, 1852; Hide and Seek, 1854; After Dark, 1856; The Dead Secret, 1857. The last of these tales appeared in Household Words, and kept its readers in breathless suspense-the delight of all lovers of romanceuntil the secret was unfolded. Mr Collins is author also of a drama, The Frozen Deep, performed in 1857 by Mr Dickens, by the dramatist himself, and other friends, amateur actors, in aid of the family of Douglas Jerrold, the Queen having previously witnessed a private representation of the piece. The late works of Mr Collins are-The Queen of Hearts, 1859; The Woman in White, 1860; No Name, 1862; My Miscellanies, 1863; Armadale, 1866; The Moonstone, 1868; Man and Wife, 1870; Poor Miss Finch; The Law and the Lady; &c. This popular novelist is a native of London, born in January 1824. He was intended for a commercial life, then studied law in Lincoln's Inn; but in his twenty-fourth year he entered on his natural field-the literary profession.

CAPTAIN MAYNE REID.

writers were boldly assailed by the anonymous
critic, and his articles became the talk of the
town. Two volumes of these literary essays have
since been published. The tales of Mr Phillips
all bear the impress of his energetic mind and
shrewd caustic observation. With better health,
he would probably have been more genial, and
have accomplished some complete artistic work.
As a first-class journalist and happy descriptive
writer, few young men rose into greater favour and
popularity than MR ANGUS BETHUNE REACH
(1821-1856). He was a native of Inverness; but
before he had reached his twentieth year he was
in London, busily employed on the Morning
Chronicle, as reporter and critic, and let us add,
fortune had fallen. Besides contributing to the
magazines, Mr Reach wrote two novels-Clement
Lorimer, one volume, 1848; and Leonard Lindsay,
two volumes, 1850. He wrote also a number of
light satires, dramatic pieces, and sketches of
social life-The Natural History of Bores and
Humbugs, The Comic Bradshaw, London on the
Thames, The Man of the Moon, &c.
Being
despatched to France as a Commissioner for the
Morning Chronicle, he enriched his note-book
with sketches social, picturesque, and legendary,
published with the title of Claret and Olives, from
the Garonne to the Rhone, 1852. The disappoint-
ment he experienced in traversing what is consid-
ered the most poetic region of France, he thus
describes :

In the description of daring feats and romantic adventures-scenes in the desert, the forest, and wild hunting-ground-CAPTAIN MAYNE REID, of the United States army, has earned great popularity, especially with the young. He seems to have made Cooper the novelist his model, but several of his works are more particularly devoted to natural history. This gentleman is a native of the north of Ireland, son of a Presbyterian minister, and was born in the year 1818. In his twentieth year he went abroad to 'push his fortune.' He set out for Mexico, made trading excursions with the Indians up the Red River, and after-honourably supporting his parents, on whom miswards sailed up the Missouri, and settled on the prairies for a period of four or five years. He then took to the literary profession in Philadelphia; but in 1845, when war was declared between the United States and Mexico, Mr Reid obtained a commission in the American army, and distinguished himself by his gallantry. He led the forlorn-hope at the assault of the castle of Chapultepec, and was severely wounded. The Mexican war over, Captain Reid organised a body of men to aid the Hungarians in their struggle for independence, but the failure of the insurrection prevented his reaping any fresh laurels as a soldier. He now repaired to England and resumed his pen. His personal experiences had furnished materials of a rare and exciting kind, and he published a series of romances and other works, which were well received. In 1849 appeared The Rifle Rangers; in 1850, The Scalp Hunters; in 1852, The Desert Home and Boy Hunters; in 1853, The Young Voyageurs; in 1854, The Forest Exiles; in 1855, The Bush Boys, The Hunter's Feast, and The White Chief; in 1856, The Quadroon, or a Lover's Adventures in Louisiana; in 1857, The Young Yägers; in 1858, The Plant Hunters and The War Trail; in 1859, Oceola; &c. As a vivid describer of foreign scenes, Captain Reid is entitled to praise; but his incidents, though exciting, are often highly improbable.

SAMUEL PHILLIPS-ANGUS B. REACH-ALBERT

SMITH.

