and having attached it to this, he led the way to Atropos, that her spinning might make the thread of destiny unchangeable. Thence, without once turning round, he went under the throne of Necessity and when he had passed through it and the others had passed too, they all proceeded through parching and dreadful heat to the plain of Lethe, for it is bare of trees and all that grows upon the earth. Evening having already overtaken them, they encamped by the river Careless, whose water no vessel can hold. A certain portion of the water all were obliged to drink; but those who had no rational self-restraint drank more than the portion and each as he drinks, forgets every thing. When now they had lain down to sleep, at midnight there came thunder and an earthquake and suddenly, as with the shoot of stars, they were snatched away in every direction up to the birth. The Pamphylian was not allowed to drink of the water and how and by what course he came back into the body, he did not know: but all at once, on looking up in the morning, he found himself already lying on the funeral pile. : 'And this revelation, Glaucon, has been preserved from perishing, and may be our preservative, if we give heed to it. And then we shall cross the stream of Lethe well and with immaculate soul. But if my counsel is of any avail, we shall at all times, under persuasion that the soul is immortal and equal to the burden of every evil and every good, hold on the upward path, and strive in every way after thoughtful rectitude, that we may be in friendship with ourselves and with the gods, not only while abiding here, but when as conquerors we go round and gather in the prizes of our victory; and that both now, and on the millennial journey we have described, it may be well with us.'"* With how wise a sadness does Plato say of such passages as this! "These things will seem to you perhaps the words of a fable,mere old wives' tales,-and you will despise them. Nor would such contempt be strange, if by any quest of ours we could find what was better and truer." ... "In these things we must reach one of two results either learn and discover how the fact really stands; or else, should this be impossible, at least take up with the best and most incontrovertible human belief respecting it; and then, borne upon this as in a skiff, venture the voyage of life,-unless we can find a securer and less hazardous passage on the firmer support of some Divine Word."+ • Rep. p. 614 в end. † Gorg. p. 527 a. Phædon, p. 85 C, D. ART. XI.-THE AUTHOR OF PAUL FERROLL. Poems by the Author of Paul Ferroll; including a New Edition of - THESE are stimulating books, and produce an impression of an intellectual temperament roused into genius by the continual presence of some sharp spiritual goad in the mind of the writer, from which there is constant pain, but no shrinking and no escape. The effect is very striking, especially in the principal novel,-for poetry a genius of this description is not, we think, adapted, and very painful. But no one can question the reality of the power displayed. No book of greater nervous tension was probably ever produced than Paul Ferroll. It is not passionate; the hero is all curb. It is not a book which delineates any growth or development of character. The moral attitude, the interior tableau vivant, once conceived, is never varied. It is not a novel which professes to show the "inexorable logic of facts." On the contrary, the facts are ill-strung together, and most of them might be omitted,-not, certainly, without great loss to the book, but without betraying the slightest inadequacy or incoherence in the conception. Much of the power, and perhaps also of the artistic deficiencies of the tale, consists in the unique character of the conception,-of a man strong enough in will to prescribe to himself beforehand the precise limits of his own intended crime, and to keep within these limits with unfaltering purpose. It is obvious that such a conception has something statuesque about it. The attitude of mind is necessarily inva riable throughout the tale; and though the scene changes often, and eighteen years elapse during its evolution,-if that can be called evolution which shows no real growth or natural expansion, the catastrophe would be as much in place and keeping in the second chapter as in the last. The author of Paul Ferroll has told her story backwards; and it is evident, we think, that it has been conceived in the direction in which it has been told. The second tale, which explains this gentleman's reasons for committing murder, is a powerful piece of mental analysis directed by the author on the main character in her previous conception. The intellectual point of departure, as well in the story itself as in the prefatory sequel to it, is the same. The one painful and inexorable certainty in the author's mind is this, that Mr. Ferroll's happiness having been completely ruined by the vain and shallow woman who had treacherously induced him to believe his intended wife faithless, and to marry herself, he had set himself free by piercing her under the ear one fine summer morning with a sharp instrument, bent on having the woman whom he loved, though without conveying to her the faintest suspicion of his crime; and resolved neither to allow any other person to suffer for his own guilt, nor to accept from casual friends or acquaintances any of the courtesies which he believed they would bitterly regret, should the murder ever be acknowledged or discovered. This is the fact evidently engraved on the author's mind from which both books issue. The first and most striking shows Mr. Ferroll's life under the tension of this secret and this resolve; the other, also powerful, attempts to unravel the provocation by which he must have been led to do the deed. The character of Paul Ferroll is finely imagined; but it is a woman's hero rather than a man's. It is evident that, in spite of the odour of blood about him throughout both stories,-for even in the explanatory sequel the murder is always the goal, the known result on which the reader's eye is constantly riveted, -there is a secret worship for his power of volition in the mind of the author, and a fixed persuasion that his undeviating adherence to the limits which he had prescribed for himself would secure his soul from absolute perdition after all. We must give some brief outline of the tales before we can attempt to criticise intelligibly the genius of the author. Paul Ferroll alias Leslie,-for, either from some capricious diffidence in the author's mind as to her power of really analysing her hero's previous history-or, from some vague notion that a murderer must be a completely changed person, he is in the second tale called Leslie, is a young man of property and sang froid, able, selfish, perfectly