Mr. Kingsley's Adventurous Travels-his Return Home. 401

seen them ere he described them with such vivid accuracy and thrilling power in Hypatia. He fought with Heraclitus on the scorched campagna of Rome, hunted jerboas and ostriches with Syrenius-argued about the Song of Solomon with Augustine, Bishop of Hippo; and then we lost him, nor heard more of his adventures, till suddenly we learnt that he had come to the reign of our good Queen Bess, and was revelling in the wild romance of those days when the discovery of the New World awoke the old Viking temper lurking in our Norse blood; when the great battle of Protestantism and spiritual liberty was fought by England for the world; and when, amidst the splendour and exaltation of these events, as Emerson says, 'the English mind flowered in every faculty,' and Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Hooker, Raleigh, Bacon, were the familiars of their age. And now, after years of wandering, we welcome our somewhat errant genius as he lands on the Devon coast, to visit again the modern times, and the civilized England, which he forsook in scorn years ago.

Friends ask us how he looks after his dire and perilous voyage through so much time and space. And what does he think of us now? In answer to the first of these questions we have to say, he likes us now much better than he did; and therefore, we frankly own it, we like him much better. We fancy he has seen hard times abroad; he has seen bloated wealth and pining poverty in other times and lands than ours. These sights have softened him; he has come back a wiser man, to settle contented, even amidst the horrid clank of machinery, and the screech of our steam-engines, which make the nineteenth century such an intolerable bore to chivalrous spirits like his. Moreover, the war has redeemed our character in his eyes. It has proved irrefutably that the men of England are not a set of manufactured Guy Fawkeses, sewed up with packthread, stuffed with cotton rags, and goggling with inky eyes, only fit, like all shams, for the terrible burning. Mr. Kingsley has found out that, even among such, there are men who have real souls in them, and can shed real blood too, if need be, in defence of truth and honour.

Let the foregoing be our proemium to the short outline, and shorter criticism, of Mr. Kingsley's story we shall now lay before our readers, and which we hope may serve to introduce them to the three volumes themselves. The opening scene of the tale is laid in Aberalva, a fishing-village on the Devonshire coast. In fact, in this little place most of the mischief is brewed, if love-making, of which there is abundance in every variety, may be so termed; and if not, yet there is mischief of another kind, which ends at last in a woful tragedy.

Mr. Kingsley is never weary of painting scenes from the home

of his childhood. In Westward Ho! in Glaucus, and again in these volumes, the shores of Devonshire crusted with shells, its upland wolds golden with gorse blossoms, and the lush fragrant vegetation of its meadows and hedge-rows, are described again and again with enamoured fondness, as if he felt these earliest impressions of nature to be the purest and most blessed-' for Heaven lies about in our infancy'-and would lovingly expend his best art to reproduce the scenes which first awed and thrilled his imagination with a sweet enthusiasm,

'More bright than madness or the dreams of wine.'

Some of our readers may have strolled through Aberalva (though we cannot discern its real name under this pseudonym) two years ago, i. e., in the month of July, 1854. If so, there and then the story begins. The houses lie in a long line along the cove, and then rise stragglingly up the hill towards Penalva Court. They are all basking beautifully in the hot sunshine, for yesterday they were whitewashed, and adorned, as is the pleasure of the inhabitants, by freshly-coloured stripes or buttresses of pink and blue. In front of most of them there is a small garden, surrounded by bright green palings, and stocked with the gaudy flowers which bloom in that genial climate. There are large fuchsia trees, ten feet high, set against the dazzling white walls, and sparkling all over like magnificent candelabra with the million crimson lights that twinkle and blaze amid their foliage. 'What a sweet spot for a summer lounge!' you exclaim, as you walk up the street, smell the rich fragrance of the mignionette, and then turn round to see the blue, blue sea lying before you, till it is lost in the hazy, olive-coloured rim of the southern sky. There is but the faintest swell at times on its broad azure breast, as if it were rocked breathlessly asleep under the glistening heat of the sun. 'Just the place,' you add, ' to read, write, or live a dreamy, luxurious romance. Not such, however, is Mr. Kingsley's. Down upon the shore there is the usual mid-day scene in such places of trawlers and fishing-boats lying aslope on the sand, their dark rusty sides shining in the warm sunlight-of spars of timber, idle masts, &c., heaped together, upon which the sailors are squatting, pipe in mouth, with their elbows on their knees and their fists squeezed against their chins-of children swinging themselves in and out the boats, or paddling in the little pools. The pier, with its gaunt skeleton frame of tarry beams, runs out into the sea, and you may hear the waters lapping and washing underneath it with an endless moan. Beside the pier on the one side sits the heroine of the tale, Grace Harvey, the village schoolmistress. Her character is peculiar and excep

