a rest that may gather some solace in the cares and fondness of maternity relieving a little the aching emptiness within; but such a doom is beyond any natural redemption from the fatality of the one great mistake. Its nearest approach to it is to settle yet lower down to the stolid practicality of its yoke-fellow, to harden what is left of one's heart into a millstone which shall at least grind out the grists of a dull and venal utility. So our poet leaves this part of his theme, with a withering sarcasm of contempt.

We pause a moment to consider. The topic is one of a close home-interest. We hope the numerous We hope the numerous "good books" which have latterly been spun out from kindly hearts and prudent heads on the forming and management of domestic relationships will do something to abate the evil of misassorted natures. It is melancholy that the most sacred temple of human loves should ever be turned into a prison-house of worse than Pharaonic bondage. Yet, with every precaution against it, the misery of this error will doubtless enter many another disappointed soul, turning its anticipated parterre of summer flowers into a bed of wormwood. The question is certainly worth asking, whether nothing but the bitter herbs can grow even there? Perhaps not, under a merely natural culture. But the utterly disappointed and seemingly ruined Madame Guyon found, amid this very wreck of earthly expectations, and as the immediate product of it, a wondrously potent charm for the heartache of her sorrows, in a simple and childlike trust in God and communion with the Spirit of Christ, which, with much of morbid sensibility in it, did give her a real victory over this formidable. adversary. We cannot but wish that just here our author had pressed a drop of that Christi consolatio into his cup of myrrh and aloes, which he has mingled so freely in the precious chalice of the "In Memoriam even at the risk of marring the

artistic unity of his poem.

But there is no such toning down the sentiment; and we push on with our hard rider, in the rush of impulses and sensations which whirls him away from his betrayed confidence into other excitements.

"Am I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter fruit? I will pluck it from my bosom, tho' my heart be at the root."

-a resolve easier made than kept. But a brave spirit will fight for its life against the demon of Despond. It is a little difficult, however, to find just where to strike for another conquest in an age like this. Gold holds the keys of the gateways of success; gold bars the doors up to which the clamorous crowds are thronging.

"I had been content to perish, falling on the foeman's ground,

When the ranks are rolled in vapor, and the winds are laid with sound.

"But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honor feels,
And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels.
"Can I but relive in sadness? I will turn that earlier page.
Hide me from my deep emotion, oh thou wondrous Mother-Age!
"Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,
When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life;

"Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

"Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

"Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

"So I triumphed "

-Yet not very satisfactorily it would appear an imaginary more than a real victory.

"So I triumphed, ere my passion sweeping thro' me left me dry, Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye,

"Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint,

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Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point:"

Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher,
Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire."

-a picture of the days of the Bastile and the Sansculotte
which, in two lines, gives us the contents of Carlyle's two vol-
umes of France-run-mad. This is the power which stamps
genius with its royal mark. - Tennyson does not seem to be
very sanguine concerning the intellectual millennium of which
Mr. Buckle is prophesying so oracularly. We judge him not
to be a disciple of that inflated school.
enough that "the thoughts of men are

While it is true widened with the

process of the suns," none but an incurable egotist will dissent. from the poet's confession;

"Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast, Full of sad experience moving toward the stillness of his rest."

But the merry bugle-note of his comrades calls our solitary, stirring again the slackening fires of his tropical nature in which this transient philosophic mood is burned up like a handful of dry leaves. He spurns the trammels of civilization, and pants for the freedom of the wild life of far-off shores "at the gateway of the day," where no European trader chaffers or flag floats amid the heavy-blossomed bowers and heavy-fruited trees of

"Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea."

The picture has a momentary fascination. Those "darkpurple spheres of sea" are enough to tempt almost any one to fly away in quest of their murmuring waves.

"There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind, In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind. "There the passions, cramped no longer, shall have scope and breathingspace;

I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.

"Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive, and they shall run, Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun; "Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks, Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books."

It will not do. The mere statement of the question explodes it as preposterous. Even Rousseau was not crazed enough to practise on his own creed of a paradisiacal savageism. It is too false for a second thought. Bad as the Fifth Avenue may be, the etiquette and morals of Dahomey and the Marquesas are beyond comparison worse.

"Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild,
But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child.

“I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!
“Mated with a squalid savage · what to me were sun or clime?
I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.".

-

—a capital prescription to cure any of our Byronic young misanthropes whom some South-sea Melville may have inoculated with the Typee and Omoo fever. Fish-oil toilets and cannibal cuisines to those of strong enough stomachs. We prefer to gang anither gate, albeit our guide just now is rather heady in his on-goings, and arrives at a decidedly abrupt and somewhat dramatic upshot of his travels, quite a la Ravenswood of the "large sable feather."

"Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range.

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.

"Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day; Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

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Mother-age, (for mine I knew not,) help me as when life begun : Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the sun.

"O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set, Ancient founts of inspiration well thro' all my fancy yet.

"Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall! Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall. "Comes a vapor from the margin, blackening over heath and holt, Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.

"Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow: For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go."

We have not thought it worth while to stay the progress of the poet in order to point out the many beauties of his verse, the aptness and force of his transitions, and other fine points of his work. The reader will not have missed these if open to the charms of such writing. In the full version there are many more of them than we could cull into this bouquet. Competent criticism across the water pronounces this poem one of the best specimens of this class of composition in the language. The passions which surge through it are surging through countless dissatisfied souls in this fast and furious age of ours. It is a most natural expression of one and a very common phase of social disappointment, while, as Augustine so truthfully confessed for himself and for thousands since as well, we wander "further and further from Thee, into more and more fruitless seed-plots of sorrow, with a proud dejectedness, and a restless weariness." And the remedy which it gives its victim is the

best which nature alone can supply the spirit to help it bear its infirmities and heal its sicknesses. What we want and this only is that sweet vision of Faith kneeling before the Cross along the dim pathway, which Palmer has hung up in our. memory on the pure marble, to be a joy forever; and which Tennyson himself has elsewhere sung in that noble invocation beginning

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Strong Son of God, immortal Love!"

ARTICLE III.

IMMORTALITY AND ANNIHILATION.

Debt and Grace, as related to the Doctrine of Future Life. By C. F. HUDSON. 1857-1861. 1857-1861. pp. 497.

Christ our Life. The Scriptural Argument for Immortality through Christ alone. By C. F. HUDSON. 1861. pp. 168. La Mort n'est qu'un Sommeil Éternel. Pere la Chaise. 1793.

PRYING up foundations is a favorite work of the present generation. But this always involves the question whether the stone shall move or the lever be broken. We are quite sure that it will take a tougher bar of iron than has yet been forged to loosen the great rock of the Immortality of the Soul and topple it over into the black and bottomless abyss of Annihilation. We hold this assurance as well concerning the just now vigorously advocated assumption of the limited existence of the unforgiven wicked, as against the general affirmation of the materialists, that all human spirits are perishable like the brutes.

That this topic should need re-arguing almost compels one to ask, if there is anything settled under the sun? The dream and the study of mankind since the creation, it has evolved in its defence a large variety of reasons. These have moulded themselves to the peculiar characteristics of their authors; now exhibiting the deductions of a severe logic, and now taking on