shall be bathed in the hyacinthine dews of immortality.

i

This poor object, here already may it have cast its obsolete and exploded fashions, as the worn-out hoops and horse-shoes of the work-shop, flung into the furnace, gradually lose their battered unsightliness and melt into luminous utility once more. Sore tried was she-scarred and seamed in the conflagrations of early catastrophes. The scars this moment mark, though they do not disfigure, her spiritual body.

Twiller here paused, and allowed his thoughts to rest. When they resumed their march, they were tinged with feeling and had become familiar.

My aunt, Grace Trumperant, I am inclined to think, kept up appearances through life, like a troublesome umbrella of a windy day. One kind word, and she shut it up.

Rough and wrinkled as she was, who knows but she may have had a heart as soft as a melon! None of us know much of anybody else. We only touch circumference to circumference

the solids are apart.

Here was an old lady who lived under a mistake; and, as I verily believe, died because she had not found it out sooner.

Dare I enter, like a custom-house officer, into her heart, and say, here was a thought that must pay dutythis may pass free-this I seize as contraband

Poor gentlewoman! The fashion of thy nature was like thy dress, suited to other times and circumstances. It had set off, and been admired on the young and fair of the past. On thee→→→ and now we will leave the coverlet over it!

Grateful? Yes. As grateful as if the gold were in thy coffers instead of in thy dreams. Thou wouldst have repaid a friendly look and a kind word of expostulation with "the half of thy goods"-nay, the whole; for the other half was given as I would have given it myself.

Dear old soul! And thy last act was to point upwards! There, indeed, is the true treasure, which neither moth nor dust doth corrupt.

John Twiller wept gentle tears in that unoverlooked chamber, and they did him good.

He had time to dry his eyes. There was no one to disturb him. The domestics were busy with their friends down stairs, making tea.

enough to weep, and

Three days more, and the last act was over. The old lady was buried under the wall of a little ruined chapel, built, it was said at the academy, in the days of saints, at all events at some period when the human race must have been smaller than they are now. Hubert Trunperant had entered into possession; and Twiller was again master of his time and his oriel-window.

ANY one who takes the trouble to turn back a couple of chapters in this narrative will see that the scene just pictured is an episode introduced out of its place; and that Twiller has already been reinstalled in his usual niche, whence he had last been disturbed by the tailless cat. The history of the monster as connected with Twiller's establishment was short. It had no Manx blood in it whatever. Nature had supplied it with a tail of the usual dimensions. The hand of man it was, not the Isle of Man, which had docked the appendage. Man, did we say? Boy, boys. The first glimpse Twiller ever obtained of the future disturber of his poetic inspirations, revealed it

in a horse-pond, freshly betailed, and on the eve of being despatched by the missiles of a score of juvenile execationers. He had waived ceremony for once-kicked his way amongst, and past them-waded into the pond amidst the laughter of the whole body (who, however, decamped before he came out) and bore off the questionable prize, dripping, bedab bled with mud and gore, a filthy, despicable, and disgusting object, and apparently not inclined to take too well the attentions of its deliverer.

Before he had got home he had become a little ashamed of it. The point was to smuggle it into the house. He exacted a promise down for:

that it should not be seen by the family until it had been thoroughly washed, well fed, and effectually taught that it need not stare ferociously upon everything that looked at it; above all 'till its tail was healed, and it had ceased to eddy after it like a whirlpool on four legs. One of the young people, however, early discovered the secret. It was Jessica who was attracted the next morning to its retreat by a succession of those small lady-like convulsions, by which ailing cats know how to make the most of an undigested mouse. She

was for immediate measures of relief, until the initiated domestic warned her to keep at a respectful distance, and on no account to communicate her discovery to the rest of the house, an injunction which she carefully obeyed by informing all her brothers and sisters of a great thing she was not to say a word about-and how it was under the stairs in the dark--and how it was near dying-and how papa had directed nobody to be told of it-and how it had no tail-and how, in short, they would all be delighted and astonished as soon as they knew; which caused such a minute search, that in a quarterof an hour Demophon, Rollo, nay, the very infants penetrated the mystery and told their mamma, which made their papa very angry indeed. He had then to relate the whole story to excuse himself, omitting the wading into the mud, which he knew his wife would never forgive. He was well laughed at while he was telling it, and then all the children came and kissed him, and Ella's eyes were not dry. As for his wife she kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. They were her secret treasures to think of; for her prevailing belief was, that John Twiller was a great man, and that his lightest words and

actions would be one day of importance to the world. In this, indeed, perhaps, his own ideas and hers might not have been so very dissimilar.

The cat had remained in the kitchen, the torment of the whole house, ever since. Twiller could not help its receiving numerous treads, kicks, and missiles, with an occasional drop from the spout of the kettle, &c. because though the injury to the cat on these occasions was evident enough by its cries, frantic escapes, and the testimony of its skin, the insurmountable difficulty remained, to discover who was the offender. But one or two serious proposals to give it away, to keep it out of doors, &c., he steadily resisted. He had stuck the stick in the ground, and it was his humour to water it.