Grace Harvey.

403 tional, but we aver that it is drawn from nature, and that, in the circumstances of her training, it is not an impossible or improbable character. It therefore satisfies the rigorous condition of truthfulness, which is the supreme law of art, though grossly violated in the caricatures of some of our most popular writers; and we accept the description of her character, together with the history of its development, as one of the chefs-d'œuvre of Mr. Kingsley's genius. She is sitting among a group of scholars, telling them one of her strange, saintly tales, when we are thus uncourteously introduced to her:

'Let us leave the conversation where it is, and look into the face of the speaker, who, young as she is, has already meditated so long upon the mystery of death that it has grown lovely in her eyes.

'Her figure is tall, graceful, and slight; the severity of its outlines suiting well with the severity of her dress, with the brown stuff gown and plain grey whittle. Her neck is long, almost too long; but all defects are forgotten in the first look at her face. We can see it fully, for her bonnet lies beside her on the rock.

The masque, though slim, is perfect. The brow, like that of a Greek statue, looks lower than it really is, for the hair springs from below the bend of the forehead. The brain is very long, and sweeps backward and upward in grand curves, till it attains above the ears a great expanse and height. She should be a character more able to feel than to argue; full of all a woman's veneration, devotion, love of children-perhaps, too, of a woman's anxiety.

The nose is slightly aquiline; the sharp-cut nostrils indicate a reserve of compressed strength and passion; the mouth is delicate; the lips, which are full, and somewhat heavy, not from coarseness, but rather from languor, show somewhat of both the upper and the under teeth. Her eyes are bent on the pool at her feet; so that we can see nothing of them but the large sleepy lids, fringed with lashes so long and dark, that the eye looks as if it had been painted, in the eastern fashion, with antimony; the dark lashes, dark eyebrows, dark hair, crisped (as west-country hair so often is) to its very roots, increase the almost ghost-like paleness of the face, not sallow, not snow-white, but of a clear, bloodless, waxen hue.

'And now she lifts her eyes-dark eyes, of preternatural largeness; brilliant, too, but not with the sparkle of the diamond; brilliant as deep clear wells are, in which the mellow moonlight sleeps fathomdeep, between black walls of rock; and round them, and round the wide opened lids, and arching eyebrow, and slightly wrinkled forehead, hangs an air of melancholy thought, vague doubt, almost of startled fear then that expression passes, and the whole face collapses into a languor of patient sadness, which seems to say, 'I cannot solve the mystery. Let Him solve it as seems good to Him.''

