the soul has returned charged with sublimer secrets and a sublimer love. They were nearly of the same height; Dinah evidently a little. the taller as she put her arm round Hetty's waist, and kissed her forehead.

'I knew you were not in bed, my dear,' she said, in her sweet clear voice, which was irritating to Hetty, mingling with her own peevish vexation like music with jangling chains, for I heard you moving; and I longed to speak to you again to-night, for it is the last but one that I shall be here, and we don't know what may happen tomorrow to keep us apart. Shall I sit down with you while you do up your hair? O yes,' said Hetty, hastily turning round and reaching the second chair in the room, glad that Dinah looked as if she did not notice her earrings.

Dinah sat down, and Hetty began to brush together her hair before twisting it up, doing it with that air of excessive indifference which belongs to confused self-consciousness. But the expression of Dinah's eyes gradually relieved her; they seemed unobservant of all details. 'Dear Hetty,' she said, 'it has been borne in upon my mind to-night that you may some day be in trouble-trouble is appointed for us all here below, and there comes a time when we need more comfort and help than the things of this life can give. I want to tell you that if ever you are in trouble and need a friend that will always feel for you and love you, you have got that friend in Dinah Morris at Snowfield; and if you come to her, or send for her, she'll never forget this night, and the words she is speaking to you now. Will you remember it, Hetty?' Yes,' said Hetty, rather frightened. should you think I shall be in trouble? Do you know of any thing?? Hetty had seated herself as she tied on her cap, and now Dinah leaned forwards and took her hands as she answered,

But why

Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing; the people we love are taken from us, and we can joy in nothing because they are not with us; sickness comes, and we faint under the burden of our feeble bodies; we go astray and do wrong, and bring ourselves into trouble with our fellow-men. There is no man or woman born into this world to whom some of these trials do not fall, and so I feel that some of them must happen to you; and I desire for you, that while you are young you should seek for strength from your Heavenly Father, that you may have a support which will not fail you in the evil day.'

Dinah paused and released Hetty's hands, that she might not hinder her. Hetty sat quite still; she felt no response within herself to Dinah's anxious affection; but Dinah's words, uttered with solemn, pathetic distinctness, affected her with a chill fear. Her flush had died away almost to paleness; she had the timidity of a luxurious pleasureseeking nature, which shrinks from the hint of pain. Dinah saw the effect, and her tender anxious pleading became the more earnest, till Hetty, full of a vague fear that something evil was sometime to befall her, began to cry. . . . Dinah had never seen Hetty affected in this way

before, and with her usual benignant hopefulness, she trusted it was the stirring of a divine impulse. She kissed the sobbing thing, and began to cry with her for grateful joy. But Hetty was simply in that excitable state of mind in which there is no calculating what turn the feelings may take from one moment to another, and for the first time she became irritated under Dinah's caress. She pushed her away impatiently, and said with a childish sobbing voice, 'Don't talk to me so, Dinah. Why do you come to frighten me? I've never done any thing to you. Why can't you let me be?'

Poor Dinah felt a pang. She was too wise to persist, and only said mildly, 'Yes, my dear, you're tired; I won't hinder you any longer. Make haste and get into bed. Good-night.' She went out of the room almost as quietly and quickly as if she had been a ghost; but once by the side of her own bed, she threw herself on her knees, and poured out in deep silence all the passionate pity that filled her heart. As for Hetty, she was soon in the wood again-her waking dreams being merged in a sleeping life scarcely more fragmentary and confused."

This is powerful, and it seems scarcely possible that the conception of a problem so deep should be worked out with any adequate success; and yet the development is as powerful as the commencement, and the solution most powerful of all. To depict the sufferings of a sensitive but frail nature,—the remorse of guilt, the despair of shame, this would be comparatively easy to an imagination so powerful as George Eliot's. But to deal with a nature too shallow for any real sense of guilt, too easily numbed by pain for clear thought at all, too cowardly for despair, and to show how, by the slow, dull pressure of mingled shame and hardship, momentarily broken by a new instinct, and then renewed after a more conscious act of guilt, a dim sense of spiritual things is literally wrung out of this sterile little pleasure-loving life, till under Dinah's kindly influence it becomes a distinct cry for help,-this is a task as great as any which an imaginative writer below the rank of a great poet ever attempted. Let us observe with what flexibility the author contracts her own powerful imagination within the limits of Hetty's nature, and delineates the growing wretchedness and numbness of her vacant mind during the futile journey in search of Captain Donnithorne, the helpless attempt to destroy herself, and the violent shrinking of her whole being from the brink of death.

"There it was, black under the darkening sky: no motion, no sound near. She set down her basket, and then sank down herself on the grass, trembling. The pool had its wintry depth now: by the time it got shallow, as she remembered the pools did at Hayslope, in the summer, no one could find out that it was her body. But then there was her basket-she must hide that too: she must throw it into

CIS

the water-make it heavy with stones first, and then throw it in. She got up to look about for stones, and soon brought five or six, which she laid down beside her basket, and then sat down again. There was no need to hurry-there was all the night to drown herself in. She sat leaning her elbow on the basket. She was weary, hungry. There were some buns in her basket-three, which she had supplied herself with at the place where she ate her dinner. She took them out now, and ate them eagerly, and then sat still again, looking at the pool. The soothed sensation that came over her from the satisfaction of her hunger, and this fixed dreamy attitude, brought on drowsiness, and presently her head sank down on her knees. She was fast asleep. When she awoke it was deep night, and she felt chill. She was fright, ened at this darkness-frightened at the long night before her. If she could but throw herself into the water! No, not yet., She began to walk about that she might get warm again, as if she would have more resolution then.

