no more annoyance from your brother; remorse had struck him, and it is but justice to his memory to say, that he would have made me every atonement in his power, would I have accepted aught but forbearance from insult at his hands. Soon after this he died, and you returned home; and singularly enough, on that very day too, my child quitted the hut of which she had so long been the tenant. You asked anxiously about her, but though I always esteemed you, John, yet your brother's conduct having inspired me with a distrust of all the members of your family-being ignorant too how far an acquaintance with the world might have perverted your own fine nature I determined for a time to persevere in my story. But at the sight of your grief, my heart relented, and I was on the point of making a confession, when, on reflection, I thought it better previously to make a sure trial of your constancy. In due season I should have explained every thing, but Mary, whom it was a paramount object with me to keep secluded from all observation, precipitated my design. Twice in the dusk of the evening, when she thought she might venture abroad without risk of discovery, she made her way secretly to your favourite grove, pleased, no doubt, at the idea of finding herself once more so near you. On both these occasions you beheld her, and mistook her as was natural in your excited state of mind, and after the communications I had made to you with regard to her supposed deathfor a being of another world. premature discovery, coupled with your determination to consult the witch, compelled me to bring matters to a crisis. Still, however, distrustful of your affection, I resolved to put it to a last decisive test; and accordingly projected your present visit to this abbey; for if, said I, he can brave an interview with the dead, at such an hour, and in such a spot-he, whose imagination is so vivid, and so easily excited!-great, indeed, must be the strength and purity of his attachment. Forgive me, John, for making you the ubject of such a wild experiment, which, but for my knowledge of your mind, I should never have dreamed of; but you have bravely passed the ordeal, and henceforth I fling distrust to the winds. Mary is yours! It would be ungenerous to interpose further ob This stacles. Enough has been sacrificed to duty, let constancy now meet with its reward. I have no doubt that the Baronet will in time be prevailed on to give his consent, for his affections, my boy, are now wrapt up in you; but should he not, why then-as the recent death of a relative has again rendered me independent-I will not, to humour his prejudices, sacrifice the happiness of two young people so deservedly dear to me. But try him first, John; allow time for his better feelings to come into play, for, remember, he is your father!-and now, here we are at home; nay, no entering here tonight," for Trevanion, reluctant to part from Mary even for an hour, was following them up the garden,-" return to the Hall, John, and in a day or two we will see each other again ;" and with these words, Mr Mordaunt, barely allowing the lovers time for one embrace, hurried his daughter with him into the cottage. About a month after this memorable scene at the Abbey, when the sensation created throughout the village by Mary's extraordinary re-appearance had somewhat subsided, as profound a one, if not profounder, was excited by the unprecedented circumstance of Sir Hugh Trevanion's state carriage standing at the door of Mr Mordaunt's cottage. Subdued by grief and age, and penetrated with his son's unremitting attention to his slightest wishes, the old man had no longer the heart or the inclination to refuse him any thing. Accordingly, after urging a few faint objections, he was persuaded to have an interview with the Mordaunts; and, as to see Mary was to love her, he no sooner became acquainted with her, and learned that her family, though not of rank equal to his own, was nevertheless of "gentle blood," than he gave his consent to her union with his son. And long and happily John and Mary lived together. Her native good sense and strength of mind corrected the infirmities of his imagination; and often, when in maturer years he thought of his youthful adventures with the pirates, he thought of them with gratitude, as having been the means of drawing out that latent energy of character which had enabled him to win the hand of Mary. Thus the last as well as the first part of the Witch of Dartmoor's prediction was fulfilled! 