efforts, except those which tend to an ascetic and mystical isolation. What interest they excited in him arose from his habit of regarding them, not as men, but as embryo angels. He did not speak their language, nor enter into, though he compassionated, their struggles and sufferings. The gross and violent heard his exhortations like a faint aerial music, sweet and sublime, but remote from all which they valued or dreaded. The better and more thoughtful were bewildered, by feeling that they did not understand or sympathize with him, and that all which they found in religion of present support and comfort for their practical life, was to him but worthless, if compared to his ideal longings and meditative communion with heaven.

After another day or two, he visited the poor-house, where he found a motley collection of young and old, all more or less in some perverse or unhealthy state. Old age in all varieties of feeble, fretful imbecility; diseases of many and hopeless kinds, palsy, deafness, dumbness, blindness, idiocy; the maimed, the ulcered, the bed-ridden, the deformed, the doting; orphans, whom love had never approached; widows, from whom it had forever fled away; the broken in fortune, once rich; the loathsome, once beautiful; the relics, rags, ashes, and garbage of our human life, still invested with ghastly human semblances, all decayed and worn out; and sepulchral shadows of what once was man, all stunted, abortive and despised modes of young existence; all these were there; and each a melancholy portion of a hideous whole. The old and infantile were mixed together, but the aged received no duteous reverence, and the children were regarded with no tender watchfulness. There was a certain dull tranquility enforced by power; a chill orderly sufficiency of physical necessaries provided by routine; a discipline and economy directed to no higher than an outward end, and animated by no affection. The whole was an image of evil of all kinds, compressed, indeed, and frozen, and benumbed by mere superficial pressure, leaving only the consciousness of unrest and pain, but ready, had the weight been removed, and the machinery for a moment relaxed, to burst out in explosions of

rage, hatred, horror, and despair. Here sat an old man, once a wealthy farmer, whom drunkenness had made a pauper, and whose only child, a daughter, had been betrayed by po verty into fatal corruption, and had died an outcast. He looked downward with dim, inflamed eyes, still occupied by the vision of an intoxicat ing draught which he could no longer procure. There the widow of a shopkeeper, whom her fierce passions and self-will had goaded to the grave, sat in sullen dignity, dressed with some pretension to superior refinement, and brooding on the injustice of the fate which confined her to such society. Scoffs and fury, when she happened to speak, were the burthen of all her language. She had hoarded for twenty years a single pound to purchase a handsomer funeral and better attendance than were provided at the expense of the parish. Among those about her were the worn-out drudges who had toiled as the wives of labour. ers now dead; and the men whose choicest recollections were of years long gone by, when they enjoyed the night of poaching and the ale-house riot. There was the cobbler, disabled by incurable headache, and half-crazed by ill-health and fanaticism, whose sense of the woful present was every now and then brightened by a flashing dream of a golden and vermilion New Jerusalem, and by the assurance of his own immeasurable spiritual superiority to those who required moral conduct of a Christian, and who had ever been at school. For he was a self-taught theolo gian, and was even ingenious in his absurdity. Beside him sat the soldier, with one leg and one arm, whose gayest phantasms were of the town he once helped to sack, and of unstinted brandy. Children, moping over some heartcankered attempt at free and happy sport, slunk in corners and made their presence known chiefly by an occasional quarrel and shriek. One woman, of seventy, who had ap peared since ten years old destitute of every faculty but the purely animal ones, now at last, while the clergyman was reading a chapter of the Scrip tures, suddenly woke up at the names of Ruth and Naomi, and began to mutter, in language which she had not used for more than half a century an account of the last gleaning in which she had shared as a child with her

mother. She died before she could be carried into another room. In the midst, however, of this strange and disordered society, some members of it appeared to enjoy all the happiness of which their poor mutilated natures were now capable, and some eyes of the lighter and more joyous temperaments twinkled with unquenchable good-humour.

In this dreary confusion, where it seemed that Orpheus might have sung, and almost that Moses might have legislated, in vain, the benevolence and faith of Musgrave glanced by and vanished without a trace. One glow-worm under the coal-black

vault of night, a single candle in the largest, deepest mine, is not more ineffectual. Some, indeed, derived, from his soft and dolicate ministra tions, a purblind sense of something like good will towards them existing somewhere; and even this was a blessing. But he felt himself a wanderer into a region which he did not understand, and where he had no hope of ever finding a solid resting-place for his foot. The butterfly among the rocks of Caucasus might as well have dreamt of sweeping down before its silken wings the crag on which the Titan groaned in vain.

