the air! Men with baggage dash up against you; women shrilly vociferate above the roar of the steam; it is a fragment of the vitality and hurry of the great city carried for a little to the quiet country place. But the last rope is thrown off; the paddles turn; the steamer moves-it is gone. There is the blank water, churned now into foam, but in a few minutes transparent green, showing the wooden piles, encrusted with shells, and with weeds that wave about below the surface. There you stand, and look vaguely, and think vaguely. It is a curious feeling. It is a feeling you do not understand except by experience. And to a thoughtful person a thing does not become commonplace because it is repeated hundreds of thousands of times. There is something strange and something touching about even a steamboat going away from a pier at which a dozen call every day. But you sit upon the pier, you saunter upon the beach, you read the newspapers; you enjoy the sense of rest. The day wears away, and in the evening the steamboat comes back again. It has travelled scores of miles, and carried many persons through many scenes, while you were resting and idling through these hours; and the feeling you had when it was gone is effaced by its return. The going away is neutralized by the coming back. And to understand the full force of Gone in such a case, you must see a ship go, and see its vacant space when it is gone, when it goes away for a long time, and takes some with it who go for ever. Perhaps you know by experience what a choking sensation there is in looking at an emigrant vessel clearing out, even though you have no personal interest in any one on board. I have seen such a ship depart on her long voyage. I remember the confusion and hurry that attended her departure the crowded deck, thronged with old and young; gray-headed men bidding farewell to their native land; and little children who would carry but dim remembrances of Britain to the 297 distant Australian shore. And who that has witnessed such a scene can forget how, when the canvas was spread at length, and the last rope cast off, the outburst of sobs and weeping arose as the great ship solemnly passed away? You could see that many who parted there, had not understood what parting means till they were in the act of going. You could see that the old parents who were willing, they thought, to part from their boy, because they thought his chances in life were so much better in the new country, had not quite felt what parting from him was, till he was gone. Have you ever been one of a large gay party who have made an excursion to some beautiful scene, and had a pic-nic festival? Not that such festivals are much to be approved; at least to spots of very noble scenery. The noble scenery is vulgarized by them. There is an inconsistency in seeking out a spot which ought to awe-strike, merely to make it a theatre for eating and drinking, for stupid joking and laughter. No; let small-talk be manufactured somewhere else. And the influence of the lonely place is lost, its spirit is unfelt, unless you go alone, or go with very few, and these not boisterously merry. But let us accept the picnic as a fact. It has been, and the party has been very large and very lively. But go back to the place after the party is gone; go back a minute after for something forgotten; go back a month or a year after. What a little spot it is that you occupied, and how blank it looks! The place remains, but the people are gone; and we so lean to our kind, that the place alone occupies but a very little part in our recollection of any passage in our history in which there were both scenery and human life. Or go back after several years to the house where you and your brothers and sisters were children together, and you will wonder to find how small and how blank it will look. It will touch you, and perhaps deeply; but still you will discern that not places, but persons, are the true objects of human affection; and you will think what a small space of material ground may be the scene of what are to you great human events and interests. It is so with matters on a grander scale. How little a space was ancient Greece-how little a space the Holy Land! Strip these of their history and their associations, and they are insignificant. And history and associations are invisible; and at the first glimpse of the place without them the place looks poor. Let the little child die that was the light and hope of a great dwelling, and you will understand the truth of the poet's reflection on the loss of his, 'Twas strange that such a little thing, Should leave a blank so large!' There is no place perhaps where you have such a feeling of blankness when life has gone from it as in a church. It is less so, if the church be a very grand one, which compels you to attend to itself a good deal, even while the congregation is assembled. But if the church be a simple one, and the congregation a very large one, crowding the simple church, you hardly know it again when the congregation is gone. You could not believe that such a vast number of human beings could have been gathered in it. The place is unchanged, yet it is quite different. It is a curious feeling to look at the empty pulpit where a very great preacher once was accustomed to preach. It is especially so if it be thirty years since he used to preach there; more so, if it be many centuries. I have often looked at the pulpit whence Chalmers preached in the zenith of his fame; you can no more bring up again the excited throng that surrounded it, and the rush of the great orator's eloquence, than when standing under a great oak in December you can call up plainly what it looked in June. And far less, standing under the dome of St. Sophia, could one recal as a present reality, or as anything but a dreamy fancy, the aspect and the eloquence of Chrysostom, ages since gone. The feeling of blankness, which is the essential thing contained in the idea suggested by the word Gone, is one that touches us very nearly. It seems to get closer to us than even positive evil or suffering present with us. That fixes our attention: it arouses us; and unless we be very weak indeed, awakens something of resistance. But in the other case, the mind is not stimulated it is