The author of Caleb Stukeley and other tales, MR SAMUEL PHILLIPS (1815-1854), was for some years literary critic of the Times, and afterwards literary director of the Crystal Palace. The only works to which he put his name were certain guide-books to the Palace. Mr Phillips was by Birth a Jew, son of a London tradesman. In his fifteenth year he appeared as an actor in Covent Garden Theatre; but his friends placed him in the London University, and whilst there, he attracted the attention of the Duke of Sussex by an essay on Milton. Through the Duke's assistance he was sent to Göttingen University. His novel of Caleb Stukeley appeared originally in Blackwood's Magazine, and was reprinted in 1843. Its success led to other contributions to Blackwood-We are all Low People There, and other tales. He occasionally sent letters to the Times, and ultimately formed a regular engagement with the conductors of that paper. His reviews of books were vigorous and slashing; Dickens, Carlyle, Mrs Stowe, and other popular

The South of France.

We entered Languedoc, the most early civilised of the provinces which now make up France-the land where chivalry was first wedded to literature-the land whose tongue laid the foundations of the greater part of modern poetry-the land where the people first rebelled against the tyranny of Rome-the land of the Menestrals and the Albigenses. People are apt to think of this favoured tract of Europe as a sort of terrestrial paradise shade of the orange and the olive tree, queens of love -one great glowing odorous garden-where, in the and beauty crowned the heads of wandering troubadours.

The literary and historic associations have not unnaturally operated upon our common notions of the country; and for the 'south of France,' we are very apt to conjure up a brave, fictitious landscape. Yet, this country is no Eden. It has been admirably described in a single phrase, the Austere South of France.' It is austere grim-sombre. It never smiles: it is scathed and parched. There is no freshness or rurality in it. It does not seem the country, but a vast yard-shadeless glaring, drear, and dry. Let us glance from our elevated perch over the district we are traversing. A vast, rollthe sun; here and there masses of red rock heaving ing wilderness of clodded earth, browned and baked by themselves above the soil like protruding ribs of the earth, and a vast coating of drouthy dust, lying like snow upon the ground. To the left, a long ridge of iron-like mountains-on all sides rolling hills, stern and kneaded, looking as though frozen. On the slopes and in the plain, endless rows of scrubby, ugly trees, powdered with the universal dust, and looking exactly like mopsticks. Sprawling and straggling over the soil beneath them, jungles of burnt-up leafless bushes, tangled and apparently neglected. The trees are olives the country. It seems a solitude. Perhaps one or two and mulberries-the bushes, vines. Glance again across distant figures, gray with dust, are labouring to break the clods with wooden hammers; but that is all. No cottages-no farm-houses-no hedges-all one rolling sweep of iron-like, burnt-up, glaring land. In the dis

tance you may espy a village. It looks like a fortification--all blank, high stone walls, and no windows, but mere loopholes. A square church tower gloomily and heavily overtops the houses, or the dungeon of an ancient fortress rears its massive pile of mouldering stone. Where have you seen such a landscape before? Stern and forbidding, it has yet a familiar look. These scrubby, mop-headed trees-these formal square lines of huge edifices-these banks and braes, varying in hue from the gray of the dust to the red of the rock-why, they are precisely the backgrounds of the pictures of the renaissance painters of France and Italy.

With his various tasks and incessant labour, the health of the young littérateur gave way. Mental disease prostrated him, and for the last two years of his life he was helpless. One eminent and generous man of letters-Mr Thackeray-by special lectures and personal bounty, contributed largely to the comfort of the sufferer; and another -Mr Shirley Brooks-undertook, and for many months cheerfully fulfilled, some of his friend's literary engagements. The Literary Fund also lent assistance. It is gratifying to note these instances of sympathy, but more important to mark the warning which Mr Reach's case holds out to young literary aspirants of the dangers of over-application.

MR ALBERT SMITH (1816–1860), born at Chertsey, is best known for his illustrated lectures or amusing monologues in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, in which he described a visit to Constantinople, the ascent of Mont Blanc, and a trip to China in 1858-9. Of these tours he also published accounts. Mr Smith studied medicine both in London and Paris, but began early to write for the magazines, and threw off numerous tales and sketches-as The Adventures of Mr Ledbury, The Scattergood Family, Christopher Tadpole, The Pottleton Legacy, several dramatic pieces, &c. His lectures-somewhat in the style of Mathews's 'At Home,' but with the addition of very fine scenery-were amazingly successful: 'Mont Blanc' was repeated above a thousand times, and almost invariably to crowded houses.

MRS ELLIS.

