The poet refuses to give any description | of his lost friend; partly from the hopeless difficulty of conveying in words the impressions produced by personal power and converse; and partly in natural shrinking from that coldness of the world "which credits what is done," but has little care for unfulfilled promise, though it was Death that broke the earthly performance which is going on somewhere else. But he is not always able to retain this distrustful silence. We give one of several attempts to communicate the peculiar presence of his friend :—

"Heart-affluence in discursive talk

From household fountains never dry; The critic clearness of an eye, That saw thro' all the Muses' walk;

Seraphic intellect and force

To seize and throw the doubts of man;
Impassion❜d logic which outran
The hearer in its fiery course;

High nature amorous of the good,
But touch'd with no ascetic gloom:
And passion pure in snowy bloom
Thro' all the years of April blood;
A love of freedom rarely felt,

Of freedom in her regal seat
Of England, not the schoolboy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt;

And manhood fused with female grace
In such a sort, the child would twine
A trustful hand, unasked, in thine
And find his comfort in thy face;

All these have been, and thee mine eyes
Have look'd on: if they look'd in vain
My shame is greater who remain,
Nor let thy wisdom make me wise."-p. 168.

Some of the most touching poems in the volume, for all have had the experience that inspired them, are those which celebrate the return of anniversaries after the death of one with whom all their joy and all their hope. had been interwoven. We have the records of at least three Christmas days, and they mark the spiritual stages of grief. The first is but a patient, all-enduring concession to custom: the holy emblems do not yet sway the heart, though the pious will consents to lift the consecrated signs:

"With such compelling cause to grieve
As daily vexes household peace,
And chains regret to his decease,
How dare we keep our Christmas-eve;

Yet go, and while the holly boughs
Entwine the cold baptismal font,
Make one wreath more for Use and Wont
That guard the portals of the house;

Old sisters of a day gone by,

Gray nurses, loving nothing new; Why should they miss their yearly due Before their time? They too will die.”—p. 47.

The next Christmas, the outward calm is recovered, and the tears dried, but there sleeps at the heart, "the quiet sense of something lost:" on the last, whose record we have, the spiritual Hope is quite in the ascendant. Christ, and all who slept in him, are alive that day; and comforted Sorrow has become ardent, longing, perhaps impatient, Faith. The dirge of death gives place to the hymn of confidence: and the heart of the reader, somewhat oppressed by the long melancholy, rejoices at last to have the claims of Earth and Heaven harmonized in the trustfulness of love and expectation. It is finely marked by the incidents of domestic history appearing in the poem, that this effect had been aided by the liberation from over-powering associations consequent on a change of dwelling. The old bells, now heard no more, had tones that could recal only one set of feelings. The change of scene has helped to break the bond of use, and give the Future its rightful power.

ing out old shapes of foul disease, Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, ing in the thousand years of peace.

Ling in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
ing in the Christ that is to be."-p. 163.

he deepest interest of these poems is in the vings of the spirit to hold converse with dead, to conceive aright the nature of the een ties that may still connect the loving I faithful of each world, and through the rt to reason against and set aside the fear widening separation between souls in difent conditions of existence, and subject haps to different laws and measures of ritual growth. There is much curiosity, h of a physical and of a moral kind, which ple love should silence, taking her own sts and prophesies as sufficient for her fidence, as Mary was satisfied to ask no estions of Lazarus, of his four days' sorn beyond mortality, in her full contentnt with his presence, and that of the holy ve which him back. gave

Her eyes are homes of silent prayer, Nor other thought her mind admits, But, he was dead, and there he sits, And he that brought him back is there.

Then one deep love doth supersede
All other, when her ardent gaze
Roves from the living brother's face,
And rests upon the Life indeed.

All subtle thought, all curious fears,
Borne down by gladness so complete,
She bows, she bathes the Saviour's feet
With costly spikenard and with tears.

Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers,
Whose loves in higher love endure;
What souls possess themselves so pure,
Or is there blessedness like theirs?"-p. 51.

