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ter-shocks for a little while; but, unless all signs deceive, the great issue can not be long delayed. The calmest observer is unable to deny the significance of the electrical flashes occasionally shooting now across the atmosphere. It is as if words of doom were traced in lurid streaks, breaking here and there through the darkened sky. We are strongly reminded of the similar incidents which marked the summer of 1868 in Spain. Those incidents were then scarcely understood abroad; yet they meant the subsequent great event of September. Even so there are now signs and portents in France-only fraught with a meaning for Europe at large.

This was published in December, 1869. In the following year, September, 1870, Bonapartist rule was a thing of the past.

Czardom, on its part, may play out its last card by embarking upon a fresh war. It will

only thereby hasten its doom. Though in Russia concentrated action, for the sake of overthrowing a system of government, is surrounded with greater difficulties than in France, I fully expect that the day is not far distant when autocracy must either bend by making a concession to the more intelligent popular will, or be utterly broken and uprooted. "Terror for Terror!" is a war-cry of despair; but on such a principle a nation's life can not continue. The moment may come when the tyrant will be driven to bay in his own palace. And loud and hearty will be the shout of freemen when that event occursof the men striving for liberty in the great prison-house of the Muscovite Empire itself, as well as of all those abroad who have still some pity left in their hearts for the woes of a host of down-trodden nations.

KARL BLIND, in the Contemporary Review.

IT

A DIALOGUE ON HUMAN HAPPINESS.

T was a morning of magical beauty toward the close of February. A breeze breathed inland from the sparkling ripples of the Mediterranean as buoyant and fresh as they were; and Nice seemed to glance and float in the luminous haze that bathed it, like an unreal vision in the depths of an enchanted mirror. Its gay and motley world, however, was as unenchanted as possible; a long line of carriages, for Monte Carlo, was extending, for its benefit, the entire length of the railway-station; and many were the startling toilets to be seen studding the platform, and many the complexions of what seemed a preternatural fairness. Among this strange crowd moved the popular Mrs. Fitzpatrick, still the confidante of men, although past fifty, and still caressed by every woman whose affection is a comfort, or whose acquaintance is a distinction. Her day's prospect was something far less vulgar than the gaming-tables-it was a breakfast with Lady Di at the Villa Godwin, close to whose lovely gardens is a small station, a mile or two on this side of Monaco. A few other guests from Nice were, she knew, going also; and she was scanning the crowd, in hopes of detecting some of the favored ones. Her sensitive taste was very quickly startled by a dress of purple velvet, embroidered with golden sunflowers; and she was indulging gently in the reflection so common with all of us, "What people there are in the world!" when the lady of the sunflowers rapidly came up to her, and proved to be no less

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a person than Mrs. Crane, the beauty. June, at a fancy fair in London, Mrs. Crane had sold cigars at ten guineas apiece, and Mrs. Fitzpatrick thought that, though not in her own set, “she was all very well at Nice." Mrs. Crane, too, who by no means despised the appearance of respectability, or the company, in public places, of unimpeachable people, would by no means let Mrs. Fitzpatrick pass; and a greeting took place of the most comfortable cordiality. What, however, was the latter lady's surprise, on asking if her companion was going to Monaco, to learn that, like herself, she was bound for the Villa Godwin! "So come with me, my dear," Mrs. Crane added. "We have monopolized a salooncarriage; and there are our party standing in front of it, with your cousin, Phil Marsham, taking charge of us."

"Ah, there the boy is!" said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, with a smile of meaning, and a familiar nod to him. "And so, my dear, Phil is another of your friends, as well as poor Di!"

"Yes," said Mrs. Crane gayly. "Mr. Phil and I are sworn friends, of a good three weeks' standing; and we have hardly a thought that we don't share by this time. But as for Di, as you call her, I never set eyes on her till yesterday, at Monte Carlo, when Mr. Phil and Lady Otho introduced us; and, as we can never let a day pass without a turn at the tables, we have been asked to take the Villa Godwin by the way. We go on, in the afternoon; dine at Monte Carlo; stay

for the concert; then row back in a boat by moonlight with Countess Marie, whose singing is the divinest thing I ever heard in my life, and of whom your cousin could tell you a great deal more than I can; and then we wind up our proceedings with the Nice fancy ball, which, unless my foresight fails me, will be of the most curious description. But now," Mrs. Crane went on, "be a good woman, and tell me all about Lady Di; she has long been a name to me, but nothing more than a name, and I hate going to people's houses without knowing something about them -I mean about their relations; for else one never knows where one is, and is sure to commit one's self in one way or another."

'It seems to me," said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, "that Phil Marsham knows too much about too many ladies. I can answer for it, at any rate, that he knows something about poor Di, so you had best ask him. I must go and speak for a moment to dear Lady Otho."