This lady is the Hannah More of the present generation. She has written fifty or sixty volumes, nearly all conveying moral or religious instruction. Her principal works are- -The Women of England, 1838; A Summer and Winter in the Pyrenees, 1841; The Daughters of England, 1842; The Wives of England and The Mothers of England, 1843; Prevention Better than Cure, 1847; Hints on Formation of Character, 1848. Several short tales and poems have also been published by Mrs Ellis. This accomplished and industrious lady (née Sarah Stickney) was in 1837 married to the distinguished missionary, the Rev. William Ellis, author of Polynesian Researches in the Society and Sandwich Islands, four volumes, 1832.

MISS C. M. YONGE-MISS SEWELL-MISS

JEWSBURY.

A not less voluminous writer is CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE, a native of Hampshire, born in 1823. Her novel, The Heir of Redclyffe, 1853, at once established her reputation. She had, however, previous to this date written several other

tales-Henrietta's Wish, Venneth, and Langley School, 1850; The Kings of England, The Two Guardians, and Landmarks of Ancient History, 1852; &c. The popularity of The Heir of Redclyffe induced the authoress to continue what may be called the regular novel style; and in Heart's Ease, 1854; Daisy Chain, 1856; and Dynevor Terrace, 1857, we have interesting, wellconstructed tales. Since then she has produced several other works-The Young Stepmother, Hopes and Fears, The Lances of Lynwood, Clever Woman of the Family, Prince and the Page, &c. The children's books of Miss Yonge have also been exceedingly popular; and all her works, like those of Mrs Ellis, have in view the moral improvement of the young, more particularly those of her own sex. Miss Yonge is said to have given £2000, the profits of her tale Daisy Chain, towards the building of a missionary college at Auckland, New Zealand, and also a portion of the proceeds of the Heir of Redclyffe to fitting out the missionary ship Southern Cross, for the use of Bishop Selwyn.

ELIZABETH MISSING SEWELL, a native of the Isle of Wight, born in 1815, is authoress of various works of what is called 'High Church fiction,' but works affording moral instruction, blended with delicate womanly pictures of life and character. The best known of these are Amy Herbert, 1844; Gertrude and Sketches, 1847; Katherine Ashton, 1854; Margaret Percival, 1858; &c. Miss Sewell has written various religious works, sketches of continental travel, &c.

GERALDINE JEWSBURY is more ambitious in style, but not always so successful. Her works are Zoe, 1845; The Half-Sisters, 1848; Constance Herbert and Right or Wrong, 1859; &c. Of these, Constance Herbert is the best, both for the interest of the story and its literary merits. Miss Jewsbury has written a story for children, Angelo, or the Pine Forest in the Alps, 1855. The elder sister of this lady, Maria Jane, wife of the Rev. W. Fletcher, accompanied her husband to India, and died at Bombay in 1833; she was an amiable, accomplished woman, authoress of various essays, sketches, and poems, including two volumes, Phantasmagoria, 1829, which Professor Wilson characterised as 'always acute and never coarse.'

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

This distinguished American author was born on the 4th July 1804-the American Independence Day. He was a native of Salem, Massachusetts, and was early in the field as a contributor to periodical literature. Two volumes of these pieces were collected and published under the title of Twice-told Tales (1837 and 1842.) In 1845 appeared Mosses from an old Manse, and in 1850 The Scarlet Letter, which may be said to have given its author a European reputation. He afterwards joined with some friends in a scheme like the contemplated Pantisocracy of Southey and Coleridge-a society called the Brook Farm Community, from which Arcadian felicity and plenty were anticipated, but which ended in failure. In 1851, Mr Hawthorne produced The House of the Seven Gables, and in 1852 The Blithedale Romance. He published also a Life of General Pierce, and A Wonder Book, a second series of

which, called Tanglewood Tales, was published PAGE. His widow also edited and published Pasin 1853. On the accession of General Pierce to sages from the American Note-books of Nathaniel the presidency in 1852, Hawthorne was appointed Hawthorne, two vols., 1868; Passages from the consul for the United States at Liverpool, which | English Note-books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, two he held for about five years. A visit to Italy vols., 1870; and Septimius, an unfinished romance, gave occasion to his writing Transformation 1871. The three early romances, The Scarlet (1860) a novel which gives an admirable view of Letter, Seven Gables, and Blithedale, are the most Roman life, antiquities, and art. How graphic popular and original of Mr Hawthorne's works. and striking and true, for example, is the The first of these pictures of New England life picture presented by the opening scene! and Puritanism is on a painful subject, for The Scarlet Letter is the badge of the heroine's shame, and her misery and degradation form the leading theme of the story. But it is intensely interesting, and its darker shades are relieved by passages of fine description. Perhaps its only fault is one which attaches also to Scott's Waverley-a too long and tedious introduction. The second romance does not possess the same harrowing interest, but it has greater variety, and the inmates of the old house are drawn with consummate skill. The Blithedale Romance is a story founded on the Socialist experiment at Brook Farm. A strain of weird fancy and sombre thought pervades most of Hawthorne's writings.