receptive, not active; and we muse and feel, vacantly, in the thought of something gone. You are, let us suppose, a country parson you take your wife and children over to your railwaystation, and you see them away to the seaside, whither you are not to follow for a fortnight: then you come back from the railway-station, and you reach home. The house is quite changed. How startlingly quiet it is! You go to the nursery, usually a noisy place: you feel the silence. There are the pictures on the walls there the little chairs: there some flowers, still quite fresh, lying upon a table, laid down by little hands. Gone! There is something sad in it, even with the certainty of soon meeting again, that is, so far as there is certainty in this world. You can imagine, distantly, what it would be if the little things were gone, not to return. That is the GONE consummate. All who have heard it know the unutterable sadness of the farewell of the Highland_emigrant leaving his native hills. You would not laugh at the bagpipes, if you heard their wild, wailing tones, blending with broken voices joining in that Macrimmon's Lament, whose perpetual refrain is just the statement of that consummate Gone. I shall not write the Gaelic words, because you could not pronounce them; but the refrain is this: We return, we return, we return no more! Yes; Gone for ever! And all to make room for deer! There was a man whose little boy died. The father bore up wonderfully. But on the funeral day, after the little child was laid down to his long rest, the father went out to walk in the garden. There, in a corner, was the small wheelbarrow with its wooden spade; and the foot-printsin the earth left by the little feet that were gone! You do not think the less of the strong man that at the sight he wept aloud: wept, as Some One Else had wept before him. You may remember that little poem of Longfellow's, in which he tells of a man, still young, who once had a wife and child: but wife and child were dead. There is no pathos like that of homely fact, which we may witness every day. They were gone; and after those years in their company, he was left alone. He walked about the world, with no one to care for him now, as they had cared. The life with them would seem like a dream, even if it had lasted for years. And all the sadder that so much of life might yet have to come. I do not mind about an old bachelor, in his solitary room. I think of the kindhearted man, sitting in the evening in his chair by the fireside: once, when he sat down there, little pattering feet were about him, and their little owners climbed upon his knee. Now, he may sit long enough, and no one will interrupt him. He may read his newspaper undisturbed. He may write his sermon, and no sly knock come to the door: no little dog walk in, with much barking quite unlike that of common dogs, and ask for a penny. Gone! I remember, long ago, reading a poem called the Scottish Widow's Lament, written by some nameless poet. The widow had a husband and two little children, but one bleak winter they all went together : I ettle whiles to spin, But wee, wee patterin' feet, And then I just maun greet: And faster flows the tear, Sin' the fa' o' the year. You have said good-bye to a dear friend who has stayed a few days with you, and whom you will not see again for long: and you have, for a while, felt the house very blank without him. Did you ever think how the house would 299 seem, without yourself? Have you place, blank of that figure you fancied yourself gone; and the know? When I am gone; let us not say these words, unless seriously; they express what is, to each of us, the most serious of all facts. The May Queen has few lines which touch me more than these: For lying broad awake I thought of you and Ethe dear; I saw you sitting in the house, and I no longer here. Lord Macaulay, a few years before he died, had something presented to him at a great public meeting in Scotland; something which pleased him much. 'I shall treasure it,' he said, 'as long as I live; and after I am gone'-There the great man's voice faltered, and the sentence remained unfinished. Yet the thought at which Macaulay broke down, may touch many a lesser man more. For when we are gone, my friends, we may leave behind us those who cannot well spare us. It is not for one's own sake, that the Gone, so linked with one's own name, touches so much. We have had enough of this world before very long; and (as Uncle Tom expressed it) heaven is better than Kentuck.' But we can think of some, for whose sake we may wish to put off our going as long as may be. 'Our minister,' said a Scotch rustic, 'aye preaches aboot goin' to heaven; but he'll never go to heaven as long as he can get stoppin' at Drumsleekie.' No doubt, that fit of toothache may be gone; or that unwelcome guest who stayed with you three weeks whether you would or not as well as the thing or the friend you most value. And there is the auctioneer's Going, going, as well as this July sun going down in glory. But I defy you to vulgarize the word. The water which makes the Atlantic will always be a sublime sight, though you may have a though the stupid bore who comes little of it in a dirty puddle. And when you are busy, and wastes your time, may tell you when you happily get rid of him, that he will often come back again to see you (ignorant that you instantly direct your servant never to admit him more), even that cannot detract from the beauty of Mr. Tennyson's If I can I'll come again, mother, from out my resting-place; A. K. H. B. A FEW WORDS ON THE CENSUS OF IRELAND. THE people of Ireland, in June, 1841, numbered eight million two hundred thousand persons. In the ten years previous, its rate of increase had been rather more than five in the hundred; so its numbers would now have exceeded nine millions had this proportion held on continuously. These, however, were only six millions and a half by the census return of 1851, and in the present year five millions seven hundred thousand; so that, relatively to its natural standard, the nation is less by more than one third, while absolutely, in the course of twenty years it has lost two million and a half of persons. In the face of these facts we may give credence to the tales of the havoc of the reign of