The horror of this cold, and darkness, and solitude-out of all human reach-became greater every long minute: it was almost as if she were dead already, and knew that she was dead and longed to get back to life again. But no: she was alive still; she had not taken the dreadful leap. She felt a strange contradictory wretchedness and exultation; wretchedness, that she did not dare to face death; exultation, that she was still in life that she might yet know light and warmth again. She walked backwards and forwards to warm herself, beginning to discern something of the objects around her, as her eyes became accustomed to the night: the darker line of the hedge, the rapid motion of some living creature-perhaps a field-mouse-rushing across the grass. She no longer felt as if the darkness hedged her in: she thought she could walk back across the field, and get over the stile; and then, in the very next field, she thought she remembered there was a hovel of furze near a sheepfold.

She had found the shelter: she groped her way, touching the prickly gorse, to the door, and pushed it open. It was an ill-smelling close place, but warm, and there was straw on the ground: Hetty sank down on the straw with a sense of escape. Tears came-she had never shed tears before since she left Windsor-tears and sobs of hysterical joy that she had still hold of life, that she was still on the familiar earth, with the sheep near her. The very consciousness of her own limbs was a delight to her she turned up her sleeves, and kissed her arms with the passionate love of life."

Seldom has any human experience been more powerfully painted, and yet the confession in prison which Dinah at last wins from her is still more powerful. In short, the whole thread of inward history which unites the first interview between them in Hetty's bedroom with the last in her cell, is recounted with a power quite unsurpassed in fiction. With no more promising instrument to work upon than the most sterile and frivolous of characters, George Eliot has brought forth tones which are far more

pathetic than could have been extorted from a nobler type of suffering and penitence, for they seem to attest more solemnly the capacities of all men-of man. The spiritual and the earthly natures find at last a single meeting-point in the infantine ery for divine mercy which poor little Hetty puts forth to Dinah rather than to God.

The artistic conditions under which the author of Adam Bede works are, when she chooses, singularly favourable to the exhibition of the only kind of " moral" which a genuine artist should admit. No one now ever thinks of assuming that a writer of fiction lies under any obligation to dispose of his characters exactly as he would perhaps feel inclined to do, if he could determine for them the circumstances of a real instead of an imaginary life. It was a quaint idea of the last generation to suppose that the moral tendency of a tale lay, not in discriminating evil and good, but in the zeal which induced the novelist to provide, before the end of the third volume, for plucking up and burning the tares. But though we have got over that notion, our modern satirists are leading us into the opposite extreme, and trying to convince us that even discrimination itself in such deep matters is nearly impossible. The author of the Mill on the Floss may not be exempt from this tendency; but in Adam Bede it is not discernible. The only moral in a fictitious story which can properly be demanded of writers of genius is,-not to shape their tale this way or that, which they may justly decline to do on artistic grounds,-but to discriminate clearly the relative nobility of the characters they do conceive; in other words, to give us light enough in their pictures to let it be clearly seen where the shadows are intended to lie. An artist who leaves it doubtful whether he recognises the distinction between good and evil at all, or who detects in all his characters so much evil that the readers' sympathies must either be entirely passive or side with what is evil, is blind to artistic as well as moral laws. To banish confusion from a picture is the first duty of the artist; and confusion must exist where those lines which are the most essential of all for determining the configuration of human character are invisible or indistinctly drawn. Moreover, we think it may be said that in painting human nature, an artist is bound to give due weight to the motives which would claim authority over him in other acts of his life; and as he would be bound at any time and in any place to do any thing in his power to make clear the relation between good and evil, the same motive ought to induce him never to omit in his drawing to put in a light or a shadow which would add to the moral truthfulness of the picture.

But this conceded, an artist must still work according to the

conditions of his own genius; and where that genius leads him only to give lively sketches, such as Miss Austen's for example, of the social externals of character, and barely to indicate the interior forces which determine its form and growth, it is unreasonable to expect more than a very superficial moral. Those stories alone can have deep morals which are concerned with the deepest moral phenomena; but where this is so they must show them in their true light. Adam Bede may be said to produce in this sense a deeper and nobler moral impression than any other story of our day. It exhibits in close mutual relations characters of very various degrees of moral depth. It teaches us to discriminate truly between them. It has for its centrepiece one singularly beautiful and bright character which illuminates the whole narrative, and so aids us to realise the good and the evil in all the others; and hence every conscience as well as every imagination gains fresh force and distincter vision. from its perusal.

The Mill on the Floss is in every way inferior, in some respects painfully inferior, to Adam Bede, though we do not see in it any sign of diminished intellectual power. The author, as we have said, needs both the stimulus and the natural unity of a deeply interesting story, in order to concentrate her imagination in a defined channel of action, and prevent that tendency to diffusive sketching which characterises her genius. There is no single plot in The Mill on the Floss; it is a masterly fragment of fictitious biography in two volumes, followed by a second-rate one-volume novel, the three connected into a single whole by very inadequate links. The deeper characters in the tale are not nearly so deep as those in Adam Bede; and the shallower characters do not serve in the same way to bring into relief the nobler characteristics of the deeper. The moral foundations of the story are almost entirely laid on the same dreary level. Moral and spiritual perspective there is almost none. The one character which is intended to give depth to and light up the tale at one time threatens to go out in smoke; and the shadows are any thing but clear. There is occasional confusion, both artistic and moral, some exaggeration, and one great blot.

Yet The Mill on the Floss is a book of great genius. Its overflowing humour would alone class its author high among the humorists, and there are some sketches in it of country English life which have all the vivacity and not a little of the power of Sir Walter Scott's best works. The proud, warm-hearted, not very clear-headed miller, whose heart is broken by bankruptcy, and whose spirit is consumed with the thirst for revenge, is a character to live in the imagination. Perhaps there may be a slight touch of Mr. Dickens's foolish habit of ticketing his cha