The Capitol at Rome.

Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life, although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here, likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand years ago) of the human soul, with its choice of innocence or evil at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom, but assaulted by a snake.

From one of the windows of this saloon, we may see a flight of broad stone steps descending alongside the antique and massive foundation of the Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, right below. Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate Forum (where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun), passing over a shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled rudely up with ancient brick and stone, and over the domes of Christian churches, built on the old pavements of heathen temples, and supported by the very pillars that once upheld them. At a distance beyond-yet but a little way, considering how much history is heaped into the intervening space-rises the great sweep of the Coliseum, with the blue sky brightening through its upper tier of arches. Far off, the view is shut in by the Alban Mountains, looking just the same, amid all this decay and change, as when Romulus gazed thitherward over his half-finished wall.

We glance hastily at these things—at this bright sky, and those blue, distant mountains, and at the ruins, Etruscan, Roman, Christian, venerable with a threefold antiquity, and at the company of world-famous statues in the saloon-in the hope of putting the reader into that state of feeling which is experienced oftenest at Rome. It is a vague sense of ponderous remembrances; a perception of such weight and density in a bygone life, of which this spot was the centre, that the present moment is pressed down or crowded out, and our individual affairs and interests are but half as real here as elsewhere. Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters that we handle or dream of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike.

Mr Hawthorne returned to America, and published Our Old Home, two vols., 1863, giving an account of England, but written in a tone of querulous discontent and unfairness which pained his friends on both sides of the Atlantic. Part of this must be attributed to ill-health, which continued to increase till the death of the novelist, which took place at Plymouth, New Hampshire, May 19, 1864. An interesting volume of Memorials of Hawthorne has been published by HENRY A.

A Socialist Experiment.

The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail in becoming practical agriculturists, but that we should probably cease to be anything else. While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualisation of labour. It was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship. Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom, heretofore hidden from the sun. Pausing in the field, to let the wind exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and catch glimpses into the far-off soul of truth. In this point of view, matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated. It is very true that, sometimes, gazing casually around me, out of the midst of my toil, I used to discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scene of earth and sky. There was, at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted aspect, on the face of nature, as if she had been taken by surprise and seen at unawares, with no opportunity to put off her real look, and assume the mask with which she mysteri ously hides herself from mortals. But this was all. The clods of earth which we so constantly belaboured and turned over and over, were never etherialised into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labour symbolised nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar

the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity—are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.

In quaint description and love of odd localities, Mr Hawthorne, in his short pieces, reminds us of Charles Lamb. He is a humorist with poetical fancy and feeling. In his romances, however, he puts forth greater power-a passionate energy and earnestness, with a love of the supernatural, but he never loses the simplicity and beauty of his style.

Autumn at Concord, Massachusetts.

Alas for the summer! The grass is still verdant on the hills and in the valleys; the foliage of the trees is as dense as ever, and as green; the flowers are abundant along the margin of the river, and in the hedgerows,

and deep among the woods; the days, too, are as fer- them, one sees every mile or two along the road, windvid as they were a month ago; and yet, in every breathing into some proud seclusion. All this is passing away, of wind and in every beam of sunshine, there is an and society must assume new relations; but there is no autumnal influence. I know not how to describe it. harm in believing that there has been something very Methinks there is a sort of coolness amid all the heat, good in English life-good for all classes-while the and a mildness in the brightest of the sunshine. A world was in a state out of which these forms naturally breeze cannot stir without thrilling me with the breath grew. of autumn; and I behold its pensive glory in the far, golden gleams among the huge shadows of the trees.

The flowers, even the brightest of them, the golden rod and the gorgeous cardinals-the most glorious flowers of the year-have this gentle sadness amid their pomp. Pensive autumn is expressed in the glow of every one of them. I have felt this influence earlier in some years than in others. Sometimes autumn may be perceived even in the early days of July. There is no other feeling like that caused by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception, or rather prophecy of the year's decay, so deliciously sweet and sad at the same time.

MRS STOWE.

