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Or cast-off mistress, left to shame
By a New York rowdy of evil fame.
He thrash'd her, did he? Go on.
Finish your story, and o'er and o'er,
Proving things beyond human guess,
Blacken the little adventuress.

What more?

Now you have done, and I have heard
Patiently every cruel word,
Listen to me; or rather, no!
Why should I argue with you so,
O wise Philosophy? Frown and go!
I turn to Seraphina Snowe!

IV.

MESMERIC FLASHES.

O eyes of pale forget-me-not blue,
Wash'd more pale with dreamy dew,

What faces wicked, what haunts unclean
Have ye not in your wanderings seen!
Poor little body, so frail and thin,
Bruised in the brutal embrace of sin !
Thin white hands where the blood doth run,
Like the light in a shell held up to the sun,
How often have ye lifted been

To ward away from hands obscene,

Not a wicked touch, but a ruffian blow!

God bless thee, Seraphina Snowe !

Found out, exposed, the jest of the day,

With thy spectral eyes on the world, at bay!

While the sense of the sun and the wind and the light

Surge thro' thee, and leave thee more wild and white,

And a mystic touch is in thy hair,
And a whisper of awe is everywhere,
And thou almost fearest in thy sin
The spirits thou half believest in !

Always imposing, little Elf,

And most on thy delicate, silken self!
Making the raps with thy cunning knee,
Smiling to hear them secretly,-

And all the while thy pulses beat,

Thou tremblest at thine own deceit,

Listening, yielding, till there comes
Out of thy soul and out at thy thumbs
A wave of emotion, a swift flame
Blanching thy spiritual frame
To more ivory whiteness-a wild dew
Washing the spectral eyes more blue-
The secret soul with its blinding light
Confirming thee in thy lie's despite !

Would to God that thou and I
Might put our hands together and fly
To some far island lone and new,

Where the sun is golden, the sea dark blue,
Where the scented palm and the cocoa-tree
Should make a bower for thee and me,
And all should be wild, and bright, and keen,
The flowers all colour, the leaves all sheen,
The air and the warm earth all aglow
With the life, the fever, the ebb-and-flow,
With the spirit-waves that flowing free
Foam up to a crest in souls like thee!

There, like the spider silvern and soft
Spinning its thread of gold aloft,

Thou shouldst sit among the leaves, and look

Out at me from a golden nook;

And draw me nearer with those dim eyes,

And kindle thyself to pants and sighs,

And I would crouch and gaze at thee

Through life that would seem eternity ;

While a wondrous spiritual light

Flash'd through and through me so wild and bright, Till I faded away beneath thy hand,

Through thy soul, to the Spirit Land!

ROMANCE AND HUMOUR FROM THE

BLUE

BOOKS.

I.-LORD AND LADY DUNDONALD'S ELOPEMENT TO GRETNA. WE often read and hear of the romance of real life, but we rarely find it satisfactory. The particular case may prove, or go to prove, that truth is stranger than fiction; but that, so far as it is just, carries with it only a remote value, and no one was ever yet persuaded by it into taking a newspaper or a blue-book for a novel or a poem. We feel that there is an equivocation somewhere. The romance of real life proves to be, after all, no romance. "Enoch Arden" may be founded on fact, and so may "Sylvia's Lovers ;" but, when we read in our newspaper of an "Enoch Arden in real life" (only the other day, we saw a paragraph headed, "A Batch of Enoch Ardens "), we find we do not derive from the case the same kind of satisfaction that we get from the poem. "Sylvia's Lovers" may have had an original in fact, for Mrs. Gaskell to draw from; but though that original, if you had known it, might have arrested your own attention as it did Mrs. Gaskell's, it would never have given you the peculiar impression that her story produces.

One reason is that you are too close to the footlights; you can discern that the Rosalind is not as young as she ought to be for the part, and that Orlando is weak in the knees. Poetic unity is not maintained; and it is not our weakness, but our strength-not our love of illusion, but our love of truth-which compels us to desire that it should be, and to feel that, if that is wanting, something is wrong. A great deal more might be said upon that and other topics, and perhaps we may find occasion for saying it when other instances of "the romance of real life" come to be introduced. But one point demands to be noticed at once. There is no romance possible where the actors are mean, and the emotions of the story on a low level. Humble in estate the actors may be, but they must not be cads. The emotions may play around the commonest interests of the human heart, but they must not be in themselves poor and paltry. Nor must they even be in too close juxtaposition with what is both or either. Nothing could, to us at least, make romance out of the Tichborne story, for instance. The mean odour of what is proper to the cad is too strong for the sensibilities to which Romance appeals. Thus, we need something more than surprising incident. The human figures must be, or seem, worthy of the god who ties the

knot or who cuts it, and we must not have a thunderstorm presented to us as that which spoils the beer, or makes Mrs. Cook pull her apron over her eyes.

