"As we came near, they both lifted their hats with obsequious, angry bows. Robert did not look at them, but said in a low tone, as we passed, 'Go to the office and wait there till I return.' "When he bade me good-bye at my door, he said, I shall go now to find my father, and if he is at home the brothers Wilkins will be dismissed from our employ in less than one hour.' I looked after him as long as I could see him. Then I went into our little sitting room, sank into a chair, and sat motionless, turning the check over and over in my hand, and wondering if I really were awake and alive, or if all were a dream. In a few moments Nat came home. As Patrick lifted the wagon up over the door-steps, and Nat caught sight of my face, he called out, 'Oh, sister, what is the matter--are you ill?' I ran to him and put the check into his hands, but it was some minutes before I could speak. The wonderful fortune did not overwhelm Nat as it had me. He was much stronger than I. Every stroke of his pencil during the last year had developed and perfected his soul. He was fast coming to have that consciousness of power which belongs to the true artist, and makes a life self-centered. "I have felt that all this would come, dear,' he said, and more than this too,' he added dreamily; 'we shall go on; this is only the outer gate of our lives.' "He prophesied more truly than he knew when he said that-my dear blessed artistsouled martyr! I need not dwell on the details of the next half-year. A few words can tell them; and then, again, worlds of words could not tell them. "Three months from the day I carried the piece of chintz into the overseer's office, Robert and I were married in the beautiful chapel where papa used to preach. All the mills were shut, and the little chapel was crowded with the workmen and work women. When we came out they were all drawn up in lines on the green, and Robert and Mr. Maynard both made them little speeches. Nat and Miss Penstock and Patrick were in Mr. Maynard's carriage, and Robert and I stood on the ground by the carriage-door. After the people had gone, Mr. Maynard came up to me and put both his hands on my shoulders, just as he had done three years before, and said, 'You were a brave girl, but you had to take me for your father, after one which stands on the little gilt table. shall never be separated from it. I "When I first found out how very rich Robert was, I was afraid; it seemed to me almost wrong to have so much money. But I hope we shall not grow selfish. And I cannot but be grateful for it, when I see what it has done for my darling brother. He is living now in a beautiful apartment in New York. Patrick is with him, his devoted servant, and Miss Penstock has gone to keep house for them. Nat is studying and working hard; the best artists in the city are his friends, and his pictures are already known and sought. When Robert first proposed this arrangement, Nat said, 'Oh no, no! I cannot accept such a weight of obliga tion from any man, not even from a brother.' "Robert rose and knelt down by Nat's chair, and even then he was so far above him he had to bend over. "Nat,' said he, in a low tone, 'I never knelt to any human being before; I didn't kneel to Dora when I asked her to give herself to me, for I was sure I could so give myself to her as to make her happy; but it is to you, after all, that I owe it that she is mine; I never can forget it for an hour, and I never can repay you--no, not in my whole lifetime, nor with all my fortune.' The "Then he told him that the sum which it would need to support him and Miss Penstock and Patrick in this way was so small, in comparison with his whole income, that it was not worth mentioning. And at any rate,' he said, 'it is useless for you to remonstrate, Nat, for I have already made fifty thousand dollars' worth of stock so entirely yours, that you cannot escape from it. papers are all in my father's hands, and the income will be paid to you, or left subject to your order, quarterly. If you do not spend it, nobody else will;' and then Robert bent down lower, and lifting Nat's thin hands tenderly in his, pressed them both against his cheek, in the way I often did. It was one of the few caresses Nat loved. I stood the other side of the chair, and I stooped down and kissed him, and said: "So Nat yielded. "It was hard to come away and leave him. For some time I clung to the hope that he might come with us; but the physicians all said it would be madness for him to run the risk of a sea-voyage. However, I know that "Nat's wedding-present to me was a wood- for him, the next best thing to seeing Europe carving of the One-Legged Dancers'-the | himself is to see it through my eyes. I write all.' to him every week, and I shall carry home to him such art-treasures as he has never dreamed of possessing. "Next year we shall go home, and then he will come back to Maynard's Mills and live with us. Robert is having a large studio built for him on the north side of the house, with a bed-room and little sitting-room opening out of it. Miss Penstock, too, will always live with us; we shall call her 'house-keeper,' to keep her contented, and Patrick is to stay as Nat's attendant. Poor fellow, he is not quite full-witted, we think; but he loves Nat so devotedly that he makes a far better servant than a cleverer boy would with a shade less affection. "And now you have heard the story of my life, dear friend," said Dora, as she rose from the seat and lit the rose-colored tapers in two low swinging Etrurian candlesticks just above our heads "all that I can tell you," she added slowly. "You will understand that I cannot speak about the happiest