less the mechanism of sensation is disabled or destroyed. Hunger does not cease until starvation has assailed the seat of nutrition. The sense of extreme weariness is not allayed by increased activity, but the longing for rest may subside, because it has been stifled by some overwhelming influence. The natural safeguards are so well fitted for their task that neither body nor mind is exposed to the peril of serious exhaustion so long as their functions are duly performed. In brief, over-work is impossible so long as the effort made is natural. When energy, of any kind, takes a morbid form of action, some force outside itself must be reacting upon it injuriously; and the seat of the injury, so far as the sinister influence on energy is concerned, will be found in close proximity to the sensation which under normal conditions guards the reserve. The use of stimulants in aid of work is, perhaps, one of the commonest forms of collateral influence suspending the warning sense of exhaustion. When the laborious worker, overcome with fatigue, "rouses" himself with alcohol, coffee, tea, or any other agent which may chance to suit him, he does not add a unit of force to his stock of energy, he simply narcotizes the sense of weariness, and, the guard being drugged, he appropriates the reserve. In like manner, when the dreamer and night-watcher, worn out by sleeplessness, employs opium, chloral, or some other poison to produce the semblance of repose, he stupefies the consciousness of unrest, but, except in cases where it is only a habit of sleeplessness which has been contracted, and, being interrupted, may be broken by temporary recourse to a perilous artifice, the condition is unrelieved. Not unfrequently the warning sense is stifled by the very intensity of the motive power or impulse. Ambition, zeal, love, sometimes fear, will carry a man beyond the bounds set by nature. No matter what suspends the functions of the guard set at the threshold of the reserve, if the residual stock is touched, two consequences ensue-waste and depreciation. It is important to recognize both of these evils. The former is generally perceived, the latter is commonly overlooked. The reserve, as we have seen, plays a double part in the economy; it

is a stock in abeyance, and it is the base of every present act. Without a reserve of mental energy the mind can no more continue the healthful exercise of its functions, than a flabby muscle without tonicity can respond to the stimulus of strong volition, and lift a heavy weight or strike a heavy blow.

It

The cause, or condition, which most commonly exposes the reserve of mental energy to loss and injury is worry. The tone and strength of mind are seriously impaired by its wearing influence, and, if it continue long enough, they will be destroyed. It sets the organism of thought and feeling vibrating with emotions which are not consonant with the natural liberation of energy in work. The whole machinery is thrown out of gear, and exercise, which would otherwise be pleasurable and innocuous, becomes painful and even destructive. is easy to see how this must be. The longest note in music, the most steady and persistent ray of light-to use an old-fashioned expression - the tonic muscular contraction, are all, we know, produced by a rapid succession of minute motive impulses or acts, like the explosion and discharge of electricity from alternately connected and separated points in a circuit; in fact, a series of vibrations. Mental energy doubtless takes the same form of development. If a disturbing element is introduced by the obtrusion. of some independent source of anxiety, or if, out of the business in hand, the mind makes a discord, confusion ensues, and for the time being harmonious action ceases. Working under these conditions in obedience to the will, the mental organism sustains injury which must be great, and may be lasting. The function of the warning sense is suspended; the reserve is no longer a stock in abeyance, and it ceases to give stability to the mind; the rhythm of the mental forces is interrupted; a crash is always impending, and, too often sudden collapse occurs. The point to be made clear is this; over-work is barely possible, and seldom, if ever, happens, while the mind is acting in the way prescribed by its constitution, and in the normal modes of mental exercise. The moment, however, the natural rhythm of work is broken and discord ensues, the

