Alexander Graham to be the churchyard in which he was now walking in the cool of the morning. It was more carefully kept than most Scottish churchyards, and yet was not too trim; Nature had a word in the affair-was allowed her part of mourning in long grass and moss and the crumbling away of stone. The wholesomeness of decay, which both in nature and humanity as but the miry road back to life, was not unrecognised here; there was nothing of the hideous attempt to hide death in the garments of life. The master walked about gently, now stopping to read some well-known inscription, and ponder for a moment over the words; and now wandering across the stoneless mounds, content to be forgotten by all but those who loved the departed. At length he seated himself on a slab by the side of the mound that rose but yesterday; it was sculptured with symbols of decay-needless, surely, where the originals lay about the mouth of every newly-opened grave, as surely ill befitting the precincts of a church whose indwelling gospel is of life victorious over death! What are these stones,' he said to himself, but monuments to oblivion.' They are not memorials of the dead, but memorials of the forgetfulness of the living. How vain it is to send a poor forsaken name, like the title-page of a lost book, down the careless stream of time! Let me serve my generation, and may God remember me !'

Mr MacDonald is a master of thought and sentiment, with fine fancy and descriptive power, but with little or no constructive tact. His ideas are apt to run away with him, and to cause one part of his story to move in a wholly different atmosphere from that of the other. The quaint realism of the first volume of David Elginbrod but indifferently reconciles itself with the spiritualistic effusiveness of the latter. The Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood errs in the same way, and also Malcolm; yet what fine things are in those works! Mr MacDonald's peculiar reaction against Calvinism is seen in most of his novels, particularly in Robert Falconer, which is perhaps the ablest of his tales. His Scotch is the dialect of the east of Scotland, Moray and Aberdeen-not the classic Scotch of Burns and Scott. His latest novel, St George and St Michael, is English, and is a story of the time of the Commonwealth, the plot turning on the progress of the war. Lord Herbert, the inventor, is well drawn, and the novel has occasional touches of humour. MacDonald has been very successful in fairy stories, after the model of the German Marchen, and his Phantastes is in its way quite inimitable. As in all his tales Mr MacDonald shews poetic feeling, we might expect to find him versifying, and accordingly he has written two or three volumes of poetry marked by penetration, sympathy, and subtle beauty of expression. In such lines as the following we see a fine lyrical power:

Come to us; above the storm
Ever shines the blue.
Come to us; beyond its form
Ever lies the True.

Mother, darling, do not weep-
All I cannot tell :
By and by, you'll go to sleep,
And you'll wake so well.
There is sunshine everywhere
For thy heart and mine:
God for every sin and care
Is the cure divine.

Mr

We're so happy all the day

Waiting for another;

All the flowers and sunshine stay
Waiting for you, mother.

Most of Mr MacDonald's novels contain snatches of verse. In a longer poem, Hidden Life, in blank verse, is the following Wordsworthian passage:

Love-dreams of a Peasant Youth.

He found the earth was beautiful. The sky
Shone with the expectation of the sun.
He grieved him for the daisies, for they fell
Caught in the furrow, with their innocent heads
Just out imploring. A gray hedgehog ran
With tangled mesh of bristling spikes, and face
Helplessly innocent, across the field:
He let it run, and blessed it as it ran.
Returned at noon-tide, something drew his feet
Into the barn: entering, he gazed and stood.
For, through the rent roof lighting, one sunbeam
Blazed on the yellow straw one golden spot,
Dulled all the amber heap, and sinking far,
Like flame inverted, through the loose-piled mound,
Crossed the keen splendour with dark shadow-straws,
In lines innumerable. 'Twas so bright,
His eye was cheated with a spectral smoke
That rose as from a fire. He had not known
How beautiful the sunlight was, not even
Upon the windy fields of morning grass,
Nor on the river, nor the ripening corn.
As if to catch a wild live thing, he crept
On tiptoe silent, laid him on the heap,
And gazing down into the glory-gulf,
Dreamed as a boy half-sleeping by the fire;
And dreaming rose, and got his horses out.

