with its terrible expression of the suffering of spiritual destitution, and its passionate implorings for present restitution on this side the grave, had too deep a concern with what now is to be busy with what lay beyond it, and needed to clear his spiritual eye no help from the Seeress of Prevorst, or the angelic class of informants:

"O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee:

Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto

my cry;

For my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto the grave.

I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I am s a man that hath no strength:

Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more: who are out of remembrance, and they are cut off from thy hand.

Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, and in the deeps.

Thy wrath lieth hard upon me: and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves.

I am shut up and I cannot come forth. My sight faileth for very trouble: Lord, I have called daily upon thee, I have stretched forth my hands unto thee.

Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? shall the dead arise and praise thee? . . . .

Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction?

Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?

But unto thee have I cried, O Lord; and in the morning shall my prayer prevent thee.

Lord, why castest thou off my soul? why hidest thou thy face from me?"

He who wrote thus, had learned in his anguish a truth which lies too often hidden from these people, who are so eager to pull down the heavens into our mortal sphere. He knew, he felt, that spiritual things are spiritually discerned. The soul that can sympathise, however faintly, with his experience, is not likely to become engrossed

with the floriculture, the architecture, and the costume of the future world; even the classification of the angels does not interest it. Deeper things of the spirit than these are part of its every-day life.

481

FICTIONS FOR CHILDREN.*

[February 1855. Reprinted from the Prospective Review.] BOOKS crowd the world to excess, and our children, like ourselves, suffer from plethora. Naturally omnivorous, they devour all that comes in their way, and as every uncle believes that a picture-book for the younger and a novelette for the elder scions is the most appropriate and improving present he can make, they are in general supplied with abundant provision for their undiscriminating appetites.. It would be well, however, if we would enforce upon our children some degree of abstemiousness, and put some limit to their literary inquiries. Children naturally love clear images and distinct recollections, and, for the most part, they enjoy them; but it is possible to fill their minds with a confused medley of ideas, the chaotic residuum of all that has passed through their apprehensions; where Aladdin and the Little Naturalist, Captain Cook and Cinderella, Moral Tales and the Habits of Monkeys, play their shifting parts, and mingle in inextricable entanglement. The enervation of the powers of attention and memory are not the only evils of allowing children constantly to turn to new resources instead of exhausting the old. It is scarcely a less evil that they never thoroughly know, and therefore never thoroughly enjoy, the best things which are set before them.

Any good work of art requires a very close famili

*The Rose and the Ring; or, the History of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo. A fireside Pantomime for great and small Children. By Mr. M. A. Titmarsh. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1855.

The King of the Golden River; or, the Black Brothers. A Legend of Styria. Illustrated by Richard Doyle. Second edition. London: Smith, Elder, and Co.

I I

arity fully to taste or even fully to perceive its excellences. To appreciate Shakspere or Homer, we must know them by heart, and even then we dare not flatter ourselves that much does not remain undiscovered, while the cursory glance of the amusement-seeker passes by unrecognised the most obvious beauties. There is a picture in one of our English galleries,-a Virgin and Child,—a plain, ungainly looking child it seems, with red hair and commonplace features. You pass it by; but it bears a great name-Leonardo da Vinci: look again; devote your best attention to it for half an hour; try to perceive whether the painter had a meaning,—whether his thought did or did not go beyond painting some everyday mother and child. Look deep enough, and you will see in that infant's face, which the artist scorned to endow with physical beauty, a depth of sweetness and dignity, the fullness of whose subtle manifestation you strive in vain to fathom, and you withdraw with the humble conviction that he whom a little while ago you could have criticised compendiously is greater than you, and that you must know his work far better yet before you can form any estimate of its worth. It is so with Nature; you must live with her if you would have your eyes unsealed. Who has not felt disappointed at the first view of the mountains? Who that has dwelt among them, that has seen them cradling the gray mists or sullen with purple storms, or has been startled, when snow has fallen in the night, to see them standing in their white and ghostly garments close about him, as if they had struck their tents and stolen nearer in the darkness, hemming him in, and in their passionless tranquillity making him feel the full meaning of that poet's phrase, “the silence of the hills:" who that has seen these, and suchlike things, has been disappointed in the mountains? Who has not wondered to hear people speak of the monotony of ocean and the strange calm upon the spirits which the wide sea brings? Let him go to sea, not for a

day or for a week, but for a month, or for six months; let him see day after day the circular horizon and the vaulted blue, and night by night, as the great concave goes round, behold the climbing stars mount into the zenith, and descend and steep their shining heads in the waters, and by long familiarity he will learn something of the mystery of the "great sea."

All this is as true of a child's good story-book as of the masterpieces of art and Nature, and it is well to remember that what may appear superficial to us, may employ all his powers of cogitation, and furnish him with infinite suggestions. To oblige him, by a judicious course of restriction, to master a few good fictions adapted to the development of his capacity and imagination, so that he carries them whole in his mind, is to furnish him with an ever present source, not only of amusement, but of valuable exercise. And naturally this suits a child; he loves to be thoroughly at home with the incidents of his fiction, and will hear with ever fresh pleasure the constantly renewed tale; but the taste for constant novelty is very soon aroused, and once excited, is a spirit not easily laid.

But tales worthy of this intimate acquaintance on the part of children are not easily written. The very best are not those which have been expressly made for them, but such as have become their own by a gradual process of adaptation from the traditions and fanciful creations of bygone times. The imagination of a child is peculiar; it is narrow, because his knowledge is limited; it is dependent rather than creative; it requires to have an object brought before it; but it is disproportionately vivid, it confounds the borders of reality and fiction, it triumphs over the reason and the senses. I state impressively that I am a bear; I go down on my hands and knees, I affect a rolling motion, I growl horribly; the resemblance is remote, to say the best of it, and the child knows I am not a bear, but his imagination is too strong for him;