"Opinion will," says Mr. Main, “of course be divided on the comparative merit of the two versions. For my own part, though feeling obliged to recognize the later as the authoritative text still, I cannot but on the whole agree with Mr. Graves in preferring the earlier; and for the following reasons, which are well put in his own words: L. 1. "the first Man" brings more simply before the mind the dominant idea; parent embarrasses it. 2. Against the introduction of the word divine it may be urged that we do not want, it is rather incumbering, to be told the origin of the report. But being told that it is divine interferes with the thought; for information from such a source would be calculated to take away dread of the approaching change. If the word is inserted merely to justify the word report, no other man but Adam then being in existence, it indicates a fault in both versions. Perhaps it would have been simpler and better if the approach of the sun to the horizon as observed by the first man, and the decreasing light, had been given as the cause of his imagined terror. 8. in man's view: a change for the worse in every way. It is most harsh in sound, and the poet has no right to speak of man in the abstract in connection with the momentary effect upon the one man, indicated by the lo! at the beginning of the line. "On his view" reads smoothly, and just says what is wanted. [11. It were to be wished that the recovered version had removed the tautological blemish from which this line suffers, as might easily and happily be done by the substitution of "flower" for fly]. 12. "endless" seems better to describe the action of the first man's mind as he ob

serves, rather traversing space and the bright objects it contains, than counting, or attempting to count, them; which would be an exercise of the mind less simple and less likely to be immediate. 13. Here, again, both sound and sense are in favor of the original line. Nothing can be more prosaic and poor than the first five monosyllables in the corrected line; and then and shun follow each other most cacophonously. The original line, if not much superior-it is superior-in sound, has a pathos which the corrected line has not; and it is properly addressed to the whole family of

man.

But wherever the earlier differs from the later version, the rhythm of the earlier seems to us very lame, except indeed

as regards the trivial alteration of "his" into man's, at the end of the eighth line, where the grammar rather requires the change, as otherwise "his" might be supposed to refer to Hesperus, instead of to the first man. The first line of the early version is awkward in rhythm, and even inferior in expression to the later, since it is the relative difference between the view of one who, though our own ancestor, had no experience to guide him and the ordinary view of human beings at the present day, on which the sonnet turns. "Unseen," again, is a little difficult, the context not immediately explaining it, which is always a "Endless" is incorfault in a sonnet.

rect as applied to orbs, and does not seem to us to express what Mr. Main and Mr. Graves think it expresses. The thirteenth line in the early version, which Mr. Graves thinks so good, reads to us like the awkward English of a foreigner-which, of course, Blanco White was-but which he does not in the least betray in the finished version. The interrogative form, "Why to shun Death this anxious strife?" is certainly clumsy, and obstructs the thought of the sonnet at the most critical point, the climax of the thought.

It seems to us that Mr. Main, in laying down the requisitions of a true sonnet, as he does in the preface-namely, that it should be in fourteen decasyllabic lines, and should be penetrated by a single thought or emotion-might have added, as a third requisite, though it would certainly have excluded many of the sonnets here given, that a true sonnet should rise into a climax in the last two lines should kindle into flame as it

expires. Insisting on this last condition, we should have had Mr. Main's selection diminished by perhaps one half-one or two even of Shakespeare's, for instance, fade away into baldness and weakness at the end-but it would have then contained only those sonnets which leave on the mind a really satisfying effect.

No sonnet does leave on the mind a really satisfying effect which fades away at the close. For instance, the following sonnet of Wordsworth's leaves on the reader the impression of almost blank disappointment, through this failure in it to rise in significance toward the close :

"FLOWERS ON THE TOP OF THE PILLARS AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE CAVE OF STAffa. Hope smiled when your nativity was cast, Children of Summer! Ye fresh Flowers that brave

What Summer here escapes not, the fierce

wave,

And whole artillery of the western blast, Battering the Temple's front, its long-drawn

nave

Smiting, as if each moment were their last.
But ye, bright Flowers, on frieze and archi-
trave,

Survive, and once again the Pile stands fast:
Calm as the Universe, from specular towers
Of heaven contemplated by Spirits pure
With mute astonishment, it stands sustained
Through every part in symmetry, to endure,
Unhurt, the assault of Time with all his
hours,

As the supreme Artificer ordained."