Musgrave had twice seen Elizabeth, the daughter of Farmer Wilson, in the first week after her return, and now towards the close of the second he sat again beside her bed. Maria Lascelles, who was now no longer a visitor at Sir Charles Harcourt's, but living at her uncle's house, a good deal further off, had found out the dying woman, and was with her when Musgrave entered, but then rose and went away. He found the sufferer penitent, resigned, and hopeful, and he felt that she comprehended him better than most of those whom he conversed with. She had grown rapidly weaker, and nearer to her end, and he expected her very speedy departure from the body. She was propped up by pillows in the bed, and her mother sat beside her at the opposite side from the clergyman, and attended to all her wants. Musgrave had his back to the window, through which a bright evening light flowed in and fell upon her wasted haggard face, and upon the shrunken hand that lay near him on the bed-cothes. She

spoke to him of Maria, and said, "That lady is a great blessing to me; she reads and talks to me for hours, and her visits are like those of a young prophetess. She enters strangely into all I feel, though she can never have had any thing like it in herself. And when I say any thing of this kind to her, she only answers, that we have all much the same things in our minds if we would attend to them properly." "It must be a great pleasure and

advantage to you to have such a friend."

"Oh! indeed it is so, sir. I think she has done me more good than any one I ever knew. She sees so well what kind of help I want, and she always tries to make me feel how real and awful our sins are, and then points out how great is the blessing of being relieved from the burthen of them, Oh! she is a good young lady!"

and

Musgrave listened with much interest, but thought it right to turn the conversation more directly on Elizabeth's own state. He expatiated on the happiness of a future life, the perfect freedom from sorrow trial, and the luminous and ethereal kind of existence which is all we can imagine of a perfectly spiritualized life in the unclouded presence of God. She listened with some pleasure. But, though checked in expressing herself, as the poor so often are, by the fear of differing with their superiors, she felt, in her heart that what she chiefly wanted was not encouragement of this kind, but that which should strengthen in her the sense of present victory even in this life over the pain of actual sinfulness, and the sharp remembrance of many previous offences. So only she guessed, but hardly dared to say even to herself, could she look forward cheerfully and on sure grounds to a better and nobler existence hereafter. She took the first opportunity which Musgrave's remarks offered of referring to her husband, and looked at him while she

How hard a work is life! The system of things which I live in lays on me certain unceasing tasks, but gives me no sufficient strength to fulfil them. The strong gladiator drags me into the arena of struggle that we call the world, and then and there it strikes and bruises me, and compels me to fight, yet with the certainty that I must be overcome and die. This very system awakens in me the feeling that I am fit for something better. It gives me a sense of peace, which it will not let me realise. Like a divine muse, it sings into my heart a song of mercy and hope, and at the same time, with the talons of a fury, rends and strangles me.

I have been twenty-three years in this visible world. For seven, partly from the foolish affection of others, partly from their selfish carelessness, suffered evils that I did not understand, and my gratifications were slight and baseless. Yet, in looking back even on this early part, it wears a certain brightness which it never had in the reality; pleasures, that were trivial in the enjoyment, seem in the retrospect sublime. Whence, then, comes the sublimity? It must be from my present self, from the creative power of my feelings and imagination. Yet this grandeur, which I am able to extend over the images of the past, when I would grasp and embody it as an actual good, fades and vanishes; only the Distant shines, the Near is pale and gloomy. Thus, all we see of beauty and bliss is but the feast of Tantalus, which melts when we approach in the infernal air. My boyhood was a time of strong and conscious growth. But I had the pains of the process, and never have known the peaceful fruits of it. I then enlarged my knowledge of Nature and its forms, and increased my love of them. But that passion, ardent and tender at the first, and yielding many delightful hopes, has always ended in sorrow. The Nymphs have all in turn shrunk beneath their waters and into their caves, and left the enamoured boy to stare at the

blank solitude. The enthusiasm of youthful hope and belief, kindled in the awakening consciousness by the shapes of Life and Reality, never finds a future adequate to its demands. It but enlarges the heart to hold a larger portion of disappointment. Now that I am a man, I have faculties, indeed, which enable me to discern the principles of things, and to embody these in lively images, and to devise lines of extensive action. But my heart is wearied and saddened by ill success; I want a field of movement; and languish without sympathy from those around me. I have a pupil whom I must teach, but who will hardly learn; and employers or patrons who regard me but as the menial groom of their favourite and costly horse. They would not give a shilling to save the servant's life; but a hundred pounds to rescue that of the animal.

