writer's genius, and yet, till recently, we never so much as saw his portrait.

The veil has at length been removed. In the interesting volumes before us we find, and principally in his own words, a full and faithful register of the leading events in his life, and of the more interesting movements in his spiritual history. The book is arranged on a plan somewhat similar to that adopted in Carlyle's work on Cromwell. The biography constitutes an intermitting chain between the numerous letters, and is executed in a modest and intelligent manner. Besides his correspondence, there are large and valuable excerpts from his journals, and to the whole are appended interesting though slight notices of his character, from the pen of Mr. Sheppard.

Throughout the whole of these volumes we have been impressed with the idea of a mind imperfectly reconciled and indifferently adjusted to the state of society of which it was a part-to the creed to which it had declared its adherence to the very system of things which surrounded it. This is true of many independent and powerful spirits; but in Foster's mind the antagonism has this peculiarity-it is united to deep reverence and to sincere belief. It is not the fruit of any captious or malignant disposition-it does not spring from any sinister motive. The guilty wish is never, with him, the parent of the gloomy thought. The tremendous doubts which oppress him have forced themselves into the sphere of his soul, and hang there as if sustained by the power of some dark enchantment. You see his mind laboring under an eclipse which will not pass away. In contemplation of the mysteries of earth and time, he stands helpless. Indeed, such gloomy cogitations formed so large a part of his mental scenery, and had so long riveted his gaze, that you can almost conceive him disappointed had they suddenly disappeared. Like the prisoner of Chillon, who, habituated to the gloom of his dungeon, and having made friends with his dismal companions, at last "regained his freedom with a sigh," Foster would have stared strangely, and almost unhappily, though it had been at the apparition of the "new heavens and the new earth" arising in room of the present, which his melancholy fancy had so dreadfully discolored. The causes of this

habitual gloom seem to have been complex. In the first place, he was naturally a man of a morbid disposition. His mind fastened and clung to the dark side of every question -to the more rugged horn of each great dilemma-to the shadows, and not to the lights, of every picture. To do this was with him an instinct, which instead of repressing, he nursed into a savage luxury. Secondly, he was for a large portion of his life a solitary, struggling, and disappointed man-preaching to people who did not understand him, struggling with straitened circumstances, and unsustained, till middle-age, by the sympathy of any female friend. Had a man of his temperament met sooner with the breeze of general and generous appreciation; and, above all, had he found in youth such a kindred and congenial spirit as afterwards, in his accomplished and gifted wife, he had lived a much happier and more useful existence, and taken a kindlier, and, we trust, a truer view of the world and of mankind. Thirdly, as an eloquent writer elsewhere observes, Foster never gave himself a real scientific education, and although possessed of keenest sagacity, never rose into the sphere of a great and a trained philosopher. He was to this what a brave bandit is to a regular soldier. Scientific culture is sure to beget scientific calm. The philosopher is taught to take a wide, comprehensive, dispassionate, and rounded view of things, which never frets his heart, if it often fails to satisfy his intellect. Foster's glimpses of truth, on the contrary, are intense and vivid, but comparatively narrow, and are tantalizing in exact proportion to their vividness and intensity. He sees his points in a light so brilliant that it deepens the surrounding darkness. His minute mode of insight, too, contributed to his melancholy. He looks at objects so narrowly that, as to a microscope, they present nothing but naked and enlarged ugliness. His eye strips away all those fine illusions of distance which are after all, as real as the nearer and narrower view. This is the curse which blasts him to see too clearly, and the lens through which he looks becomes truly a "terrible crystal." Like Cassandra, he might well wail for his fatal gift. It is a dowry she got in wrath, and has faithfully transmitted to many besides Foster, who may with her exclaim

"O ill to me the lot awarded,
Thou evil Pythian god."

From man, thus too utterly bare before him, he turns away, with a deep pensive joy, to Nature, feeling that she is true, were all else untrue-that she is beautiful, were all else deformed that she stands innocent and erect, though her tenant has fallen-and, like a child in her mother's arms, does he repose, regaining old illusions, and recalling longdeparted dreams of joy. There is something to us peculiarly tender and pathetic in Foster's love of nature. It is not so much an admiration as it is a passionate and perpetual longing. It is not a worship, but a love. He throws his being

into nature. It is as if he felt his heart budding in the spring trees, his pulse beating high in the midnight tempest and in the ocean billow, his soul shooting up, like living fire, into Snowdon, as he gazes upon it; or we might almost imagine him the divorced spirit of some lovely scene, yearning and panting after renewed communion, "gazing himself away" into the bosom of nature again, while the murmuring of streams, and the song of breezes, and the waving of pines, were singing of these strange nuptials, the soft epithalamium. He engages in mystic converse with the creation. He seeks for meanings in her mighty countenance, which are not always revealed to him. He asks her awful and unanswered questions. He seems to cry out to the river "What meanest thou, thou eloquent babbler; wilt thou never speak plain, wilt thou nerer shape me any distinct utterance, from the vague and soft tumults of thine everlasting song?"-to the rocks and mountains, "Will ye never reveal those secrets of an elder day, which are piled up in your massive walls; to your solemn hieroglyphics shall there never arrive the key?" but to add, in stern resignation, "Be it so, then; retain your tremendous silence, or utter on your inarticulate sounds; better these than the jargon, the laughter, and the blasphemies of the reptile and miscreant race of man; to you, my dumb kindred, I am nearer and dearer than to those that so speak."