Compare that with almost any of Hartley Coleridge's sonnets; this, for instance, and we do not take in this the best of Hartley Coleridge's:

"PRAYER.

"Be not afraid to pray-to pray is right. Pray, if thou canst, with hope; but ever pray,

Though hope be weak, or sick with long delay;

Pray in the darkness, if there be no light.
Far is the time, remote from human sight,
When war and discord on the earth shall

cease;

Yet every prayer for universal peace Avails the blessed time to expedite.

Though it be what thou canst not hope to

see:

Pray to be perfect, though material leaven Forbid the spirit so on earth to be; But if for any wish thou dar'st not pray, Then pray to God to cast that wish away." Or this of Mr. W. C. Roscoe's, of which we see with pleasure that Mr. Main has extracted six of great beauty:

The bubble of the silver-springing waves, Castalian music, and that flattering sound, Low rustling of the loved Apollian leaves, With which my youthful hair was to be crowned, Grow dimmer in my ears; white Beauty grieves

Over her votary, less frequent found; And not untouched by storms, my life-boat heaves

Through the splashed ocean-waters, outwardbound.

Clasped on his ear, strives trembling to reAnd as the leaning mariner, his hand

claim

Some loved lost echo from the fleeting strand,

So lean I back to the poetic land;
And in my heart a sound, a voice, a name
Hangs, as above the lamp hangs the expir-
ing flame."

Mr. Main could hardly have done better than he has done, unless he had been bent on making a very much smaller and more perfect selection-that is, on excluding all sonnets of the second or third class altogether. For what it aims

-

Heaven,

44

The Spectator.

I.

Macmillan's Magazine.

FOR the following brief biography of Professor Newcomb, one of the most eminent of American astronomers, and a distinguished mathematician, we are indebted mainly to Appletons' "American Cyclopædia.

SIMON NEWCOMB was born at Wallace, Nova Scotia, on the 12th of March, 1835. Coming to the United States in his youth, he taught school for several years in Maryland, and speedily acquired such a reputation for proficiency in mathematics that he was employed as computer on the Nautical Almanac for 1857. He began his original investigations in theoretical astronomy in 1858; and three years later, in 1861, he was appointed Professor of Mathematics in the Navy, and ordered to the Naval Observatory at Washington, where he has since remained. He negotiated the contract for the great telescope authorized by Congress, supervised its construction, and planned the tower and dome in which it is mounted. He was a member and secretary of the commission created by Congress in 1871 to provide for the observation of the Transit of Venus, that occurred on December 9th, 1874; and the work of organizing parties, selecting their stations, and planning the system of observations, fell chiefly upon him. In 1872 he was elected a foreign associate of the Royal Astronomical Society of England; and in 1874 he received that society's gold medal for his tables of Uranus and Neptune. In the

same year (1874) he was elected a corresponding member of the Institute of France, and received the degree of LL.D. from the Columbian University at Washington. In 1875 he received the same degree from Yale College, and the honorary degree of Ph.D. from the University of Leyden, at its three hundredth anniversary. Also in that year he was made a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg, member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

The most important astronomical works that Professor Newcomb has published are: On the Secular Variations and Mutual Relations of the Orbits of the Asteroids" (1860); "Tables of the Planet Neptune;" Planet Neptune;""Investigation of the Solar Parallax" (1867); “On the Action of the Planets on the Moon," communicated to the French Academy during a visit to France in 1871; "Tables of Uranus" (1873); " Popular Astronomy" (1878); and a volume on Astronomy" in the American Science Series, designed for use in schools and colleges (1879).

66

Professor Newcomb has also published "A Critical Examination of the Financial Policy during the Southern Rebellion" (1865); and has contributed to various periodicals on political economy and similar topics. The A B C of Finance" is one of his latest publications (1878).