Verily it seems to me that the Life we know is all a delusion. We sometimes pierce the covering, and find blackness and hollowness within. We are told, indeed, that inside this, in turn, there is I know not what treasure-a gem, a light, an eye, a magical remedy. But may not this, too, be a delusion? Who knows? I have seen a French sugar-plum-box with a pic. ture of a watch upon the cover, to indicate that there was a watch within; but, on opening it, the watch was found to be of painted and gilt sugar, as false as the outward image. It is the cry of moralists, and the curse of our nature, that all fair things seen by man turn into clay, and lastly he himself.

The adaptation, so often trumpeted, of man to the system of nature, is, I think, at best but as the relation of a line to its parallel. Their very parallelism secures that they shall never meet. Man works on wheels, but these will not fit the grooves they seem designed for, and can only move out. side of them in the irregular rut which they have broken for themselves.

Human life has evidently desires that human life can never satisfy. What is the remedy for this evil? Apparently, none is possible. The very terms seem to involve a hopeless contradiction. It is indeed said, that faith in God helps us out of the difficulty, and raises man above himself. But when I ask my teacher what he means by the Deity, I receive either no answer or worse than none. One says, the Creator of all things. But this tells me nothing of the kind of Being who created all. The rat that lurks in the crannies of a castle, and is hunted and laid wait for daily, learns little to gratify its soul if told that the architect of the castle formed the ratholes no less than the rat-traps, and even took pains to stock them with his progenitors. Another talks to me of the Life and Ground of all things. But this gives me scanty help; for of all things I best know myself. It is, therefore, by looking within that I can find the most intelligible specimen and example of that All of which I am referred to the Cause and the Vital Principle. From this quarter, then,-namely, my own consciousness of myself,-I must derive my view of the character of the Primordial Power. Now, it is my own consciousness which is sick, suffering, plague-stricken; and it is from its miseries that I am directed to take refuge in that Divine Idea which is yet so plainly shown to be itself wounded with the same weapon and infected by the same poison. It is the very malady and desperation of all within me which leads me to seek help from something outward. If that Outward be but a repetition of the Interior Existence, magnified in the concave mirror of the Universe, all its distortions and scars, its blood and tears and steel-spiked crown, are also reflected and enlarged there. If, again, I am sent to the Bible, I see, indeed, clearly enough that what I will not call the Jupiter of that Iliad, but the Fate of that High Hebrew Tragedy, would condemn and punish me for not being other than I am. But how I shall become other, how be fashioned by that standard, seems to me as vain an enquiry as how the flying-fish can change itself into the dolphin which pursues it, and so find refuge in the waters. Finally, miracles are no evidence to him who has no clear conception of the Being they are said to

proceed from; and even if they were, they would go to establish a system which, from the incomformity of my mind to its principles, leaves me an outcast or makes me a victim.

I cannot recognise myself or my experience of life in the Sacred Re cords. When I read them I find my. self travelling in an enchanted region that has almost nothing in common with my accustomed country. There is little in it that joins on to any thing pre-existent in me. I acknowledge, indeed, here a rich and profuse beauty, as in fairy pictures; there, a dreary awful power, as in Druidical or Egyp tian remains; wonders, again, as unprepared and incoherent as those of dreams; lastly, gushes of human feeling and strains of thought which really seem to belong to the same nature as mine, but which stand in no close or necessary relation to the loftier, stran ger, more oracular portions. I can as little enter into the old Hebrew's views of divine and human things as he, could he now revive, would compre hend my feelings as to nature, art, and man. His world is, indeed, a land of marvels, many of them lovely and many expressive, hut all shut up within a circuit of huge walls. It seems to me the chief of all confounding paradoxes that so many millions of men, in times and modes so different from these, should fancy the grey and thundering cloud of that old Eastern Theocracy can remain built up like a Cy. clopian wall in our freer calmer sky.

In the family I live in there is no one who has the smallest notion that my opinions differ at all from their own and from those of the clergyman of the parish. There is no one of them who could ever be brought to understand the least portion of my views. Now if, as I cannot but suppose, there are many other instances of the same entire misconception as to the charac ters and thoughts of those we live with daily, what a world of secret and unguessed life must be concealed within that which is palpable and commonplace! How many hidden-treasure chambers, forgotten graves, buried habitations, and inurned yet beating hearts, must lie under the soil which the feet of busy men hourly and s heedlessly travel over! Perhaps the world would gain were it to unknow