independent, from whose mind the claims of others seem to run off like water from oilskin when they do not meet his own wishes, and on that account the more able to make his own claims or wishes fasten with irresistible force on the minds of others. He is first introduced to us,-first, that is, in the imaginary order of events, for his first appearance in fiction, and probably also in the author's own imagination, was as a murderer, with the guilty act already done,-as a man fresh from Oxford, staying at the house of the brother of the lady whom he afterwards marries and kills. "Life was a fine hard reality to him; he knew it for evil and for good; and while he destroyed every illusion as fast as they courted him, he looked keenly to its enjoyments, and rated them by the vast power of pleasure within him which he shared with most healthy and active human beings." The main power of this preliminary but later-conceived tale lies in the delineation of the young lady afterwards murdered. She is conceived with great power, and a very disagreeable conception she is; handsome, clever, self-loving; passionate without delicacy; jealous, and capable of mean deceit; and more unscrupulous than Leslie, rather because she has not the pride and independence which comes of strength of purpose and truth of intellect, than because she is more really selfish. This young lady is entertaining Mr. Leslie (or Paul Ferroll) at her brother's house throughout the preliminary tale. Thither comes a ward of her brother's, a young orphan who had been brought up in a convent, simple, innocent, and affectionate, Paul Ferroll's second wife. The worldly Leslie falls in love with her, and engages himself to her, to the great discomfiture of Miss Chanson, who uses all female artifices, and finally hatches a very shameless as well as clearly actionable conspiracy to detach him, and gain him for herself. She at last succeeds in persuading him falsely of Elinor's faithlessness; but the result is a long and terrible illness, through which she nurses him; and she finally asks him, with tolerable frankness, to put a stop to the gossip about them by marrying her. Leslie replies, that if his name is of any use to her she may bear it, but that he is wholly indifferent to her love; and his first wife closes with the offer. After their marriage, it comes out, in casual conversation with the brother, that the story of Elinor's faithlessness is wholly untrue; and this is admitted by the principal conspirator herself, who taunts him with his credulousness. Leslie at once leaves home, finds out Elinor, tries in vain to persuade her to fly with him, and the preliminary tale ends by leaving him in the toils. "He was fast bound in the meshes which a woman, a mere woman, had found the means to twine around him, and fiercely did he resent the injury, and gaze sternly at her falsehood and successful deceit. It was in vain he raged against his bonds, which Elinor refused to assist him in evading, and which the hand that fastened them, even if willing, had no power to untie, though it had sought and found the fatal spell to make them fast. She was his fate; a contemptible, but all-powerful agent; a hateful presence which had forced itself upon him, and which held him imprisoned in sight of the felicity he had once grasped, and let go at the false accents of that despicable deceiver." The first published tale, but the later in order of event, opens immediately after these meshes have been burst. It is perhaps a defect inseparable from the order in which the tales were written, that murder has certainly improved the character of the hero. In the previous tale there was, besides absorbing selfishness, something much less than honourable in his earlier treatment of both the ladies whom he was to marry, and little redeeming trait of any kind, unless his passionate devotion to Elinor be thought one. The author had evidently been anxious to paint a character capable of great crime, and does not fully prepare us for the stronglydefined and sternly-observed limits within which he was to keep that crime. At all events, the murder seems to have cleared the moral air in which Paul Ferroll lives; though it would be unjust to argue that our author thinks it his first step in the right direction. He reappears descending his own steps on a fine summer morning, at five o'clock, for an early ride. The object of this ride is to help a perplexed farmer, who is a workhouse-overseer, in disentangling his public accounts. He eats heartily of the farmer's home-made bread, and is making good progress in the elucidation of the balance-sheet, when one of his horrified servants arrives at full gallop to summon him home to his murdered wife. No trace is found of the murderer. A labourer suspected of it is tried, defended at Mr. Ferroll's own expense, and acquitted. But as the public still believe him guilty, he and his wife, who was in the service of the murdered woman, are sent to America at Mr. Ferroll's expense. After an interval of some years spent by Mr. Ferroll abroad, he reappears with his second wife, the Elinor of the former tale, and a little girl. They live in perfect retirement; but Mr. Ferroll does not fail to secure his neighbour, Lady Lucy Bartlett's, friendship for his wife; in return for which he helps her in the management of her household and her son, though seldom accepting her hospitality. Many episodes are introduced to illustrate his character which are entirely non-essential to the story. For instance, the neighbourhood is visited by cholera in its worst form. Mr. Ferroll, who, though his heart is entirely inaccessible to either the pain or pleasure of sympathy, yet enjoys conducting any kind of well-organised administration, and who moreover delights in the new experience of human nature for which such calamities afford the occasion, is foremost in visiting and relieving the sufferers; his spirits remain at the highest point during the whole period of danger; and every night he pours the results of his experience and reflection into the mind of his wife, with whom it is his passion to share every enjoyment. Another episode shows him quelling a Chartist riot by shooting one of the men whose life he had saved in the cholera, though this man had expressly excepted Mr. Ferroll from all the evil intentions of the crowd. This incident causes his imprisonment and trial for murder, and affords a kind of foretaste of the final crisis. At last, during his absence on the Continent, the widow of the labourer who had been tried for murdering his first wife comes home, and is seen to wear trinkets which she had stolen from her former mistress. She is apprehended, and accused both of the theft and the murder, and the jury find her guilty of both. Within an hour of the verdict Mr. Ferroll leaves |