mind is like an engine with the safety valve locked, the steam-gauge falsified, the governing apparatus out of gear; a break-down may occur at any instant. The state pictured is one of worry, and the besetting peril is not depicted in too lurid colors. The victim of worry is ever on the verge of a catastrophe; if he escape, the marvel is not at his strength of intellect so much as his good fortune. Worry is disorder, however induced, and disorderly work is abhorred by the laws of nature, which leave it wholly without remedy. The energy employed in industry carried on under this condition is lavished in producing a small result, and speedily exhausted. The reserve comes into play very early in the task, and the faculty of recuperation is speedily arrested. Sometimes loss of appetite announces the cessation of nutrition; otherwise the sense of hunger, present in the system, is for a time preternaturally acute, and marks the fact that the demand is occasioned by loss of power to appropriate, instead of any diminution of supply. The effort to work becomes daily more laborious, the task of fixing the attention grows increasingly difficult, thoughts wander, memory fails, the reasoning power is enfeebled: prejudice the shade of defunct emotion or some past persuasion-takes the place of judgment; physical nerve or brain disturbance may supervene, and the crash will then come suddenly, unexpected by onlookers, perhaps unperceived by the sufferer himself. This is the history of "worry," or disorder produced by mental disquietude and distraction, occasionally by physical disease.

The first practical inference to be deduced from these considerations is that brain-work in the midst of mental worry is carried on in the face of ceaseless peril. Unfortunately work and worry are so closely connected in daily experience that they cannot be wholly separated. Meanwhile the worry of workthat which grows out of the business in hand-is generally a needless, though not always an avoidable, evil. In a large proportion of instances this description of disorder is due to the lack of education in brain-work. Men and women, with minds capacious and powerful enough, but untrained, attempt feats for which

training is indispensable, and, being unprepared, they fail. The utilitarian policy of the age is gradually eliminating from the educationary system many of the special processes by which minds used to be developed. This is, in part at least, why cases of sudden collapse are more numerous now than in years gone by. It is not, as vanity suggests, that the brain-work of to-day is so much greater than that exacted from our predecessors, but we are less well prepared for its performance. The treatment of this form of affection, the break-down from the worry of work, must be preventive; the sole remedy is the reversal of a policy which substitutes results for processes, knowledge for education. It is a serious cause of discomfiture and sorrow in work that so much of the brain-power expended is necessarily devoted to the removal of extraneous causes of worry. Labor is so fatal to life, because it is so difficult to live. The deadly peril of work in the midst of worry must be confronted, because the disturbing cause can only be got rid of by persistent labor. This is the crux of the difficulty, and in the attempt to cure the evil the struggling mind finds its fate involved in a vicious circle of morbid reactions. Nevertheless, it is the fact that work in the teeth of worry is fraught with peril, and whenever it can be avoided it should be, let the sacrifice cost what it may.

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The second deduction must be, that there is no excuse for idleness in the pretence of fear of over-work." There is some reason to apprehend that the attention recently directed to this alleged cause of mental unsoundness has not been free from a mischievous influence on minds only too ready to take refuge in any excuse for inactivity. If the private asylums of the country were searched for the victims of work," they would nearly all be found to have fallen a prey to worry," or to that degeneracy which results from lack of purpose in life and steady employment. This is a grave assertion, but it points to an evil it is especially needful to expose. Weak minds drift into dementia with wondrous celerity when they are not carried forward to some goal, it matters little what, by the impulse of a strong motive. The bugbear of "over

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work" is, it may be feared, deterring parents and friends from enforcing the need of sedulous industry on the young. The pernicious system of cram'' slays its thousands, because uneducated, undeveloped, inelastic intellects are burdened and strained with information adroitly deposited in the memory, as an expert valet packs a portmanteau, with the articles likely to be first wanted on the top. Desultory occupation, mere play with objects of which the true interest is not appreciated, ruins a still larger number; while worry, that bane of brain-work and mental energy, counts its victims by tens of thousands, a holocaust of minds sacrificed to the demon of discord, the foe of happiness, of morality, of success. The enemy takes many shapes and assumes bewildering disguises.