part of it. But you have seen Robert. The only thing that troubles me is that I have no sorrow. It seems dangerous. Dear Nat, although he has all he ever hoped for, need not fear being too happy, because he has the ever-present pain, to make him earnest and keep him ready for more pain. I said so to him the day before I came away, and he gave me those verses I told you of, called 'The Angel of Pain.'" Then she repeated them to me :— THE ANGEL OF PAIN. ANGEL of Pain, I think thy face Will be, in all the heavenly place, The sweetest face that I shall see, And swiftest face to smile on me. All other angels faint and tire; Joy wearies, and forsakes desire; Hope falters, face to face with Fate, And dies because it cannot wait; And Love cuts short each loving day, Because fond hearts cannot obey That subtlest law which measures bliss By what it is content to miss. But thou, O loving, faithful Pain Hated, reproached, rejected, slain- Know they have walked with Christ all day. When she had done we sat for some time silent. Then I rose, and kissing her, still silent, went out into the unlighted room where the gilt table stood. A beam of moonlight fell, broad and white, across its top, and flickered on the vine-leaves and the ferns. In the dim weird light their shapes were more fantastic than ever. The door into the outer hall stood open. As I went toward it, I saw old Anita toiling slowly up the stairs, with a flat basket on her head. Her wrinkled face was all aglow with delight. As soon as she reached the threshold she set the basket down, and exclaiming, "O look, look, Signora !" lifted of the cover. It was full of fresh and beautiful anemones of all colors. She moved a few on top and showed me that those beneath were chiefly purple ones. "The "Iddio mio! will not the dearest of Signoras be pleased now!" she said. Saints wish that she shall have all she desires: did not my Biagio's brother come in from Albano this morning? and as I was in the Piazza Navona, buying oranges, I heard him calling from a long way off, Ho, Anita, my Anita, here are anemones for your beautiful Signora with the bright hair.' "They grow around an old tomb a mile away from his vineyard, and he set out from his home long before light to get them fo me; for he once saw the Signora and he has heard me say that she never could have enough of anemones. Iddio mio! but my heart is glad of them. Ah, the dearest of Signoras!" and, with a tender touch, Anita la the cool vine-leaves lightly back upon the anemones and hurried on in search of Dora. THE OLD YEAR AND THE NEW. THE years have linings just as goblets do: The old year is the lining of the new,— Filled with the wine of precious memories, The golden was doth line the silver is. ON A PERSON CALLED FRIAR LUBIN. FROM THE FRENCH OF CLEMENT MAROT. POST-haste to hurry into town, Time after time, and there fulfil To mix, with well-dissembled guile, To lure, with glozing words, a maid But hates the water-drinking crew: Whate'er the form of doing ill, VICTORIAN POETS. fODERN criticism is scientifically applied | ture. ust here there is a difference between etry and the cognate arts of expression, ce the former has somewhat less to do h material processes and effects. The freedom of the minor sculptor's, painter's, or leading to a new and grander manifestation of the eternal Muse. the sky-lark scattering music at his own sweet will. Nevertheless, there is no strong imagination without vigorous intellect, and There are two ways of regarding natural to its penetrative and reasoning faculty objects; first, as they appear to the bodily there comes a time when the laws which it eye and to the normal, untutored imaginahas instinctively followed must be apparent; tion; second, as we know they actually are, and, later still, it cannot blind itself to the having sought out the truth of their phefavoring or adverse influences of period and nomena, the laws which underlie their beauty place. Should these forces be restrictive, or repulsiveness. The former, purely empir their baffling effect will teach the poet to ical, hitherto has been the simple and poetic recognize and deplore them, and to endeav-function of art; the latter is that of reason, or, though with wind and tide against him, scientifically and radically informed. The -and how often in vain !-to make his prog- one is Homeric, the other Baconian. Unress noble and enduring. til Coleridge's time, his definition that poetry is the antithesis of science, though not complete, was true so far as it extended. Let us see how the ideals of an imaginative, primitive race, differ from those of the children of knowledge, who make up our later generations. With regard to the province of the critic there need, however, be no question. He must recognize and broadly observe the local, temporal, and generic conditions under which poetry is composed, or fail to render adequate judgment upon the genius of a poet. It is now well understood that the value of art depends on the importance and beneficence of the character involved; that the standard of the latter reflects and varies with the quality of the period; that only in exceptional cases, poetry rises fairly above the idealism of an age in which it is produced. Of late, and chiefly through translations from the French and German, the public mind has become somewhat aware of the advances made in the direction of true criticism, and acknowledges the philosophical character of a method signally illustrated, for example, by M. Taine, though often and justly at variance with the popular French critic's application of it to the works of prominent English writers. I trust that lovers of poetry who are