God, and not woman, is the heart of all.
But she, as priestess of the visible earth,
Holding the key, herself most beautiful,
Had come to him, and flung the portals wide.
He entered in: each beauty was a glass
That gleamed the woman back upon his view.
Shall I not rather say, each beauty gave
Its own soul up to him who worshipped her,
For that his eyes were opened thus to see?

Already in these hours his quickened soul
Put forth the white tip of a floral bud,
Ere long to be a crown-like, aureole flower.
His songs unbidden, his joy in ancient tales,
Had hitherto alone betrayed the seed
That lay in his heart, close hidden even from him,
Yet not the less mellowing all his spring:
Like summer sunshine came the maiden's face,
And in the youth's glad heart, the seed awoke.
It grew and spread, and put forth many flowers,
And every flower a living open eye,
Until his soul was full of eyes within.
Each morning now was a fresh boon to him;
Each wind a spiritual power upon his life;
Each individual animal did share

A common being with him; every kind
of flower from every other was distinct,
Uttering that for which alone it was-
Its something human, wrapt in other veil.

And when the winter came, when thick the snow
Armed the sad fields from gnawing of the frost,
When the low sun but skirted his far realms,

And sank in early night, he drew his chair
Beside the fire; and by the feeble lamp

Read book on book; and wandered other climes,
And lived in other lives and other needs,
And grew a larger self.

Mr MacDonald has occasionally lectured on the poets-Shakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth, &c.

EDMUND YATES.

EDMUND HODGSON YATES, a miscellaneous writer and journalist (born in 1831), is author of several novels, including Kissing the Rod, and Land at Last, 1866; Wrecked in Port, 1869; Dr Wainwright's Patient and Nobody's Fortune, 1871; The Castaway, 1872; Two by Tricks, 1874; &c. Mr Yates was a contributor to Dickens's periodical All the Year Round, in which appeared his novel of Black Sheep and other works of fiction. As a dramatic writer and critic he is also well known. Indeed, for the drama, Mr Yates may be said to have a hereditary predilection, as his father was a popular and accomplished actor and theatrical manager.

MISS BRADDON-LOUISE DE LA RAMÉ. MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON has produced about thirty novels, all of them shewing remarkable artistic skill in weaving the plot and arranging the incidents, so as to enchain the reader's attention. This is the distinguishing feature of the authoress, rather than delineation of character. Some of her tales have a strong fascinating interest, and abound in dramatic scenes and powerful description. Her novels are full of surprises-literally packed with incidents of the most striking character-winding out interminably, and threatening to collapse in conflicting lines of interest, but just at the right moment they reunite themselves again with ingenious consistency. Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd may be considered as representative works, skilful in plot, but dealing with repellant phases of life and character. The following are among the best known of Miss Braddon's works: Lady Audley's Secret (which had an amazing popularity, six editions being disposed of in as many weeks), Henry Dunbar, Only a Clod, Dead-Sea Fruit, John Marchmont's Legacy, The Lady's Mile, Captain of the Vulture, Birds of Prey, Aurora Floyd, The Doctor's Wife, Eleanor's Victory, Sir Jasper's Tenant, Trail of the Serpent, Charlotte's Inheritance, Rupert Godwin, Ralph the Bailiff, The Lovels of Arden, To the Bitter End, &c. Miss Braddon has also produced some dramatic pieces and a volume of Poems (1861), and she conducts a monthly magazine entitled Belgravia. The prolific authoress is a native of London, daughter of Mr Henry Braddon, a solicitor, and born in 1837.

A lady assuming the name of 'Ouida' (said to be LOUISE DE LA RAMÉ, of French extraction) is author of a number of novels, characterised by gentle and poetic feeling and sentiment. Among these are: Folle-Farine; Idalia, a Romance; Chandos, a Novel; Under Two Flags; Cecil Castlemaine's Gage; Tricotrin, the Story of a Waif and Stray; Pascarèl, only a Story; Held in Bondage, or Granville de Vigne; A Dog of Flanders, and other Stories; Puck, his Vicissitudes, Adventures, &c.; Strathmore, or Wrought by his Own Hand, &c.; Two Little Wooden Shoes.

GEORGE ELIOT.