There is no more common trepidation of

= heart, than that new and inconceivable

des of existence may so deprive us of all owship in the links that bind the anges" of the dead, that never can we be ly mated again. The fear belongs to the eculative, not to the spiritual nature. It powerfully put in one of these poems, and ply answered in the next.

vex my heart with fancies dim:

"Do we indeed desire the dead

Should still be near us at our side?
Is there no baseness we would hide?
No inner vileness that we dread?
Shall he for whose applause I strove,
I had such reverence for his blame,
See with clear eye some hidden shame,
And I be lessened in his love?

I wrong the grave with fears untrue :
Shall love be blamed for want of faith?
There must be wisdom with great Death;
The dead shall look me thro' and thro'!

Be near us when we climb or fall:

Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours
With larger, other eyes than ours
To make allowance for us all.-p. 73.

Again how true to love, and therefore to God, is the strong desire for personal identity and recognition, though compelled to struggle with spiritual trusts and weapons against some of nature's signs of individual decay! There is something spiritual even in the constancy with which he clings to the "eternal form" that shall still individualize, "divide the eternal soul from all beside," as a protest and protection against the heartless mockery of any "remerging in the general

Soul."

"The wish that of the living whole

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;
That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear;

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my wait of cares Upon the great world's altar-stairs, That slope through darkness up to God;

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope."-p. 79.

The fears and doubts that issue out of the perishableness of our bodies and the sins of our souls, are worthily extinguished by the cries of the heart, and the prophesies of the spirit accredited by Faith as God's own voice and word. That faith is itself not the evidence, but the reality of a divine nature in us. "Oh, yet we trust that somehow good

Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete :
That not a wormĝis cloven in vain ;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivel'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.
Behold! we know not anything;

I can but trust that good shall fall
At last-far off-at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream; but what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry."—p. 77.

This subservience of Knowledge to Faith appears from first to last as the poet's confidence, for he everywhere takes the knowledge of the Heart as that margin of experience, of real contact with God, which gives strength and ground to trust the infinite unknown. Thus in the prefatory poem:"Our little systems have their day;

They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee,-And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

operate with God's spirit where can be confidence that we are born to such es? All the inferences we may trace n the course of Providence are for us null void, until we partake of the creative it, and feel the force of Christ's axiom, y father worketh, and I work." It is 7 the consciousness that there is no anering reality within, that could dim the phecies of man's future blessedness and fection.

Contemplate all this work of Time, The giant laboring in his youth; Nor dream of human love and truth, is dying nature's earth and lime;

But trust that those we call the dead, Are breathers of an ampler day Forever noble ends. They say The solid earth whereon we tread

n tracts of fluent heat began,

And grew to seeming random forms, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, ill at the last arose the man;

Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime, The herald of a higher race,

And of himself in higher place,

f so he type this work of time

Within himself, from more to more;
And crown'd with attributes of woe
Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not as idle ore.

But iron dug from central gloom,

And heated hot with burning fears; And dipp'd in baths of hissing tears, And batter'd with the shocks of doom

To shape and use. Arise and fly

The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die." -p. 183.

This faith can spiritually subdue all the ward and material evidences of decay and nihilation-the worm and the grave, but cannot subdue the hunger of the heart for newed personal communication. If it ald, indeed, it would subdue the heart elf, the basis of Faith, for what redemption His pledges could God owe to us, if it ld become to us a matter of indifference ether our affections fed on phantoms or lities? It is unsatisfied desire that proses the future.

We must draw these extracts to a close. We had designed to say much more of our own, but as we turned the pages something exquisite forced itself upon us and extinguished our thought. We do not regret this. The best review of such a book is that which will draw the reader into some sympathy with the spirit which, out of such circumstances, breathes such sweetness and sacredness. The key-note of the whole is struck at the beginning:

"I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;

There is added to the volume a Marriage Lay; but the old strain returns at the remembrance of another marriage that was to have been and when through those fair portals he beholds the unspoiled Future, and the unborn races that in the long succession of the ages are to have their origin in Love, and God giving with every new generation a new hope and a new trial to mankind, his faith in the far-off Perfection, which would seem thus secured, is still strengthened by the remembrance of what has been :

"Whereof the man, that with me trod

This planet, was a noble type,

Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God;
That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves."

*These lines remind us of Monckton Milnes, than whom none has developed more worthily the Religion of Sorrow. The coincidence of the words that form the rhyme is curious,

"He who for Love hath undergone

The worst that can befall,
Is happier thousand-fold than one
Who never loved at all

66 The