1. CRYSTALS FROM A CAVERN. I SEEM to see a hard polished Mosaic spread over the earth, enamelled with animals, flowers, and men. They are the smooth and glittering but lifeless ornaments of a subterranean tomb. The rain falls on them, but not a drop sinks in. The wind blows over them, but cannot stir a leaf of the plants, or a tress of the figures. It is a noble work. But the living roots below begin to strive, and the flowers fracture and displace their stone copies, and a fountain forces its way through the rent masterpiece. The stag that bounds across, and the ox that lies down on it, shake and crack the picture; and the labourer dashes away with his pickaxe the shapes of goddesses and heroes, and seeks for soil below in which to drive his plough and sow his seed. The artist stands aghast, and exclaims, how wretched is it that these living things should destroy my beautiful creation. Beautiful it may be, replies the peasant; but your figures are dead, and I am a man. 2. The gods were met in air, above Olympus, and delighted themselves with discourse and song, till Vulcan, Hermes, and Pallas proposed to display before the conclave a pageant of the universe. Vast golden columns rose from darkness, and climbed amid the stars. A cloud-curtain filled the interspace, and across this floated vision after vision of worlds and all their kinds, phantoms multitudinous and immeasurable, and painted with the colours of reality. But suddenly the eagle sailed in amid the gods on expanded wings, and his talons were fixed in the girdle of a mortal child. Send the bantling, exclaimed Vulcan, with a glance of scorn, to swell that crowd of earthly figures passing in our aerial show. Nay, said Pallas, they are shadows, and he, though clayborn, lives, and is akin to us. Let him behold the vision which, being more than a phantom, he cannot belong to ; and she placed him at the feet of Jove, who smiled on the nursling of his lowest kingdom. 3. close the windows and doors of his house, and stop every crevice to keep out the light that it may not dim the shining of his candles, and should then strike a spark in this corner and that, and rejoice in seeing here a match and there a taper, and think how much nobler it is to enjoy this illumination of his own than to owe aught to the sun, so is he who shuts himself in the chambers of his self-will, and darkens himself against the radiance of truth. Poor man, he knows not in the pride of his independence that even his weak and meagre glimmer is a witness to some higher source of light than himself, whose effluence he did not create but only appropriate and obscure. 4. To the eye of Faith, and of Science too, which without faith is but a catalogue of names, every grain of dust is surrounded with its own coloured and life-sustaining atmosphere, and turns on the poles of a principle, that is, of a life governed by a law. 5. Ariel imprisoned in the pine, such is the view of man's spirit, if evil be but hinderance and difficulty. But if evil be guilt, be sin, man is an Ariel, pent not in the trunk of the pine, but in the heart of Caliban, filled with the same life-blood, stirred by the same emotions, and feeling every hideous temptation that assails or resides in that bestial form, and condemned to regard it as the companion and instrument of all his acts. From that dismal bondage no magic wand, no sage charming of a human Prospero can call the captive forth. 6. The moral satirist declaims against the cruelty and covetousness, the madnesses and follies of men, and thinks how wise he is to see through the aimlessness and vanity of these ;-too apt to believe that because he sees through others he himself is exempt from their frailties. Yet there are few human follies worse than the merely striving to see through those of all around us. There is something better than satire or declamation. What is it? Philosophy? Not if that be mere specula As one who at broad noonday should tion, for that too is only a seeing through. It is Love, Reverence, Faith. That is a dreadful eye which can be divided from a living, human, heavenly heart, and still retain its power of all-penetrating vision. Such was the eye of the Gorgons. 7. Of man as a reasonable, spiritual being, feeling is the vital heat, and bears a like relation to our faculties and mental acts, as that of the body to our visible frame, or that of the earth and air to the forms of vegetable life. As is the difference between the fulness of life in the tropics, and the dearth and stuntedness of it towards the poles, such is the contrast between those distinct minds, and those nations in whom feeling is abundant on the one hand, and those on the other in which it is deficient. Give to the Arctic circle the warmth of India, and with no other change as to causes you will have the frozen land melting into bloom and verdure; and the hidden seeds disclosing on all sides a harvest of exuberant wealth and beauty. And such an alteration is produced by the awakening of deep, earnest, and lively feeling in the hearts of men and races, such an expansion of the powers, and a similar vivifying of the whole man. It is important to remember that there is an apparent predominance of feeling in the character, which in reality argues a deficiency of the same. For the utmost quickness in the excitement, succession, and expression of feelings, proves that the quality of the feeling is weak and poor. Were it otherwise it would hold too strongly to its known and experienced objects to transfer itself so readily to new ones; and moreover it would shrink from displaying itself before those in whom it could not reckon on sympathies of cor. responding depth. But the gods and kings of mixed and multitudinous society are most commonly those whose feelings are the slightest and the lightest armed, and the readiest therefore for all occasions. And this is true whether they are feelings in their first and native character, as sensibility, taste, generosity, and so forth; or the same apostatized, the renegade feelings which take the names and arms of irony, sarcasm, and contempt; which