Under the name of George Eliot,' as author, a series of novels by a lady (said to be a native

appeared, dating from 1857, which are remarkable for fresh original power and faithful delineation of English country-life. The first of these, entitled Scenes of Clerical Life, appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, and attracted much attention. It was followed in 1859 by Adam Bede, of which five editions were sold within as many months. The story of this novel is of the real school, as humble in most of its characters and as faithful in its portraiture as Jane Eyre. The opening sentences disclose the worldly condition of the hero, and form a fine piece of English painting. The scene is the workshop of a carpenter in a village, and the date of the story 1799:

Description of Adam Bede.

The afternoon sun was warm on the five workmen there, busy upon doors and window-frames and wainscoting. A scent of pine-wood from a tent-like pile of planks outside the open door mingled itself with the scent of the elder-bushes, which were spreading their summer snow close to the open window opposite; the slanting sunbeams shone through the transparent shavings that flew before the steady plane, and lit up the fine grain of the oak panelling which stood propped rough gray shepherd-dog had made himself a pleasant against the wall. On a heap of those soft shavings a bed, and was lying with his nose between his fore-paws, occasionally wrinkling his brows to cast a glance at the tallest of the five workmen, who was carving a shield in the centre of a wooden mantel-piece. It was to this workman that the strong barytone belonged which was heard above the sound of plane and hammer, singing: Awake, my soul, and with the sun Thy daily stage of duty run; Shake off dull sloth'

Here some measurement was to be taken which required more concentrated attention, and the sonorous broke out again with renewed vigour : voice subsided into a low whistle; but it presently

'Let all thy converse be sincere,

Thy conscience as the noonday clear.' Such a voice could only come from a broad chest, and the broad chest belonged to a large-boned muscular head so well poised, that when he drew himself up to man, nearly six feet high, with a back so flat and a take a more distant survey of his work, he had the air of a soldier standing at ease. The sleeve rolled up above the elbow shewed an arm that was likely to win the prize for feats of strength; yet the long supple hand, with its bony finger-tips, looked ready for works of skill. In his tall stalwartness, Adam Bede was a Saxon, and justified his name; but the jet-black hair, made the more noticeable by its contrast with the light paper-cap, and the keen glance of the dark eyes that shone from under strongly-marked, prominent, and mobile eyebrows, indicated a mixture of Celtic blood.

The real heroine of the tale is Dinah Morris, the Methodist preacher; but Adam Bede's love is fixed on a rustic coquette and beauty, thus finely described as standing in the dairy of the Hall Farm:

Hetty Sorrel.

It is of little use for me to tell you that Hetty's cheek was like a rose-petal, that dimples played about her pouting lips, that her large dark eyes had a soft roguishness under their long lashes, and that her curly hair, though all pushed back under her round cap while she was at work, stole back in dark delicate rings on her forehead and about her white shell-like ears; it is of little use for me to say how lovely was the contour of

her pink and white neckerchief, tucked into her low plum-coloured stuff bodice; or how the linen buttermaking apron, with its bib, seemed a thing to be imitated in silk by duchesses, since it fell in such charming lines; or how her brown stockings and thick soled buckled shoes, lost all that clumsiness which they must certainly have had when empty of her foot and ankle; of little use, unless you have seen a woman who affected you as Hetty affected her beholders, for otherwise, though you might conjure up the image of a lovely woman, she would not in the least resemble that distracted kitten-like maiden. Hetty's was a springtide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things, round limbed, gamboling, circumventing you by a false air of innocence-the innocence of a young star-browed calf, for example, that, being inclined for a promenade out of bounds, leads you a severe steeple-chase over hedge and ditch, and only comes to a stand in the middle of a bog.

Poor Hetty's vanity and beauty led her to ruin. She agrees to marry Adam Bede, but at length goes away to seek her former lover, Arthur Donnithorne, the gentleman, and to hide her shame. The account of her wanderings and her meditated suicide is related with affecting minuteness and true pathos. Hetty is comforted by the gentle Methodist enthusiast, Dinah Morris, who at last becomes the wife of Adam Bede. The other characters in the novel are all distinct, well-defined individuals. The vicar of the parish, Mr Irvine; the old bachelor schoolmaster, Bartle Massey; and Mr and Mrs Poyser of the Hall Farm, are striking, lifelike portraits. Mrs Poyser is an original, rich in proverbial philosophy, good sense, and amusing volubility. The following is a discussion on matrimony, the interlocutors being the schoolmaster, the gardener, and Mr and Mrs Poyser :

Adam.'