No work of fiction, perhaps, ever had so large an immediate sale as the American story of Uncle Tom's Cabin, by MRS HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. It first appeared in parts in a weekly journal, The Washington National Era, 1850; and when completed, it was published in a collected form, and in less than a year 200,000 copies are said to have been sold in the United States. It was soon imported into this country, and there being no restraining law of international copyright, it was issued in every form from the price of a shilling upwards. At least half a million copies must have been sold in twelve months. So graphic and terrible a picture of slavery in the Southern States of America could not fail to interest all classes; and though Uncle Tom' may have been drawn

I scarcely remember a scene of more complete and lovely seclusion than the passage of the river through this wood [North Branch]. Even an Indian canoe, in olden times, could not have floated onward in deeper solitude than my boat. I have never elsewere had such an opportunity to observe how much more beautiful reflection is than what we call reality. The sky and the clustering foliage on either hand, and the effect of sunlight as it found its way through the shade, giving light-too saint-like, and Legree, the slave-owner, too some hues in contrast with the quiet depth of the prevailing tints-all these seemed unsurpassably beautiful when beheld in upper air. But on gazing downward, there they were, the same even to the minutest particular, yet arrayed in ideal beauty, which satisfied the spirit incomparably more than the actual scene. I am half convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality, the real thing which Nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense. At any rate the disembodied shadow is nearest to the soul. There were many tokens of autumn in this beautiful picture. Two or three of the trees were actually dressed in their coats of many colours —the real scarlet and gold which they wear before they put on mourning.

Sunday, September 23.-There is a pervading blessing diffused over all the world. I look out of the window, and think: 'O perfect day! O beautiful world! O good God!' And such a day is the promise of a blissful eternity. Our Creator would never have made such weather, and given us the deep heart to enjoy it, above and beyond all thought, if He had not meant us to be immortal. It opens the gates of heaven, and gives us glimpses far inward.

The English Lake Country-Grasmere.

I question whether any part of the world looks so beautiful as England—this part of England at least on a fine summer morning. It makes one think the more cheerfully of human life to see such a bright universal verdure; such sweet, rural, peaceful, flowerbordered cottages-not cottages of gentility, but dwellings of the labouring poor; such nice villas along the roadside so tastefully contrived for comfort and beauty, and adorned more and more, year after year, with the care and afterthought of people who mean to live in them a great while, and feel as if their children might live in them also. And so they plant trees to overshadow their walks, and train ivy and all beautiful vines up against their walls-and thus live for the future in another sense than we Americans do. And the climate helps them out, and makes everything moist and green, and full of tender life, instead of dry and arid, as human life and vegetable life are so apt to be with us. Certainly, England can present a more attractive face than we can, even in its humbler modes of lifeto say nothing of the beautiful lives that might be led, one would think, by the higher classes, whose gateways, with broad, smooth, gravelled drives leading through

dark a fiend, it is acknowledged that the characters and incidents in the tale are founded on facts and authentic documents. To verify her statements, Mrs Stowe, in 1853, published a Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which she had collected advertisements of the sale of slaves, letters from the sufferers, and arguments in support of slavery from newspapers, law reports, and even sermons.

Mrs Stowe visited England the same year (1853), and was received with great distinction. In London she received an address from the ladies of England, presented to her in Stafford House—the residence of the Duke of Sutherland-by Lord Shaftesbury. She afterwards travelled over the country, and from England she proceeded to France and Switzerland. An account of this European tour was published by Mrs Stowe, under the title of Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. There are some pleasant passages of description in this work, but on the whole it is unworthy of the authoress. So much tuft-hunting, vanity, and slipslop criticism could hardly have been expected from one who had displayed so much mastery over the stronger feelings and passions of our nature, and so much art in the construction of a story. Receptions, breakfast-parties, and personal compliments make up a large portion of these Memories, but here is one pleasing extract:

English Trees-Warwick Castle.

When we came fairly into the court-yard of the castle, a scene of magnificent beauty opened before us. I cannot describe it minutely. The principal features are the battlements, towers, and turrets of the old feudal castle, encompassed by grounds on which has been expended all that princely art of landscape gardening for which England is famous-leafy thickets, magnificent trees, openings and vistas of verdure, and wide sweeps of grass, short, thick, and vividly green, as the velvet moss we sometimes see growing on rocks in New England. Grass is an art and a science in England-it is an institution. The pains that are taken in sowing, tending, cutting, clipping, rolling, and otherwise nursing and coaxing it, being seconded by the misty breath and often falling tears of the climate, produce results which must be seen to be appreciated. So again of trees in England.

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