We have long been of opinion that the greater part of the real romance of actual life goes unnoticed. This implies no disregard of the genius of Mr. Charles Reade ;-for Mr. Reade cannot have his eyes everywhere, and do everything. But we believe the best part of the poetry and humour which lurk in blue books, newspapers, and such places, gets overlooked. Nobody seems to find out the magic flower-garden, which is romance; while every one discovers the enormous gooseberry, in which there is no romance at all, though there may be much that is remarkable.

We are not now about to wander in any magic flower-garden, but only to say that there is some real romance to be found, in a book which is virtually a blue book, in connection with the greatest viking of modern times-Lord Dundonald, to whom they are, we believe, erecting a monument in Chili. The romance will speak for itself, and shall tell its own story. On other occasions, though we shall often go to blue-books real or virtual for our facts, we shall not tie ourselves down to them, and we beg the reader to accept the title as representative rather than logically all-inclusive.

In the year 1861, the case of the Dundonald peerage was before the House of Lords, and the old Dowager Lady Dundonald was examined as a witness upon the claim of her son. She was sixty-four years of age, and was treated with great indulgence. She was not tied down to the ordinary rules of evidence, but allowed to ramble and expatiate just as she pleased: and indeed it would probably have been found impossible to get much out of her if she had been strictly dealt with upon the ordinary principles for conducting an examination-in-chief. She shall tell the story of the courtship in her own words. There were apparently many obstacles to begin with :

"He proposed to my aunt. He did not propose to me. the subject to me, and I refused all sorts of things of the he made the proposal to my aunt."

He had once named kind, and at length

Then she is asked the question, "He was in love with your ladyship, I suppose ?"

"The world said so. I suppose it was so. It was an unlucky marriage for him, poor man. Then there was another person who had a large property, and he thought that not marrying the lady that he was wished to marry (and certainly he was not wished to marry me), he should avoid by a secret marriage a painful position to himself and this fortune going away from him; and that by keeping my marriage a secret, it should never interfere with that arrangement of his uncle's. That was given to me as the object, and I had no right, and I had no reason, to doubt the word of the most honourable man I have

ever known. I loved him. He had once named the subject to me and I had refused him. I refused all sorts of things of the kind, and at length he made the proposal to my aunt; dear me, men in love are very foolish."

"Lord Dundonald had been very ill, and his life had been despaired of, and they sent his servant, Richard Carter, to me, to tell me he was dying, and also Captain Nathaniel Cochrane came to say how very ill he was, and to ask if I would walk in front of the house in the square, that I might let him see me; which I did, and he was lifted up to the window of his bedroom, looking like a corpse. My heart was softened to see that great man, the hero of a hundred fights. I cannot bear to be sitting here to vindicate the honour of such a man. It is too much not to speak and tell my feelings; it would be impossible. He was a glorious man. He was incapable of deception such as is imputed to him by the world, I know. I dare not say by his son, but still it is his son. Such an imputation upon such a man! Such a god of a man !---a man who could have ruled the world upon the sea! That I, his wife, should sit here to vindicate the honour of such a man as that! O God have mercy upon me, and upon us! It is too much; I cannot stand it! That honoured name!-that name for ages and for ages, that has rung the world with his deeds!-the hero of a hundred fights! I have followed the fortunes of that great man. I have stood upon the battle-deck; I have seen the men fall; I have raised them. I have fired a gun to save the life of a man for the honour of my husband, and would do it again. He was a glory to the nation in which he was born, and there is not a member of the family of Lord Dundonald that need not be proud of belonging to such a man as he was."

In that lifting of the sick man up to the window, we can hardly help discerning a little of a lover's artifice, but we like the man none the less for it. He did not consciously aim at "startling effects:" but he could not help them. In reading Lady Dundonald's references to his "honour" and the like, we must, of course, bear in mind the well-known story of the stock-jobbing charges made against him, his trial and conviction before the fiery Ellenborough, and his subsequent acquittal before the greater tribunal of his country, followed as it was by a restoration to all his honours.

Lord Brougham may be pardoned for some things, but there was one for which some of us will never forgive him-his Act for abolishing Gretna Green marriages. It was a great shame; but Lady Dundonald appears to have been very much worried by the sequel of her elopement; and there is something truly and deeply comic in her feeling so puzzled to know why she should be married so many times. When Dundonald persuades her to go off to Gretna Green with him she has a nice time of it, travelling all day and all night, with four horses, and all that. She says:

At

"I was very worn, and we went rolling on; and I slept, and so did he. one part of the road-I know it was not Gretna Green, but some little distance after Gretna Green-he said, 'Well, thank God we are all right; ' he used to call me a sort of pet name of his own, and he said, 'It is all right, Mouse: we are all right now. Moxham, mind you get a comfortable room for Lady Cochrane at the Queensberry Arms. We shall soon be there,' and he said nothing

more."

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