6

But it's a woman you'n spoke well on, Bartle,' said Mr Poyser. 'Come, now, you canna draw back; you said once as women wouldna ha' been a bad invention if they'd all been like Dinah.'

"I meant her voice, man-I meant her voice, that was all,' said Bartle. "I can bear to hear her speak without wanting to put wool in my ears. As for other things, I daresay she's like the rest o' the women-thinks two and two'll come to five, if she cries and bothers enough about it.'

Ay, ay!' said Mrs Poyser; 'one 'ud think, an' hear some folk talk, as the men war 'cute enough to count the corns in a bag o' wheat wi' only smelling at it. They can see through a barn-door, they can. Perhaps that's the reason they can see so little o' this side on 't.'

Martin Poyser shook with delighted laughter, and winked at Adam, as much as to say the schoolmaster

was in for it now.

Ah;' said Bartle sneeringly, 'the women are quick enough-they're quick enough. They know the rights of a story before they hear it, and can tell a man what his thoughts are before he knows 'em himself.'

'Like enough,' said Mrs Poyser; 'for the men are mostly so slow, their thoughts overrun 'em, an' they can only catch 'em by the tail. I can count a stocking-top while a man's getting 's tongue ready; an' when he out wi' his speech at last, there's little broth to be made on't. It's your dead chicks take the longest hatchin'. Howiver, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men.'

'Match!' said Bartle; 'ay, as vinegar matches one's teeth. If a man says a word, his wife 'll match it with a contradiction; if he's a mind for hot meat, his wife 'll match it with cold bacon; if he laughs, she 'll match him with whimpering. She's such a match as the horsefly is to th' horse: she's got the right venom to sting him with the right venom to sting him with.'

'Yes,' said Mrs Poyser, 'I know what the men likea poor soft, as 'ud simper at 'em like the pictur o' the sun, whether they did right or wrong, an' say thank you for a kick, an' pretend she didna know which end she stood uppermost, till her husband told her. That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly: he wants to make sure o' one fool as 'll tell him he's wise. But there's some men can do wi'out that-they think so much o' themselves a'ready-an' that's how it is there's old bachelors.'

'Come, Craig,' said Mr Poyser jocosely, 'you mun get married pretty quick, else you'll be set down for an old bachelor; an' you see what the women 'ull think on you.'

'Well,' said Mr Craig, willing to conciliate Mrs Poyser, and setting a high value on his own compliments, I like a cleverish woman—a woman o' sperrita managing woman.'

'You're out there, Craig,' said Bartle dryly; 'you're plan than that; you pick the things for what they can out there. You judge o' your garden-stuff on a better excel in-for what they can excel in. You don't value your peas for their roots, or your carrots for their flowers. Now that's the way you should choose women; their cleverness 'll never come to much-never come to much; but they make excellent simpletons, ripe and strong flavoured.'

'What dost say to that?' said Mr Poyser, throwing himself back and looking merrily at his wife.

'Say!' answered Mrs Poyser, with dangerous fire kindling in her eye; 'why, I say as some folk's tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin', not to tell you the time o' the day, but because there's summat wrong i' their own inside.'

Of similar style with Adam Bede, and with no diminution of power or reality, appeared in 1859 The Mill on the Floss, and in 1861 Silas Marner, not inferior to any of its predecessors. Silas is a weaver, a Dissenter, wronged and injured, a solitary unhappy man. 'You were hard done by once, Mr Marner, and it seems as if you'll never know the rights of it; but that doesn't hinder there being a rights, Master Marner, for all it's dark to you and me.' And this moral is evolved out of a painful but most interesting and powerful story. The fourth novel of the author was of a more ambitious cast: in 1863 was published Romola, an historical novel of Italian life in the days of Savonarola, a highly-finished, eloquent, artistic work, and by a select class considered the greatest intellectual effort of the author. It was, however, not so popular as its predecessors, and the author returned to the familiar English scenes. Felix Holt, the Radical, appeared in 1866. title, and what by courtesy must be regarded as the main plot, have reference to politics, but most of the incidents and illustrations of character relate to religious and social peculiarities rather than to the party feelings of Tories, Whigs, or Radicals. Though inferior in sustained interest to the other English tales of the author, Felix Holt has passages of great vigour, and some exquisitely drawn characters-we may instance that of Rufus Lyon, a Dissenting minister-and also some fine, pure, and natural description. The next novel of this brilliant series was Middlemarch, a