last is often, but not always, only self-contempt going into company, that it may escape from home. 8. Man starts on his journey in a dark and savage forest, and himself rude, haggard, fierce. He toils on, hardly knowing wherefore, but driven by the impulse of life and its necessities, and allured with moth-like instinct in the direction of the light that glimmers before him. He contends with beasts, he hews down trees, he mingles with others of his kind in amity and bloody contention. Here and there in the forest he builds himself a hut, or finds a den. Now he erects some shapeless memorial where he has found a more grateful spot of rest, or a bright gleam has fallen on him from the skies; for the wish to give outward substance and permanent habitation to his emotions moves him as the wind the mist which it condenses. Elsewhere in his journey he constructs a forge and smelts metals, and makes for himself tools and ornaments. And again he joins, amid some opening glade, a busy and shifting market. He learns to love the fellowship of his kind, and tastes the sweets of human intercourse; for language now has woven itself round him like a sphere of luminous beams, displaying to him all those around him, and making his aspect bright to them. He is helped on his way by troops of revellers with songs and torches ; and again they leave him, and the wilderness is still around him. At another point some grave and lonely hermit leads him on, and cheers him with words of hope, and rebukes him with words of wisdom which find an echo in his heart, while they seem to give distinct expression to its longchoked but ever-deepening murmurs. The flower-bands of love check the boisterous uncouthness of his gestures, and the air of love opens his hard-encrusted breast. And all helps to soften the ruggedness of his aspect, to calm his headlong pulse, and to teach him to bend his eyes forward and upward with a thoughtful and longing gaze. Phantoms and realities thicken round his path. The forest seems to shut in drearier closeness, and now and then a brighter radiance bursts across it, and makes him feel by its disappearance as if, in spite of the steady growth of light, he were again, as at first, in total darkness. He rests in a stately inn; he threads long colonnades, and through opening vistas looks on distant but still deeply overclouded prospects. By and by he finds a or lamp burning before a lonely shrine, a single piercing ray lights up some image or inscription; and through deep and mazy arches, through lines of tombs, and over ivy curtained graves he is guided by broken songs, and solemn harpings. He bends at last beneath a high cathedral roof, before a silent altar, where the full brightness of the skies looks on him through the forms of saints and angels from the face of God. On childlike knees the pilgrim sinks, and while his spirit flies upward to the light that can alone satisfy it, the weary body drops into the closing sepulchre, and leaves no earthly record but the marble effigy that sleeps before the altar with closed palms. 9. There are minds in which the idea of duty stands immovably as the only assertion of man's spiritual being. In such men it resembles a rock unclothed of all verdure, from which all life-sustaining soil has been washed away, and with nothing near it but a dreary tossing sea of passions and strivings. Duty is thus felt as the great painful burden of existence, but which it is nobler to bear than to escape from, as the mind assures itself of its own strength only by the effort of upholding its load. But the exertion is so painful that it often disturbs all clear, calm views of the world around. The suffering and the sense of contradiction embody themselves in the belief that the whole universe is equally jarring, perilous, and tortured. Hence, a reckless ferocity of opposition to whatever claims a quiet and stable dominion. Hence too, a fretful bitter scorn for the convictions and sympathies of those who maintain that either for their own minds, or for mankind as a race, every escape is provided from the bondage of law into the freedom of life and love. From the feeling of perpetual struggle in which victory promises no reward but the dreary pride of victory, arises a sympathy with all struggle, however mad and blind, against any restraining force, and a cruel and disdainful spite against the attempts, in a progressive system, necessarily inadequate and imperfect, at introducing order amid the world's confusions. Unless in truth these should happen to be chiefly remarkable as fierce and plundering reyolts against the previous and more lasting endeavours, the uppermost feeling in the mind being that of resistance, that of a holding fast one's ground against hostility, the tendency will always be to look with favour on all kindred efforts, however desperate and insane, and to scout as lies, hypocrisy, vanity, pedantry, and so forth, the notion that there can be any good in the traditional maxims, symbols, and institutions of society. It is a dreary picture, but though insufficiently transferred to language, its originals have an undeniable existence. However horrid the thought of their Cain-like isolation and ulcerated feelings, their inextricable clinging to a strong and deep principle, under the heavy