she should understand the meaning, the inevitableness, and the loveliness of natural laws; and follow at least some one path of scientific attainment as far as to the threshold of that bitter valley of humiliation, into which only the wisest and bravest of men can descend, owning themselves forever children, gathering pebbles on a boundless shore. It is of little consequence how many positions of cities she knows, or how many dates of events, or names of celebrated persons-it is not the object of education to turn the woman into a dictionary; but it is deeply necessary that she should be taught to enter with her whole personality into the history she reads; to picture the passages of it vitally in her own bright imagination; to apprehend, with her fine instincts, the pathetic circumstances and dramatic relations which the historian too often only eclipses by his reasoning and disconnects by his arrangement: it is for her to trace the hidden equities of divine reward, and catch sight, through the darkness, of the fateful threads of woven fire that connect error with retribution. But chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend the limits of her sympathy with respect to that history which is being forever determined as the moments pass in which she draws her peaceful breath, and to the contemporary calamity which, were it but rightly mourned by her, would recur no more hereafter. She is to exercise herself in imagining what would be the effects upon her mind and conduct, if she were daily brought into the presence of suffering which is not the less real because shut from her sight. She is to be taught somewhat to understand the nothingness of the proportion which that little world in which she lives and loves, bears to the world in which God lives and loves; and solemnly she is to be taught to strive that her thoughts of piety may not be feeble in proportion to the number they embrace, nor her prayer more languid than it is for the momentary relief from pain of her husband or her child, when it is uttered for the multitudes of those who have none to love them, and is "for all who are desolate and opprest.' "Sesame and Lilies." JOHN RUSKIN.

99

2. Ethereal Minstrel! Pilgrim of the sky!

Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?
Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye

Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?
Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will,
Those quivering wings composed, that music still!

To the last point of vision, and beyond,

Mount, daring warbler! that love prompted strain
("Twixt thee and thine a never-failing bond)

Thrills not the less the bosom of the plain.
Yet might'st thou seem, proud privilege! to sing
All independent of the leafy spring.

Leave to the Nightingale her shady wood:
A privacy of glorious light is thine;

Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam;

True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home! "To a Skylark." WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

3. There are two classes of permanent products raised and transmitted by human activity. One of them is cooperative and has a parallel in the life of other creatures. As the coral-reef is deposited in increments contributed by a constant animal succession, so the city, the harbor, the aqueduct, the road enlist and attest the labors of many generations, and owe their solidity and grandeur to prolonged experience and multitudinous skill. Such monuments record the power of the social spirit, and measure for us the greatness of nations.

The other class is purely individual and personal, and has no place except in human kind. An Iliad, an Agamemnon, a Divina Commedia, a Hamlet, a Faust, a Madonna di San Sisto, or a Sinfonia Eroica is a unique birth in which no sound mind can bear a part; and, go where it may, speak to what myriads it will, it is still an appeal of one soul to another, eliciting response as sharp

and single as the echo to a solitary voice. Flowing forth from a single creative nature, it acts by its touch as an experiment in spiritual friendship, and gathers an ever-increasing group, held fast in fellowship of enthusiasm, and owing a common obligation to the genius which has discovered for them their true soul.

What and where, then, are the two members of this relation? Is the first of them nothing and nowhere? and is the homage it wrings from me paid to a blank? or to a dead book onlyto blotted paper or colored canvas or an orchestral score? Heartworship, like God, is "not of the dead, but of the living"; and that, in the thought-glance with which we look up to a Homer, a Dante, a Shakespeare, there should be no reciprocity possible —that in reverencing the prophets we do but decorate their tombs-that the touch which wakes such fires within us should be that of a quenched torch, would expel their chief meaning from the noblest relations subsisting among human minds.

A great, creative personality may be lonely and neglected in his day; and only when the reflection which he leaves of himself travels down the ages, does he select and gather together his natural associates and lovers: and shall he never hear the chorus of that great company, or know of that life which began for him when life had ended? Can a word that is immortal come from a speaker that is ephemeral?