In forming, however, such a view of man and of life, Foster has committed, we think, an enormous error-the great mistake of his history. He has failed to see the

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beauty of life, its hopeful tendencies, the dignity of that discipline which is ripening man for a nobler destiny, the soul of goodness which underlies even the evils, the abuses, and the mistakes of the world, and the glory which springs from human suffering, and shines through human tears. this, he sees little else than unmitigated and unredeemed misery and guilt, and flies to the prospect of death for relief. as the opium-eater to his drug, or the drunkard to his drambottle. "I have yet," he says, toward the close of his life, one luminary, the visage of death." And in the rising of that pale luminary, that ghostly sun, he expects a reply to all his questionings, and a rest to all the wanderings of his spirit. Surely he expected far too much from such a source. For, in the first place, since the tale of the universe is infinite, can it be told all at once to a finite being? It is beyond even the might of Death to give to a mind infinite illumination, to which it has failed to give infinite capacity. It may, it must, greatly extend the view, and brighten the medium; but to suppose that it instantly makes all mysteries plain, were to leave little to do for the vast eternity beyond it. Besides, may not mystery continue to be an atmosphere fit for rearing certain future, as it is for rearing certain present, conditions of spiritual being. The caterpillar and the but terfly respire the same air. Certain plants, and those of a strong and hardy kind, grow best in the shade. To suppose that Death should explain every enigma is, in fact, to enthrone it in the room of Omnipotence. Thirdly, unless first we be reconciled to life, unless we learn to interpret its sublime hieroglyphics, to feel its divine beauty, to read its 66 open secret," to adore while we wonder at its darkest dispensations, what can death do for us? The man who, loathing, despising, reviling life, finding only desolation and barrenness in all its borders, turns away from under the vine and the fig-tree, sits with lonely Jonah under his withered gourd, saying, "I do well to be angry, even unto death," is guilty of cowardice, if not of essential suicide: he may be a gifted, but is hardly a heroic man. "It is," says Schiller, a serious thing to die-it is a more serious thing to live." So it is a great and glorious thing to die; it is a thing greater, more glorious, god-like, to live a resigned, active, and "blessed," if not happy life. To use the language of

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Sartor Resartus, Foster has been in the everlasting no; he has been in the centre of indifference, but he has not reached the everlasting yea; he has not heard, or not received, its sweet and solemn evangel-he has tarried too long in the valley of the shadow of death, and spent many needless hours in the dungeon of the giant Despair; and worse, has dreamed, that to come forth from its threshold was to reach the Celestial City by a single step!

Before proceeding to speak of Foster's merits, we have, in corroboration of these remarks, to advance against him one or two serious charges, made more in sorrow than in anger. We charge him, in the first place, with a sort of moral cowardice, which it is painful to observe in a man of such gigantic proportions. In his views of moral evil there is more of the fascinated fear of the planet-struck than of the strong courage of the combatant. He looks at it rather than seeks to strike it down. Knowing that Omnipotence alone can prostrate it in its entireness-that Omniscience alone can explain its existence he is not sufficiently alive to the facts that it is reducible, that every one may, in some degree, reduce it, that each smallest reduction proves that it is not infinite, and that the farther you reduce evil, the nearer you reach the solution of the great problems-why it is, and whence it rose. He seems sometimes to regard the efforts of men to remove or mitigate, moral, or even physical, evil, with as much contempt as he would the efforts of barbarians, with their cries and kettle-drums, to drive away an eclipse from off the face of the sun. His own attempts to abate evil are thus paralyzed. He keeps, indeed, his post-he maintains the contest-but it is languidly, and with frequent looks cast behind, toward a great reserve of force which he expects to be brought, but which is slow to come, into action. It is the old story of the wagoner and Hercules. The road is miry, the rain is heavy, he is weary, how easy it were for the god to come down and perform the task! And because he will not yet, Foster becomes sullen, disappointed, and all but desperate. Let no one say that we are not fair judges of a mind so peculiar as his, that we know not what doubts and difficulties oppressed him, or how they affected his spirit. Every thinking mind is haunted, more or less, by pre