The thing seemed to have a particular fancy for annoying him, besides; which proved its extreme illnature or stupidity. Should any one else testify a dislike to its presence it was alive enough to the hint, and scampered off without a remonstrance. But Twiller repeatedly assumed the most menacing attitudes, and spoke sternly, nay angrily to it, without its seeming to take warning or hasten its departure a bit. On the contrary, it would sometimes, as if actuated by the very spirit of contradiction, draw closer to him and rub its loathsome carcass along the inside of his shins, elevating the fur where once a tail would have towered aloft.

Was this to be borne ? It was borne, however. On the morning on which we rejoin John Twiller in the oriel-window, this illomened remnant of a cat is actually in the dusky room with him, motionless beside a mouse-hole, as he can very well discern by the two gig-lamps glaring out of the dark wainscot.

"IREALLY must begin that story.-The hero and the heroine dwell by the seaside. Well then, I suppose the proper thing to set out with is the sea. Here it is at my feet. I may paint from nature. Yet, what is there to be painted? The sea is the sca.- It's a fact, that's all.

"Yet-what a great fact' it is!how vast!- how uniform! how measureless--how sublime!-To diverse eyes, indeed, it is diverse in its aspect. To your whaler, for instance, it is a deep hole in which to grow blubber-a half business, half sporting sort of place, whereon a set of

merry fellows are launched to launch harpoons at great things that come up to be harpooned. To your naval hero it is an element conveniently circumstanced for the destruction of human life. He can make use of it to his complete satisfaction, as at once a facilitator of his wholesale patriotic massacres and a grave to get rid of the remains. To your philosopher it is a fluid evaporated on the surface and supplied at the sides; holding certain substances in chemical solution; swinging under the moon; lagging back behind the earth in its course; scored over by undulations at right angles to the wind; filching timber to make coals; and pulling down old continents to build new.

To your

alderman it is a nursery of turtle-a large bowl in which they are scattered a little thinly previous to their being transferred to the more limited tureen on his table. To your bagman it is a surface that might be evener than it is, but is still generally smooth enough to bear things with cabins, wherein he has time to write out his orders fair between the ham and eggs, and the brandy and water. To your poet it is-it is-oh, it is-bless my soulit is what? He cannot tell-yet he never can keep away from it. There he is eternally clucking round the margin, while the ducklings of his imagination go forth perilously upon it, and prove to his horror their adaptation and addiction to a treacherous, beggarly element.

"Some of the poetic class indeed have not been so timorous.

There

Το

are those who have laid their hands upon its mane. Nobler fancies have poured its streams round the edge of the hero's shield. The loftiest imagination of all has lodged it in the hollow of the Almighty hand. him to them-to all,-ocean is a marvel and a mystery-a mystery as deep in a tumbler glass as in the mighty chasm of the Pacific-for how comes it salt?

"If there is anything I have a contempt for, says Hester Green, it is the moon. It is difficult for the poet quite to go along with Miss Green; but, be it said with all due respect, I pity its inhabitants, if there be any, for having no water;-and pity is a sad feeling to be obliged to entertain even for lunatics. After all, perhaps the sun pities us for having no fire,-for

as for our little sparks of volcanoes not even a solar Herschel could make them out. This condescending sort of sympathy may possibly be a natural instinct in a primary towards its satellite under some cosmical law. Heaven knows, there may be something for the moon to pity. Its animalcule may thank their stars (including us) that they have one element left them, denied, say, to their own souls once they are unsphered.' Thus the convict of Sydney, with a ticket of leave, used to bless his stars (the southern cross) that he was not a felon on Norfolk Island.

"But" - here Twiller suddenly paused and glanced at the cat. He felt for a moment as if she had been looking sarcastically at him. "I. was upon the sea; and lo! I find myself floated up towards the moon, as if a mighty tide had risen under me. Is this, too, an instinct analogous to nature? Oh, omnipresent and allpervading harmony! Every now and then we find, in the most solitary vistas of contemplation, outlets to other avenues, believed cul de sac. There, breaking through the cactushedge of surprise, we stand smitten silent a moment by the conviction that we have been here before, visitants from other points of the compass, and that self has met self again, as we shake our own hands round a tree. Then we utter a shout, level the hedge, and open once for all the new communication over which thought shall evermore smoothly travel. Nature will, I do believe, appear to disfranchised spirits to have been only a labyrinth in which mortals wandered disconsolately for ever, believing themselves in a trackless wilderness; while the wanting half of the soul-itself, too, an

"Animula vagula,"

was in the next alley, within earshot of a call, instead of dwelling-as the most Christian of heathen philosophers held-in some sublimer sphere.

"That noble old sceptic, Humboldt, carries the Cordilleras about with him wherever he goes. It is a tolerable burthen for an old man. Even Atlas had less on his shoulders. Besides, he was mythological, though the mountain was not. The Baron exists as well as his Andes, and can be driven

to perform the feat or own himself a boaster.