pressure of anguish and despair, makes them objects of true and brotherly sympathy to every believer in spiritual realities. The great error seems to be the substitution in the mind of a law, for a personal being, a God. A law must be obeyed at whatever cost of reluctance, and has no tendency to make obedience easy. It is only a person that can be loved, and with love comes life and hope. 10. The unflinching and unlimited selfwill of Bonaparte, together with his sense of numerical order and combination, acted on revolutionized and revolutionary France as an arctic winter on the storm-tost waters. By the freezing of the waves the worn-out and perishing crew of a crazy vessel may be preserved from drowning. But they can never hope to return to port or be finally rescued except by the passing away of the tyrannous congelation which has enclosed the ship and all the world around it in a case of smooth ice. The man himself appears to have been great only in his gigantic selfwill, and his ready and unwearied capacity for combining and applying the calculable elements of power. In all that relates to feeling, duty, and imagination, he was a mean and insolent barbarian, and, though there are many men on record of far more capricious and drunken impulses, there is probably none more entirely destitute of conscience. It seems probable that much of his ambition, perhaps much of all aggressive and cumulative ambition, is to be explained by the perpetual inward uneasiness and pres sure arising from the obscure consciousness that his power rested on no worthy base of honour, benevolence, and reason. Whence the inexplicable anxiety for outward confirmations, sops to his self-distrust, such as victories, titles, monuments, royal marriages, and even the mere frippery of his station, which, when not a matter of custom and course, is even ludicrous and sickening. Whence, too, the remorseless fury with which he stamped down the slightest show of resistance, and his mad irritation against the breath of ridicule or neglect. For the pettiest of such demonstrations touched on and lacerated his own morbid sense of instability. The great secret of the vulgar awe which his name still inspires is simply this, that his kind of greatness, viz. the Alaric or Bashaw species, is that which alone all minds, including the meanest, can understand and envy. Even these might perhaps be expected to consider more frequently than they appear to do, that no power so pompous and plausible ever since the beginning of history has made such utter shipwreck. 11. A man with knowledge but without energy is a house furnished but not inhabited; a man with energy but no knowledge, a house dwelt in but unfurnished. 12. Self-consciousness in most men flashes across the field of life like lightning over a benighted plain. The sage has the art to compel it into his lamp and detain it there, and is thus enabled to explore the region that we are born into and dwell in, and which is nevertheless so unknown to most of us. 13. The greatest intellectual difference among men is not that of having or not having thought on any one given subject, or any number of subjects; but of having or not having ever thought at all. He who has known the dignity, the strength, the sense of liberation, in the attainment of an independent personal conviction, has taken probably the greatest leap possible for the mere intellect. But such convictions are less common than they may seem. Bank notes are not forged or stolen once, for ten thousand times that the same felonies are committed as to thoughts. 14. Will is the root; knowledge the stem and leaves; feeling the flower. 15. The man who can only scoff in his heart at the recollection of his first love, however extravagant and illdirected it may have been, is not to be trusted with another's life. He scorns his own. 16. There is hardly a more serious spectacle than that of a man in rags, and without any moral cultivation, reading a newspaper. What are the many Marii in one Cæsar compared with Marii by millions? You cannot stop the reading the newspapers, but you may give the education that will act as a preceding antidote. 17. If you want to understand a subject, hear a man speak of it whose business it is. If you want to understand the man, hear him speak of something else. 18. A beautiful plant is to a solitary man a sort of vegetable mistress. 19. There are men from whom any burst of passion seems as extraordinary as would be the breaking out of a volcanic eruption from the apex of a pyramid. Now, the pyramid has certainly this advantage over the smoking cone, that from it we look for no discharge of fire and lava. But the artificial mound of granite is lifeless, and incapable of supporting life-no gases work within it, and no tree grows without. It stands for thousands of years unmouldering, indeed, but dry, barren, verdureless. If, then, we beheld a mind resembling this, a mind of mere intellectual predetermination and rigid self-will, should we not have cause to rejoice, though with fear, if we found that there were boiling springs of life within, that the pyramid had been built above a crater? For thus, by an epoch of convulsion and destruction, the artificial casing might be shattered, and a soil disclosed below, capable, in time, of receiving dews |