Sometimes he comes in like a flood, hurrying everything before him; with heaps of work to be done in less than adequate time. Now the victim is hurried from task to task with a celerity fatal to sanity. Then he is chained like a galley-slave to some uncongenial labor without respite. Again, a buzz of distracting and irritating mental annoyances seem let loose to distress and distract him. Under each

and all of these guises it is worry that molests, and, unless he be rescued, will ruin him. Meanwhile, the miseries of "over-work," pure and simple, are few and comparatively insignificant. Those who bewail their infliction most loudly are weak of mind or torpid of brain. Of such lame and maimed mortals we

are not now thinking. Their lot may be humiliating or pitiable, as their condition is due to neglect or misfortune; but our concern is with the multitude of strong and able-minded workers who fail at their task. These are the victims not of over-work but of worry, a foe more treacherous and merciless than all besides. The mind-cure for the malady to which "worry" gives rise, and from which so many suffer, is not idleness, or "rest, in the ordinary sense of that term, but orderly and persistent work. The work by which they have been injured has not been excessive, but bad of its kind and badly done. The palsied faculties must be strengthened and incited to healthy nutrition by new activity, at first, perhaps, administered in the form of passive mental movement, and then induced by appropriate stimuli applied to the mind.The Nineteenth Century.

MISS ROSSETTI's love of allegory and symbol is, even in these days, a noticeable feature of her poetry. A subtle indirectness is the characteristic of most of our recent verse. We do not quarrel with this-we merely state the fact; for assuredly the allegorical is essentially a poetic mood; indeed, so much so that allegory may easily grow too poetic for prose treatment, as we see, for instance, in Landor's allegory of Love, Sleep, and Death in the "Pentameron, where the very exquisiteness and ravishing loveliness of both matter and form arouse in the reader a certain sense that Prose is attempting work whose requirements are, after all, beyond her. Yet it must be always remembered that in poetic art, as, indeed, in every other art, there are two opposite and mutually antagonistic ways of viewing Nature and

* A Pageant, and other Poems. By Christina G. Rossetti. (Macmillan & Co.)

human life-the simply representative or dramatic (the method of Chaucer and Shakespeare), and the subtle or allegoric (the method of Spenser and Shelley). And in most literatures, perhaps, it will be found that one or other of these methods has had its day in turn, and then, after succumbing for a time to its adversary, has revived again.

One of the many proofs of Shakespeare's supreme power, as evidenced by his sonnets, is the way in which he, finding the allegorical fashions of his day antagonistic to his genius, set his foot upon allegory. foot upon allegory. Compare, for instance, Shakespeare's sonnets with those of Barnfield and others. While the very idea of the sonnet-save, perhaps, in the single instance of Drayton's great sonnet-was almost inseparable from the idea of allegory, Shakespeare's sonnets, rich as they are in figurative language, are for the most part as free from allegorical subtlety of intent-are, indeed,

as direct and purely passionate-as though they were written by Byron, with whom the purely direct method vitalized by Shakespeare, after surviving through the whole of the eighteenth century, culmin ited perhaps.

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In Shelley, however, there appeared a poet as symbolical in his methods, as subtle in intent if not in achievement, and as mystical in temper as though he had been the countryman of Jami intead of the countryman of Shakespeare. Though the Shelleyites, like the Wordsworthians, are all agreed that their greatest poet of the age" is the only true and genuine greatest poet of the age,' they are all disagreed as to what are the peculiar teaching and temper which cause him to be the greatest poet of the age, and consequently the critical expositions of Shelley are as various of complexion as are the theological and philosophical tenets of the critics. Yet perhaps they have all "missed the word". that unlocks the door. This word is, we think, "Sufism." It is the beautiful allegorical intent underlying all the "shows of things" which Shelley reads in Nature's face whether she smiles or frowns. While Shelley lived, however, his Sufism seems to have influenced no one. And afterward Keats's Shakespearean method of giving direct objective representation, and yet giving it "stained in the dyes" of figurative language, found in Mr. Tennyson a worker as rarely endowed almost as Keats himself; and it was from America, perhaps, that Shelley's allegorical method was brought back to England, for we must never forget Edgar Poe's enor mous influence upon our more recent poetry. With the sole exception of Mr. William Morris, it would be difficult to point to any prominent poet later than Mr. Browning on whom the witchery of Poe's methods has not had more or less influence; and this again, joined to the figurativeness of another kind of which Mr. Dante Rossetti's sonnets are so full, has given a character to our later poetry which marks it off very sharply from English poetry of any other period, whether the period be allegorical in temper or realistic. Yet, as we have said, Miss Rossetti in her strong leaning toward the allegorical view of nature and human life is a prominent figure,

even at a time when allegory has taken a place in poetic art such as would have astonished writers like Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron.