"A Study of Religion."

JAMES MARTINEAU.

4.

Whence the sound

Of instruments, that made melodious chime,
Was heard, of harp and organ; and who moved
Their stops and chords, was seen; his volant touch
Instinct through all proportions, low and high,
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.
"Paradise Lost,” Book XI.

Passion of sudden death! that once in youth I read and interpreted by the shadows of thy averted signs!-rapture of panic taking the shape (which among tombs in churches I have seen) of woman bursting her sepulchral bonds-of woman's

Ionic form bending forward from the ruins of the grave with arching foot, with eyes upraised, with clasped, adoring hands— waiting, watching, trembling, praying for the trumpet's call to rise from dust forever! Ah, vision too fearful of shuddering humanity on the brink of mighty abysses!-vision that didst start back, that didst reel away, like a shrivering scroll before the wrath of fire racing on the wings of the wind! Epilepsy so brief of horror, wherefore is it that thou canst die? Passing so suddenly into darkness, wherefore is it that thou sheddest thy sad funeral blights upon the gorgeous mosaic of dreams? Fragments of music too passionate, heard once and heard no more, what aileth thee, that thy deep rolling chords come up at intervals through all the worlds of sleep, and after forty years, have lost no element of horror?

I

Lo, it is summer-almighty summer! The everlasting gates of life and summer are thrown open wide; and on the ocean tranquil and verdant as a savannah, the unknown lady from the dreadful vision and I myself are floating-she upon a fairy pinnace, and I upon an English three-decker. Both of us are wooing gales of festive happiness within the domain of our common country, within that ancient watery park, within that pathless chase of ocean, where England takes her pleasure as a huntress through winter and summer, from the rising to the setting sun. Ah, what a wilderness of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands through which the pinnace moved! And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers -young women how lovely, young men how noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting toward us amid music and incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous corymbi from vintages, amidst natural carolling, and the echoes of sweet girlish laughter. Slowly the pinnace nears us, gaily she hails us, and silently she disappears beneath the shadow of our mighty bows. But then, as at some signal from heaven, the music, and the carols, and the sweet echoing of girlish laughter-all are

hushed. What evil has smitten the pinnace, meeting or overtaking her? Did ruin to our friends couch within our own dreadful shadow? Was our shadow the shadow of death? I looked over the bow for an answer, and, behold! the pinnace was dismantled; the revels and the revelers were found no more; the glory of the vintage was dust; and the forests with their beauty were left without a witness upon the seas. "But where," and I turned to our crew-"where are the lovely women that danced beneath the awning of flowers and clustering corymbi? Whither have fled the noble young men that danced with them?" Answer there was none. But suddenly the man at the masthead, whose countenance darkened with alarm, cried out, "Sail on the weather beam! Down she comes upon us; in seventy seconds she also will founder."

II

I looked to the weather side, and the summer had departed. The sea was rocking and shaking with gathering wrath. Upon its surface sat mighty mists, which grouped themselves into arches and long cathedral aisles. Down one of these, with the fiery pace of a quarrel from a crossbow, ran a frigate right athwart our course. "Are they mad?" some voice exclaimed from our deck. "Do they woo their ruin?" But in a moment, as she was close upon us, some impulse of a heady current or local vortex gave a wheeling bias to her course, and off she forged without a shock. As she ran past us, high aloft amongst the shrouds stood the lady of the pinnace. The deeps in malice opened ahead to receive her, the billows were fierce to catch her. But far away she was borne upon the desert spaces of the sea; while still by sight I followed her, she ran before the howling gale, chased by angry seabirds and by maddening billows; still I saw her, as at the moment when she ran past us, standing amongst the shrouds, with her white draperies streaming before the wind. There she stood, with hair disheveled, one hand clutched amongst the tackling-rising, sinking, fluttering trembling, praying-there for leagues I saw her as she stood, raising