In this portraiture, though by no means in Mr. Kingsley's best

manner, for it wants the chaste delicacy proper to the subject, the character of Grace is faintly shadowed. Her imagination is vast and subtle in its workings, and is accompanied, according to an invariable psychological law, with a susceptibility of emotion proportioned to the acute refinement and weird strength of her fancy. But the 'passion and the life' are fed from deep springs within, and so her pensive temperament dims with a gentle sadness the fervid pulsing thoughts of her soul. The melancholy main' has nursed her solemn musings. A profound religiousness has early imbued her nature with tenderness and divine yet sorrowful blessedness. Her heart, which the holy forms of young Imagination have kept pure,' is in very truth the fountain of sweet tears.' She has but little sympathy with the gay, sportive aspects of nature. The hushed and awful stillness of night soothes into unutterable peace her devout, impulsive spirit, and the rack of storms awakens the tremor of agonizing fear and pity for those who go down to the sea. Yet, amidst all changes of her fluctuating heart, there dwell in it a yearning love for the children of her care, and child-like faith in her Father-God. Can we wonder that Grace Harvey, in the beauty of her person, the melancholy and mystery of her thoughts, the shifting expressions of her face, now glowing with such calm brightness as the face of God was lifted upon her soul, and then darkened with such piteous gloom, should have ruled, as by enchantment, the hearts of all the simple folks in that village. They could not comprehend the troubled visions of her excitable and somewhat morbid imagination, so that they venerated her with a sort of superstitious awe, while the silent charity of her life charmed and won their perfect love.

Such was Grace, her character, her vocation, her life-who might, as Mr. Kingsley says, in America have been degraded into a profitable medium,' or in the Catholic Church been exalted into a St. Theresa. Before she entered her home that evening, she prayed the Lord, with an anguished spirit, to avert the storm which she saw coming with portentous signs. The haze around the horizon had become thicker and more livid in its colouring. The hot air was troubled, as if pressed from afar. A hollow rumble died upon the ear as though it echoed from the deepest caves of the sea. The faint swell on the blue waters rose higher, and broke that azure surface into wide, undulating, though scarcely visible furrows. At last the dark clouds loomed out of the sea, and swept in ragged masses towards the zenith. The ships, many of them bound to the seat of war, flew in haste to the open waters, and all men knew there would be a hideous night of wrath and ruin on the coast. The storm stinted not its

fury, the wind and rain came lashing down at nightfall; but, above the hoarse thunder of the waves and the howling of the wind, the fishermen heard the boom of a cannon out at sea. Again and again it rang through the shuddering tempest. There was one ship in distress. Mr. Kingsley has described the wreck with terrific faithfulness. The brave seamen, covered with their mackintoshes and sou'-westers, were down on the beach, saw the ship, fired rockets to her, but all was in vain. Another heave and she was splintered into fragments, and sank in the white seething waste. Grace had accompanied them, and witnessed the dreadful scene from a flat slope of rock: the remainder of the chapter we prefer to extract.

'Old Willis went down to her, and touched her gently on the shoulder. Come home, my maid, then-you'll take cold, indeed;' but she did not move or lower her arm.

The old man, accustomed to her fits of fixed melancholy, looked down under her bonnet to see whether she was 'past,' as he called it. By the moonlight he could see her great eyes steady and wide open. She motioned him away, half-impatiently, and then sprang to her feet with a scream.

"A man! A man! Save him!'

As she spoke, a huge wave rolled in, and shot up the sloping end of the point in a broad sheet of foam. And out of it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure. He looked wildly up and round, and then his head dropped again on his breast; and he lay clinging with outspread arms, like Homer's polypus, in the Odyssey, as the wave drained back, in a thousand roaring cataracts, over the edge of the rock.

"Save him!' shrieked she, again, as twenty men rushed forward and stopped short. The man was fully thirty yards from them; but close to him, between them and him, stretched a long ghastly crack, some ten feet wide, cutting the point across. All knew it-its slippery edge, its polished upright sides, the seething cauldrons within it; and knew, too, that the next wave would boil up from it in a hundred jets, and suck in the strongest to his doom, to fall, with brains dashed out, into a chasm from which was no return.

Ere they could nerve themselves for action, the wave had come. Up the slope it swept, one half of it burying the wretched mariner, and fell over into the chasm. The other half rushed up the chasm itself, and spouted forth again to the moonlight in columns of snow, in time to meet the wave from which it had just parted, as it fell from above; and then the two boiled up, and round, and over, and twirled along the smooth rock to their very feet.

The schoolmistress took one long look; and, as the wave retired, rushed after it to the very brink of the chasm, and flung herself on her knees.

''She's mazed!'