SUNSHINE AND STORM IN THE EAST; OR, CRUISES TO CYPRUS AND CONSTANTINOple. By Mrs. Brassey. With upward of 100 Illustrations, chiefly from Drawings by [the Hon. A. Y. Bingham. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Though less continuously interesting, perhaps, than her charming "Voyage Around the World in the Yacht Sunbeam,' the readers and admirers secured for Mrs. Brassey by the latter work will not be disappointed in the present one. It describes two distinct yachting cruises through the Mediterranean to Constantinople and back to England; and its title is meant to indicate the change which had passed over Constantinople in the four years that intervened between the two visits. "Melancholy, indeed," says Mrs. Brassey, "seemed the change in the Turkish capital during the four years since our last visit-a change from all that was bright and glittering to all that was dull and miserable and wretched. It may perhaps be interesting to the reader to compare impressions formed under circumstances so widely different, though the narrative must necessarily appear disjointed and disconnected on account of the intervening years.".

The first voyage was made in 1874, and included visits to Tangier, Gibraltar, Sicily, and Athens, a cruise along the coasts of Greece and among the islands of the Archipelago, a somewhat protracted stay at Constantinople, where sight-seeing was methodically pursued, a cruise through the Bosphorus to the Black Sea and along the coast of Asia Minor, and back home by way of Corfu and other Ionian Islands, Messina, Naples, and Nice. The second voyage was made in 1878, by way of Naples, Capri, Messina, and Cyprus to Constantinople again, with a return by Malta and Marseilles. During this voyage Cyprus, which had then recently been occupied by the British in accordance with the convention with Turkey, was thoroughly explored; and the accounts given of its unhealthiness and of the sufferings of the troops surpass the most sensational of the reports that were sent home by the newspaper correspondents.

It will be seen by this itinerary that both voyages comprised visits to places that form the consecrated ground of history and romance; and Mrs. Brassey's lack of imagination is rather painfully apparent in her account of them. What she does best is in catching and recording those minute details which would be overlooked by a more resourceful writer, but which give realism and interest to the scanty and somewhat monotonous inci

dents of life aboard ship. Her style is rather that of the inventory than of any more strictly literary type, yet she manages to convey an impression of fidelity and trustworthiness which go far to compensate for the absence of the lighter and more picturesque graces. The chapters on Greece and Cyprus are disappointing; one feels that the descriptions are altogether too arid for the subject; but the record of the visits to Constantinople is exceptionally interesting by reason of the exceptional advantages which the author enjoyed. Her acquaintance with the great people of the place rendered many places and spectacles accessible, from which most visitors are jealously excluded; and no one but a woman could have gotten materials for the interesting disclosures which she makes concerning the growing discontent of the higher-class Turkish women with the restraints and seclusion of the harem. The children of the present day, she says, are brought up to think the system of yashmaks (veils) and confinement a most tyrannical custom, and not to be endured ;" and she remarks that, in spite of the Sultan Valideh's edicts, the yashmaks get thinner and thinner every day, till in many cases they are little more than tulle veils." The broughams containing the ladies from the harems draw up at the mosques of Bymzel at Mashleck, or the gardens at Chumleyjah, the negroes and eunuchs discreetly turn their backs, and a good deal of flirting and sign-making goes on." One of the princesses said to Mrs. Brassey, "How odd it must be to you Europeans to hear us talk about our brothers and sisters and their mothers, for there are just as many of the one as of the other;" and then, speaking of religion, she added, "I have read the Koran straight through thirty times in the original Arabic, and many expositions. The priests try and teach us to believe that there is one God, neither man nor woman, but a spirit, and that Mahomet is his prophet. But how are we to believe that, when every thing is for man, and nothing for woman? A good God could not be so unjust. He must be all man, and a bad Turk too. We are told that we must kneel to our husbands and kiss their hands. If they kiss ours (as mine always does, he having lived in Western Europe), their lips will be burnt, and our hands also, with the most horrible torture. We are to walk, even when weak and suffering, while they ride; and we must carry their parcels too. It can't be right. As I don't believe that, how am I to believe any thing?" Another lady amused Mrs. Brassey greatly by saying, "Though my husband is not so particular himself, I don't believe he