This being so, the reader will be prepared to find that the principal poem in this volume is a personification of the months. January, March, July, August, October, December, are supposed to be represented in a half humorous masque by boys; February, April, May, June, September, November, by girls; while the subordinate characters are robin redbreasts, lambs and sheep, nightingale and nestlings. The scene is a large and comfortable room in a cottage with a fire burning on the hearth. January is discovered sitting by the fire, and to him enter in succession all the other months of the year, each one making his or her own appropriate speech. This is how the poem opens :

JAN. Cold the day and cold the drifted snow, Dim the day until the cold dark night.

[Stirs the fire.
Crackle, sparkle, faggot; embers glow :
Some one may be plodding through the snow
Longing for a light,

For the light that you and I can show.
If no one else should come,

Here Robin Redbreast's welcome to a crumb,
And never troublesome :

Robin, why don't you come and fetch your crumb ?

Here's butter for my hunch of bread,
And sugar for your crumb ;
Here's room upon the hearthrug,

If you'll only come.

In your scarlet waistcoat,
With your keen bright eye,
Where are you loitering?

Wings were made to fly !
Make haste to breakfast,

Come and fetch your crumb
For I'm as glad to see you

As you are glad to come

[Two Robin Redbreasts are seen tapping with their beaks at the lattice, which January opens. The birds flutter in, hop about the floor, and peck up the crumbs and sugar thrown to them. They have scarcely finished their meal, when a knock is heard at the door. January hangs a guard in front of the fire, and opens to February, who appears with a bunch of snowdrops in her hand.

JAN. Good-morrow, sister. FEB. Brother, joy to you! But quite enough to prove the world awake, I've brought some snowdrops; only just a few, Cheerful and hopeful in the frosty dew And for the pale sun's sake.

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[She hands a few of her snowdrops to January, who retires into the background. While February stands arranging the remaining snowdrops in a glass of water on the window-sill, a soft butting and She opens bleating are heard outside.

the door, and sees one foremost lamb, with other sheep and lambs bleating and crowding toward her.

FEB. O you, you little wonder, come—come in,

You wonderful, you woolly soft white lamb : You panting mother ewe, come too,

And lead that tottering twin

And in my wake

Frail wind-flowers quake, And the catkins promise fruit. I drive ocean ashore With rush and roar, And he cannot say me nay: My harpstrings all Are the forests tall, Making music when I play.

And as others perforce, So I on my course Run and needs must run, With sap on the mount And buds past count

And rivers and clouds and sun,
With seasons and breath
And time and death

And all that has yet begun.

[Before March has done speaking, a voice
is heard approaching accompanied by
a twittering of birds. April comes
along singing, and stands outside and
out of sight to finish her song.

APRIL (outside).
Pretty little three
Sparrows in a tree,

Light upon the wing;
Though you cannot sing
You can chirp of Spring:
Chirp of Spring to me,
Sparrows, from your tree.

The above extract will show that Miss Rossetti's poetry has lost none of those characteristics which to all readers are pleasing and to some are, no doubt, a source of peculiar and special delight. Her fancy (not cold, like most people's fancy, but warm as the snug cottage room in which the dramatic action takes place), her playfulness, her music (apparently lawless as a bird's song, yet, like the bird's song, obeying a law too subtle to be recognized)-these are all to be found, we think, in the lines Unlike her other allegogiven above.

ries, however, this poem seeks to inculcate no distinct moral lesson. As graceful and bewitching as the children for whom it is written, it is also as unconscious as they. All the lesson to be drawn from it is that Nature is beautiful in her every mood and that God is good. Like all beautiful things, in short, it teaches, without any effort and without knowing it, the only lesson of life that is worth learning.

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"A Ballad of Boding" is an allegory of the terrible kind to which poems such as Miss Rossetti's Amor Mundi" belong. The power of allegorical construction is by no means a necessary accompaniment of the allegorical attitude of the mind, resulting in that allegorical material of which most recent poetry is composed, at which we have glanced above. Indeed, it seems to be given to but very few English poets. And it is not a little curious that, although an allegorical conception, based as it is upon an abstract thought, would seem to be