Gallienus, or of the plague of the fourteenth century; and we venture to say that such a depopulation is unexampled in modern Europe. As is well known, the failure of the crop which formed the staple of Irish consumption, was the origin of this great revolution. We shall not revert to the chequered scenes which marked this phase of Irish history-how one third of the nation, suddenly deprived of the one source of existence it possessed, was uplifted in famisling swarms from the soil, and thrown on the alms of the empire for support-how for months, through the length and breadth of the land, the roads were darkened with these teeming hordes kept miserably alive through the exertions of the State-how, at last, this gigantic mass of pauperism was brought into more manageable proportions, and through the agency of wise legislation, was restrained from fastening again on the land from which it had been fortunately uprooted-and how by degrees it found an exit in an emigration unparalleled in numbers, which abandoned the soil to a new race of owners. Nor yet shall we notice how great was the triumph of imperial charity and modern civilization, in guiding Ireland through this season of peril, in averting the horrors of wide-spread famine, and saving property from utter ruin, in replacing to millions the means of support, and gathering their food from all ends of the world, and finally, in opening a channel of escape to a dense array of chaotic misery which threatened to consume the resources of the nation. As regards these events, we shall only observe that the Irish census adds to the proofs of the signal success of the Imperial Government in dealing with a tremendous exigency which threatened to involve a nation in destruction. It shows that the diminution of the population, which has synchronised with the potato failure, is not in any appreciable degree to be ascribed to the agency of famine, as has been loudly and shamelessly asserted, but is directly the result of emigration and of the decline of births in Ireland. One or two calculations from the census returns will establish this point beyond a question. We have seen that the actual results of the enumeration compared with the normal average of the people from 1841 to 1861, show a void of three million three 1861.] Decline of Population. But hundred thousand persons. emigration during this period accounts for two millions four hundred and thirty thousand, and the falling off in the numbers of the births is estimated at seven hundred thousand-a very low calculation, we think, if we bear in mind the circumstances of the country. This disposes of all the missing population, except one hundred and seventy thousand, a number formidable enough, no doubt, but wonderfully small if we bear in mind the suddenness and severity of the calamity, the deadly epidemic it brought in its train, and the change so fatal to old constitutions-which it caused necessarily in the food of millions. If these causes together were not more destructive, it is obvious that the deaths by famine must have been comparatively few indeed; and whatever number we set to this account, it is certain that it is very small compared with what it has often been estimated. Leaving the dead, however, to bury their dead, with the consciousness that the visitations of Heaven can be only palliated by the efforts of man, we may briefly consider the permanent effects upon the national life of Ireland of this great decline in her population. We cannot doubt that this remarkable event must be looked at as a fortunate circumstance. Some years before 1841, the many social and civil evils which were preying upon the frame of Ireland had, as almost always has been the case with misgoverned and neglected communities, expressed themselves in the symptom of a population too great for the means of actual subsistence, and incompatible with the safety of property, according to its existing distribution. How to deal with the masses had become the main point in the Irish question; and in spite of a notion prevalent in England, and kept up by the Whigs and O'Connell, that the ills of Ireland were simply political, and were to be cured by political means, it had forced itself into fearful distinctness. A parliamentary commission in 1836, had placed 301 this in the clearest light; and certainly, when we take up its account, we can only wonder that revolution had not solved already the Irish difficulty. Of a population of eight millions and upwards, nearly six millions were settled on the soil, and depended on it directly for subsistence. This multitude, gathered upon an area of thirteen millions of cultivated acres, was divided into eight hundred thousand families; and of these nearly five hundred thousand were in the condition of pauper cottiers, while beneath them lay a destitute mass, not over-estimated at two millions of persons, who during the greater part of the year had no visible means of subsistence. These two classes were the bulk of the nation, and of course the natural source of its wealth; yet such had become their relations with it, that they formed a fatal check on its progress. Engrossing probably two-thirds of the soil, they cultivated it in the most barbarous fashion; or, glutting the labour market to excess, they beat down the estimated rate of wages to half-a-crown on a weekly average. Many thousands of them were often destitute of the only food they possessed, the potato; while in their squalid and miserable dwellings, and in their haggard and sullen features, too many of them bore a close resemblance to the peasantry of France before the Revolution. Above this mass of threatening poverty, were about eighty thousand larger agriculturists, including the body of the landed gentry; and though the condition of these classes was far from being in a healthy state, they formed almost the only centres of hopeful life and organization in Ireland. It is needless to dwell on the lamentable results of this state of society in the nation. About onethird of the Irish people was constantly on the verge of starvation, a standing menace to property and Government, which consumed hopelessly the national resources, reduced the reward of industry to a point only just compatible with mere existence, and fastened on |