Mrs. Fitzpatrick was always close to the right people. She could not help it. It was not that her heart was bad, but that her instinctive tact was exquisite. And now, her hand in another moment-her gentle, truthful, caressing hand— was, almost before she knew it, upon Lady Otho's muff, and a low coo of confidences had begun instantly.

Once in the saloon-carriage, Mrs. Crane had her way with Marsham. "Who is she?" and "What is she?" she was saying. "You must tell me all about her. And is she a great friend of yours? I can tell you this much, at any rate: she looks more like Venus than Diana."

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"She You

'Dio-what?" said Mrs. Crane. "Diotima," repeated Marsham slowly. is a strange person, with a strange name. have of course heard of her father, old Lord Wastwater?"

"Heard of him! I knew him too, for my sins. I met him at Sandown the day before he died. He made eyes at me for half an hour incessantly; he thanked Heaven that, though he was past seventy, he was still susceptible to the charms of a pretty woman; and he promised to send me next week a copy of verses made in my special honor."

"Ah!" said Marsham gently; "his career was the saddest thing I ever knew in my life. He began in a very different way from the way he ended in. He was full of ambition and high aims once as a student and a poet. He translated Greek poetry, and he studied Greek philosophy; and with his clear, eager eyes, that I have often heard about, he impressed every one as a youth of the greatest promise. But at thirty his

change came. He put his dreams away from him, and exchanged them for what he called realities. He came out of his seclusion; he gave up his Plato in favor of play; and just as his first master had taught him to despise his riches, so his second helped him to get rid of half of them. Still his early tastes in a great measure clung to him; and though he built the place we are now going to on purpose that he might be near the gaming-tables, yet his library and his statues will show you that he was a student and a man of taste to the end. And there, for her mother died early, he taught this child of his. He taught her, or had her taught, Greek and Latin, and some smattering of theology, for the Godwins are stanch Papists; and he completed her education by dragging her with him into half of the fast society in Europe. She is the strange child of a strange parent; and much of her fate and character seems written in the name he gave her."

"And who," said Mrs. Crane, “may Diotima have been, if you please?"

"She was a mysterious woman of whom we read in Plato-to me the most fascinating of all classical characters. Who she was is wrapped in mystery; but I picture her to myself as a sort of George Sand of antiquity. It was she who taught Socrates of the nature of love, of which she is supposed to have been a professor in more ways than one. Besides that, she is supposed to have been a priestess; and the gods loved her so well that, at her prayer, they would stay a pestilence. Fancy her, half saint and half sinthe wise woman at once of prayer and pleasure, whom the wisest of the ancients found more wise than himself!"

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"As far as I can understand," said Mrs. Crane, "you are not giving your friend a very brilliant character."

"

'As far as what we mean by character goes," said Marsham, "I believe her to be without reproach; and that, considering the way she has been brought up, is wonderful. I would stake my life on her honor. But think of the way she has lived, and the strange influences out of which her thoughts and her tastes have been woven. Think of the set of men and women from whom, to a certain extent at least, her tone must have been taken the extravagant debtors, the gilded paupers, the reckless love-makers! Her faith and her conscience, it is true, have kept her taintless; but in her natural and unregenerate heart she is, I think, half pagan and half Bohemian; and, though she does not hate good, yet naturally she does not fear evil.”

Mrs. Crane, who was herself a gilded pauper, was for this reason, and perhaps for certain others, not much pleased by these remarks. "Of

course," she said, "I can not tell who Lady Diotima may have been; but she has certainly lost her looks, even if she ever had any."

“Ah!” said Marsham, “very likely you think So. But Lady Di is essentially a man's beauty. And even men don't think her a beauty at first. But she has the ambushed charm that does all the more execution, because at first you do not perceive it; and still, though her cheeks are faded, and her eyes have a few faint lines round them, it is 'terrible as an army with banners,' lying in wait for you among autumnal brushwood."

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Men like you, Mr. Marsham," said Mrs. Crane, with a tone of pique in her voice, "are very transparent creatures. You are devoted to Lady Di, or at least you have been. Indeed, Mrs. Fitzpatrick told me as much, when I was talking to her just now on the platform."

"My cousin," said Marsham, laughing, "is a born match-maker; so you must not pay a moment's attention to what she says. No, my praise of Lady Di is quite disinterested. It is true I have known her very well. But then is not that as much as to say that I am not in love with her?"

Marsham said this with such frankly genuine carelessness that Mrs. Crane's good temper at once returned to her. "Well, I admit," she said graciously, “that Lady Di does dress to perfection. She has the prettiest boots I ever saw-(I must ask her where she gets them), and the prettiest hands too; only she never takes her gloves off. And, whether she can conquer or no, her dress could show any woman that she at least wishes to do so."

The party were now alighting at the station; and, as they were walking down a short reach of road to the villa-gates, Mrs. Fitzpatrick again joined Mrs. Crane and Marsham.