The

Study of English Provincial Life, 1871-2. In 1876 appeared Daniel Deronda, a story of modern English life. The heroine of this story, a haughty capricious beauty, and some sketches in it of Jewish life and character, are as striking and original and powerfully drawn as anything in modern romance. Besides these prose fictions, George Eliot has sent forth an elaborate dramatic poem, The Gypsy Queen, 1868, which abounds in subtle philosophical thought, and in scenes and lines of great beauty, yet has no strong prevailing interest. A second poetical work, Agatha, a Poem, appeared in 1869.

George Eliot, we may add, is rich in reflective power and in the delineation of character. She also infuses into her writing a deep personal teaching which has laid hold of the most thoughtful, while hardly militating against the taste of careless or popular readers. This is distinctly seen in her Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. In these we have a strong belief in the past as a great determining element in character and possibility. The same feature occurs in The Spanish Gypsy, in which the heroine fails to detach herself from a past that is, in certain respects, opposed to her highest aspirations. George Eliot has skilfully balanced depth of thought with ripe humour and invention. In her latest works she seems fond of drawing into her descriptions scientific and philosophical phrases, which occasionally seem out of place; there is also at times a slight touch of masculine coarseness in her metaphors and illustrations. The exquisite singer falls into a false note! But what are these to the fascination of her style and her characters, and her features of English scenery and life? And we may also instance the learning and imagination so prominent and so finely blended in Romola, which revives Italian life of the time of Savonarola.

Spring-Bright February Days.

Bright February days have a stronger charm of hope about them than any other days in the year. One likes to pause in the mild rays of the sun, and look over the gates at the patient plough-horses turning at the end of the furrow, and think that the beautiful year is all before one. The birds seem to feel just the same: their notes are as clear as the clear air. There are no leaves on the trees and hedgerows, but how green all the grassy fields are! and the dark purplish brown of the ploughed earth and of the bare branches is beautiful too. What a glad world this looks like, as one drives or rides along the valleys and over the hills! I have often thought so when in foreign countries, where the fields and woods have looked to me like our English Loamshire-the rich land tilled with just as much care, the woods rolling down the gentle slopes to the green meadows. I have come on something by the roadside which has reminded me that I am not in Loamshire: an image of a great agony-the agony of the cross. It has stood perhaps by the clustering apple blossoms, or on the broad sunshine by the corn-field, or at a turning by the wood where a clear brook was gurgling below; and surely, if there came a traveller to this world who knew nothing of the story of man's life upon it, this image of agony would seem to him strangely out of place in the midst of this joyous nature. He would not know that hidden behind the apple-blossoms, or among the golden corn, or under the shrouding boughs of the wood, there might be a human heart beating heavily with anguish; perhaps a young blooming girl, not knowing where to turn for refuge from swift-advancing shame; understanding no

more of this life of ours than a foolish lost lamb wandering farther and farther in the nightfall on the lonely heath; yet tasting the bitterest of life's bitterness. Such things are sometimes hidden among the sunny fields and behind the blossoming orchards; and the sound of the gurgling brook, if you come close to one spot behind a small bush, would be mingled for your ear with a despairing human sob. No wonder man's religion has much sorrow in it: no wonder he needs a suffering God.-Adam Bede.

It was in the prime
Of the sweet spring-time.
In the linnet's throat
Trembled the love-note,
And the love-stirred air
Thrilled the blossoms there.
Little shadows danced,
Each a tiny elf,
Happy in large light,
And the thinnest self.