"But still, the herculean boldness of such efforts-the Titanic grandeur Terations-the Stinson-like self-confidence of a miraculous odforce, has this good effect-it strengthens the muscles of thought for burthens really tolerable. No cal over seized the sublime that had not grasped at the illimitable. It is by an attempt to reach the stars that we surmount the loftiest eminences; and so, too, the true career of virtue on earth is run in the race for an unattainable perfection.

"Finally, Poetry-that crowning wreath of life's Olympian strife-is to he woven best out of the asphodel and locus di a Ghadowy Elysiuni, with whose amaranthine-odours the soul of the hard must be sprinkled to prepare him for his doom-martyrdom in life in death, immortality.

"La gloire enfin pour eux arrive,
Et toujours sa palme tardive.
Croit plus belle au pied d'un cercneil.”

"Thus sings the bard-thus sing the
heavenly hymnings of eternal presci-
ence-attesting for all-a life for all
a death for all-another life, comple-
mentary to the first, in which those

who have already fulfilled their des tiny will live-and no more; those who have estuated "in cold obstruction," with the immortal longings of the Pellean youth, will live, and a great deal more-will expand, triumph, shine. Such is the language of all oracles through the mysterious ambiguity of signs and symbols, from the leafy whispers of Dodona to the howlings of the son of Amoz."

"But what is become of the sea all this time?" asked a momentary reminiscence within the soul of Twiller.

The land has been upheaved beneath it, and it has disappeared.

"So, too, when a deep subject rises, the lighter and more floating ideas which had overlaid it at first, lapse from about it, and leave it to the sun.

"People are always arguing about the immortality of the soul, from analogy. Resemblances are not analogies. We have nothing to argue from strictly analogous to soul, apart from revelation; it is intuition, and intuition alone, which tells me that I shall not die when I die. Of course, those who do not feel such intuition are at liberty to differ with me."

Twiller thought proper to argue the rest of the analogical question in heroic periods.

"Can this be called argument? If the line were long enough, a midshipman "would touch bottom and overset the whole analogy. That the soul of man is immortal, immortal longings shadow forth, reason suggests, and reve

lation declares. Analogy therefore is superseded, and man may liveand die-in sure and certain hope." And so Twiller, feeling tired, put off his story and went to bed.

It is more difficult even to keep a reputation than to make it. George the Third is said, in complimenting Sheridan on his play, the "School for Scandal," to have added, "but it has powerful Rivals." We are reminded in the same way that the author of Dred is the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her reputation has been made by one book; in writing another she therefore plays an unequal game with fortune. She has little to gain and everything to lose; she has given us a standard of excellence in one novel with which she must be compared in every other. Dred must be tried by a jury of its peers, and the foreman to acquit or condemn its brother book is Uncle Tom. Hard fate of genius, it must always be its own executioner,--cleave the apple, or wound through the head its own reputation.

There is in this respect a close parallel between Mrs. Stowe and Miss Bur ney. In Evelina, Miss Burney took the world by surprise. A shy girl who had written stories to please her sisters, and afterwards burned them to please herstep-mother, was reported to have written the best novel that had appeared since the death of Smollett. In the pages of Uncle Tom, Mrs. Stowe in the same way stole into fame. Written at first as a sort of feuilleton in a Washington paper, the death of Uncle Tom excited at once so much attention, that Mrs. Stowe added a beginning and a middle to her end, and so composed the story as we now have it. Within six months, 150,000 copies were sold in America. In

May, 1852, the first London edition was printed; and before the year closed, probably a million copies had been dispersed over England, and translations published in all the lan

guages of Europe. No authoress before Miss Burney, or since Mrs. Stowe, ever made such a spring into the heights of fame. Other writers have risen by little flights, as some birds soar by wheeling in the air. Mrs. Stowe and Miss Burney rose like the lark from its nest or the ground, which is out of sight almost at a spring.

No

Popularity had found a new idol and began to worship it. "Evelina" and "Uncle Tom" were the "open sesame" to the doors of the great.Who could deny admittance to the two enchantresses of their age? women have ever received such literary adulation as Miss Burney and Mrs. Stowe. Their popularity in this respect is about equal, allowing for the difference between the England of 1785 and the England of 1855.

The two authoresses have written diaries in which "each day's doing has been noted in a book." Madame D'Arblay's diary is a historical picture-gallery of all the celebrities of England seventy years ago, and Mrs. Stowe's "Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands" is another gallery of the celebrities of the England of our day. But there is this notable difference, that the one seems to have seen much of the shady side" of life in her diary, the other only the "sunny side." Madame D'Arblay's diary is in great part the song of a cage-bird looking on life through gilded bars. Mrs. Stowe's is the burst of a free heart, full of eyes to see and a tongue to tell what she has seen.

The two authoresses resemble each other in one more respect. Each had won fame with a book, and was bound therefore to keep it with another. But it is not easy to sit down and write under a load of reputa