“I think, Philip,” she said with a sort of reproval in her voice, “I heard you tell Mrs. Crane that Lady Di was in heart half a pagan. I must set your companion right there. Di is as good a Christian as any of us. Her great charm to me is that she is a Catholic without bigotry. She believes, I've no doubt, firmly in her own faith. In fact, there is much of it that is so beautiful that a mind like hers must cling to it if possible. But she knows that to be good and genuine is of more importance than creeds: she does not care two straws for the Pope; and she likes a book all the better if it has not been written by a Papist. But," she added, making the others pause and look behind them a moment, " do you see, high up the hill, among the gray olives, just over the zigzag mule-track, and beyond the gleaming cottages, where a little chapel stands, among its black cypresses? Well, there Lady

Di climbs daily, and says her prayers in solitude, in a dim, musty twilight, among faint smells of incense; and then meditates on the rusty crosses in the graveyard, and looks out over the endless levels of the sea. How can you," she said to Marsham in a low, tender tone, “speak as you did of the only woman who has ever really loved you?"

Marsham's only reply was a soft, genial laugh, which showed his cousin at once that her words had no meaning for him. Men are very stupid," she said to herself, softly. stupid-stupid Philip!"

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'Poor Di! and

Meanwhile, under the shadow of mimosas, palms, and cypresses, a long, winding carriagedrive had brought them to the villa, and there Lady Di received them in a large marble hall. A man, who had been told that her face had a charm lurking in it, might have detected the charm at once; and her general aspect, even if he had not been told, might have warned him unconsciously to expect it. Her long, plain dress of tight-fitting gray velvet not only showed all the curves of her perfect figure, but her own knowledge of their perfection also; and there was a sense about her as she moved and spoke

Not a word did she

not indeed of coquetry, she was too serene and too confident for that-but of the subtile abandon, perceived like a faint perfume, of a woman accustomed, if not to love, at any rate to have love made to her. Nor did at breakfast this impression wear off. utter about philosophy or Greek poetry; and her only allusion to religion was to say that her Italian concierge hoped to cure his rheumatism by applying a painted woodcut of St. Joseph to it. She talked much to Marsham, with animation, but, as Mrs. Fitzpatrick observed, without a sign of tenderness. She spoke with gayety and interest of the gossip of Nice and Monte Carlo; she touched on several doubtful histories with a mixture of familiarity and delicacy; and she won golden opinions of Mrs. Crane, first as to her wisdom, by saying that marriage was a mistake, and then as to her taste, by describing how she had once been to a fancy-ball as Rosalind. The entertainment seemed altogether to be a complete success. Conversation was quick and sparkling all round the table; and long before a break-up was needful regrets were to be heard that there need be any break-up at all.

"He was a wise man, Lady Di," exclaimed Lord Surbiton, a poet, a diplomate, and a dandy of the last generation, laying a jeweled hand on his heart, and repressing a hollow cough—" he was a wise man who said that the climax of civilization was the getting together a certain number of knees under one piece of mahogany."

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"Or fifty pairs of hands," said Mrs. Crane, "round a single trente-et-quarante table."

"Any savage can love," said Lord Surbiton, "and any savage can gamble; but it is only civilized man that can really talk. And, therefore, a charming and accomplished hostess, who alone can make conversation possible, is, properly speaking, the high-priestess of civilization."

"Now, come, Lord Surbiton," said Lady Di, "and let us consider that for a moment. We have all of us here to-day been, no doubt, most charming. But has one of us uttered a serious thought, or said a single thing worth remembering? Our talk would seem very pointless, I'm afraid, if it were written down."

"Precisely, my dear lady," said Lord Surbiton, "and for this reason: In fine conversation the mere words are but a small part of it. The magic of these depends on that viewless world of association that is born and dies with each special day and company. They are like a spell, an incantation; they evoke, they do not describe; like other spells, they are effectual only in a charmed circle; and, like other spells to outsiders, they are apt to sound mere gibberish. And this is the reason why fine dialogue in books can never be what is called natural; for art has to concentrate into one mode of expression what in real life is conveyed to us by a thousand. And, even then, how often the result is a failure! What poet's art," he went on, preparing a sigh, that made his satin necktie creak-"what poet's art can supply the want of a woman's living eyes, or the personal memory of one's own relations with her?"

"Surely," said Lady Di, “if, as you say, any savage can make love, any savage can make eyes also. And you, Lord Surbiton, ought to be above such savagery."

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"You mistake me," said Lord Surbiton, who had meanwhile been fixing his own hollow eyes upon Mrs. Crane. I said that any savage could love; not that every savage could make love. The latter is a rare social accomplishment. The former is a universal private misfortune."