It was but a minute
In a far-off spring,
But each gentle thing,
Sweetly wooing linnet,
Soft-thrilled hawthorn tree
Happy shadowy elf
With the thinnest self,
Love still on in me;
O the sweet, sweet prime
Of the past spring-time.

Spanish Gypsy.

Ruined Castles on the Rhine.

From The Mill on The Floss.

Those ruins on the castled Rhine have crumbled and mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps, that they seem to have a natural fitness, like the mountain pine; nay, even in the day when they were built, they must have had this fitness, as if they had been raised by an earth-born race, who had inherited from their mighty parent a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of romance! If those robber-barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres, they had a certain grandeur of the wild beast in them-they were forest boars with tusks, tearing and rending, not the ordinary domestic grunter; they represented the demon forces for ever in collision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life; they made a fine contrast in the picture with the wandering minstrel, the soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse, and the timid Israelite. That was a time of colour, when the sunlight fell on glancing steel and floating banners; a time of adventure and fierce struggle-nay, of living religious art and religious enthusiasm: for were not cathedrals built in those days, and did not great emperors leave their western palaces to die before the infidel strongholds in the East! Therefore it is that these Rhine castles thrill me with a sense of poetry; they belong to the grand historic life of humanity, and raise up for me the vision of an epoch. But these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed angular skeletons of villages on the Rhine oppress me with the feeling that human life-very much of it—is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of, were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers.

Saint Theresa-Unfulfilled Aspirations.

From Middlemarch.

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on

the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of farresonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet, and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardour alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile, the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favourite love stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness, tremble off, and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognisable deed.

Detached Thoughts.

Comprehensive talkers are apt to be tiresome when we are not athirst for information, but, to be quite fair, we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due to the lack of matter. Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

All knowledge which alters our lives, penetrates us more when it comes in the early morning: the day that has to be travelled with something new, and perhaps for ever sad in its light, is an image of the life that spreads beyond. But at night the time of rest is near.

used to call God's birds, because they do no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?

O the anguish of that thought, that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we shewed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God has given us to know!

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters. Melodies die out like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.

The finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as 'light,' 'sound,' 'stars,' music '-words really not worth looking at, or hearing in themselves, any more than chips' or 'sawdust:' it is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful.

MRS CRAIK (MISS MULOCK).

The

In 1849 appeared The Ogilvies-'a first novel,' as the authoress timidly announced, but without giving her name. It was instantly successful, and appreciated as a work of genius, written with deep earnestness, and pervaded by a deep and noble philosophy. The accomplished lady who had thus delighted and benefited society by her first novel' was DINAH MARIA MULOCK, born at Stoke-upon-Trent, Staffordshire. success of her story soon led to others, and we subjoin a list of the works of this authoress-a list which gives a picture of a wonderfully active literary career and prolific genius: NOVELS: The Ogilvies, 1849; Olive, 1850; The Head of the Family, 1851; Agatha's Husband, 1853; John Halifax, 1857; A Life for a Life, 1859; Mistress and Maid, 1863; Christian's Mistake, 1865; A Noble Life, 1866; Two Marriages, 1867; The Woman's Kingdom, 1869; A Brave Lady, 1870; Hannah, 1871. MISCELLANEOUS WORKS: Avillion and other Tales, 1853; Nothing New, 1857; A Woman's Thoughts about Woman, 1858; Studies from Life, 1861; The Unkind Word and other Stories, 1870; Fair France, 1871; Sermons Out of Church. CHILDREN'S BOOKS: Alice Learmont, a Fairy Tale; Rhoda's Lessons, Cola Monti, A Hero, Bread upon the Waters, The Little Lychetts, Michael the Miner, Our Year, Little Sunshine's Holiday, Adventures of a Brownie. Besides the above, this authoress has written a number of poetical pieces, and translated several works.

In 1865 Miss Mulock was married to Mr George Lillie Craik, publisher, son of the Rev. Dr Craik, Glasgow, and nephew of Professor Craik. As a moral teacher, none of the novelists of the present day excels Mrs Craik. She is not formally didactic-she insinuates instruction. A too prolonged feminine softness and occasional sentimentalism

and corrupts the life-springs of the mind-and how every event, adverse or fortunate, tends to strengthen and expand a high mind, and to break