"Yes," said Lady Otho, pensively, with a charming expression of sadness, "I suppose love on the whole does cause more sorrow than happiness. If girls never fell in love, they would never run away from their husbands, and then half the misery one hears of every year would be spared one."

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of the world. Passion," he coughed out slowly amid a general silence, “is a great educator; but its work only begins when it itself has left us. I have observed, and I think with truth, in one of my own romances, that a woman of the world should always have been, but should never be, in love. She should always have had a grief, but she should never have a grievance. She should always be the mistress of a sorrow, but never its servant. The happiness of society, as I have observed in another place, is based on the pains of private or domestic experience. But our hours," he added, "of such perfect happiness are, alas! as fleeting as they are exquisite; and, as we are most of us on our way to Monte Carlo, your musical clock, Lady Di, warns us that we must soon be moving."

"I said just now," said Lady Di, "that we had none of us uttered anything worth remembering. You, Lord Surbiton, have at any rate freed us from that reproach."

"If I have," said Lord Surbiton, "I am sincerely sorry. The best conversation is never worth remembering. It is a delicate rose that will not survive for an instant the stalk it grows on. It is a fine champagne, that sparkles and rejoices us for the moment, but whose excellence we are never so sure of as when we find it has left no trace of itself next morning."

"And if true conversation," said Marsham, as the company were rising, "is like good champagne, true love is like bad. False and true taste equally well at the moment, and we only detect the true when we find that it has made our heads ache afterward."

"Very well put," said Lord Surbiton, with a low chuckle, as Marsham was helping him into a huge overcoat, lined with splendid sables. "You are coming with us, Mr. Marsham, are you not?'

"Are you?" murmured Lady Di, who was standing close beside him. "I had hoped you would have staid with me for an hour or two, for I want your help so very much in the library."

Marsham looked doubtful and disappointed; but Lady Di was invincible in such small social manœuvres; and in a few words with Lady Otho the whole thing had been settled.

"And what," said Mrs. Crane confidentially, "will Countess Marie think of you, Mr. Philip, when she promised to sing your boat-song tonight as we came home on the water?"

"Never fear about that," said Marsham. "You are to pick me up here at the landingstage at the bottom of the garden; and, meanwhile, give my friend my best remembrances, and tell her I've staid behind here to discuss theology."

"I thought," Mrs. Crane whispered, “it was flirtation you staid behind for, and not theology!"

"I never knew," he answered, "that the two had much in common. However, I suppose, on second thoughts, all false and useless things have a certain family likeness."

"Well, upon my word," said Mrs. Crane to Mrs. Fitzpatrick, as they were strolling slowly toward the station, "though I have seen many male flirts in my day, I never saw so busy a one as Mr. Philip, your cousin."

"I'm sorry to hear it, my dear," said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, with real feeling.

See, Mr. Marsham," said Lady Di, as she brought him into the long, quiet library, "I still keep my old tastes, and I still spend half my morning here. You know this room, don't you? It was here I first had the pleasure of meeting you. That was six years ago; and I remember to this day how I first saw you, as you came from your father's yacht, appear between those two tall cypresses. You were surprised, were you not, to find a student and a would-be poetess in what, at first sight, as you confessed afterward, you took for a young Parisian adventuress? However, I dress more quietly now. Is not that your opinion?" She had put on since breakfast a gray velvet hat that matched her dress, and that made her look five years younger; and she leaned back against a bookcase, conscious of an attraction which she felt she exercised. "Ah!" she went on in a few moments, "those were happy days. We were brother and sister for a whole cloudless fortnight. You were the very thing that at that time I wanted-a companion of my own age and tastes. Do you see that book in white vellum? That is the very Eschylus over which you smiled to find me poring. And now," she said, as she motioned him to a chair, "sit down by my writing table, and wait patiently while I read you something."

"Good heavens!" cried Marsham, as he watched her take from a drawer a locked manuscript-book, "how well I recollect that dull-blue binding! You had some scraps of mine inside it once, I believe-bits of translation I did from the plays we read together."

She held up her delicate hand to enjoin silence. "Listen," she said tenderly; "this is how the sea-nymphs sang to the bound Prometheus in his solitude, as they floated up to him, not from a yacht on the blue sea's surface, but from their coral caves far down under it :

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"Do you remember that?" she said, with a quiet look at Marsham. "Listen again, then. You must surely be flattered at hearing your own verses. You sent me this from Genoa. It is out of the " Agamemnon"; and it is, strangely enough, the last passage we ever read together: "Woe to the proud house! woe

To the proud house, and the mighty men thereof!

Desolate are the palaces; for lo,
From them the presence is gone forth of love.
And he is left astonied at his lot,

And silent-our lone lord;
Dishonored, yet he speaks no swelling word,
Stricken, he revileth not.

Only it seems we have a ghost to king,
Our king is changed in such wise-yea, so grown
More sad than any living, fleshly thing:
For even like a ghost's to look upon

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