familiar with the genius of Landor, Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Hood, Procter, Swinburne-British singers who have flourished during the last thirty years, and are, by common acceptation, representative poets-will not be repelled, by the hardness of the theme, from a reference to the characteristics of the Victorian Period, and to what I conceive to be the conditions which have sustained these poets, or against which they have struggled to pour forth their utterances with all the freedom and inspiration of some more fortunate time. It is impossible, then, to observe the recent English era, and not to find the modern question of the relations between Poetry and Science pressing for consideration at every turn and outpost. The time has been especially characterized by a stress of scientific iconoclasm. This is mentioned as a fact; not, perforce, to be deplored; possibly as Look at the antique spirit as partially revived by a painter of the sixteenth century. The Aurora fresco in the Rospigliosi palace expresses the manner in which it once was perfectly natural to observe the perpetual, splendid phenomena of breaking day. Sunrise was the instant presence of joyous, effulgent deity. A Greek saw the morning as Guido has painted it. The Sun-God in very truth was urging on his fiery footed steeds The clouds were his pathway; the early morning Hour was scattering flowers, in ad vance, of infinite prismatic hues, and her blooming, radiant sisters were floating in air around Apollo's chariot; the earth was roseate with celestial light; the blue sea laughed beyond. Swiftly ascending Heaven's archway the retinue swept on; all was real, exuberant life and gladness; the gods were thus in waiting upon humanity, and men were the progeny of the gods. The elements of the Hellenic idealism, so often cited, are readily understood. It appeared in the blithesome imagery of a race that felt the pulses of youth with no dogmas of the past to thicken its current and few analytical speculations to perturb it. Youth, health, and simplicity of life, brought men to accept and inform after their own longings the outward phenomena of natural things. Heaven lies about us is our infancy. I refer to the Greek feeling (as I might to that of the pastoral Hebra age), not as to the exponent of a period sup rior to our own, or comparable with it knowledge, comfort, grasp of all that en hances the average of human welfare; but a that of a poetical era, charged with what ha ever, until now, made the excellence of suc times—an era when gifted poets would fin sionizing process which has made their own time a turbulent, unrestful interval of transition from that which was to that which shall be; a time when, more than his perpetual wont, the poet "looks before and after, and pines for what is not." themselves in an atmosphere favoring the production of elevated poetry, and of poetry especially among the forms of art, since this has seemed more independent than the rest of aid from material science. But there are other types of the poetical age. Pass from the simple and harmonious ideals of classicism As in chemical physics, first sublimation, to the romantic Gothic era, whose genius was then crystallization, then the sure and firm-set conglomerate of old and new, and the myths earth beneath our feet; so in human progress, of many ages and countries, but still fancy- first the ethereal fantasy of the poet, then free, or subject only to a soi-disant science as discovery by experience and induction crude and wanton as the fancy itself; whose bringing us to what is deemed scientific, imagination was excited by chivalrous codes of prosaic knowledge of objects and their laws. honor, brave achievement, and the recurrent Thus in the earlier periods, when poets comchances and marvels of new discovery. Such, posed empirically, the rarest minds welcomed for example, the Elizabethan period of our and honored their productions in the same own literature; such the great Italian period spirit. But now, if they work in this way, from which it drew its forms. There was a cer- as many are still fain, it must be for the tain largeness of mechanical achievement in tender heart of women and the delight of the times of Dante, Boccaccio, Tasso and youths, since the fitter audience of thinkers, Ariosto, and a mass of theological inquiry, the most elevated and eager spirits, no longbut all subject to the influence of superstition er find mental sustenance in such empty. and romance. The world was only half dis-magician's food. With regard to the soul of covered; men's fancy was constantly on the alert; nothing commonplace held the mind; to lives and ventures of merchants-though, like our own, it was a mercantile age-had a wealth of mystery, strangeness, and speculation about them, which might wel make an Antonio and a Sebastian the personages of Shakespeare's and Fletcher's plays. Each part of the globe was a phantasmal or fairyland to the inhabitants of other parts. traveler was a marked man. Somewhere in Asia was the Great Khan; later, in America, were cities of Manoa paved with gold. Nothing was extraordinary, or, rather, everything was so. The people fed on the material of poetry, and wove laurel wreaths for those who made their song. A The characteristics of the middle portion of the nineteenth century are so different from all this, that it is but natural the elder generation among us should exclaim, "Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" While other arts must change and change, the pure office of poetry is ever to idealize and prophesy of the unknown; and its lovers, forgetting that Nature is limitless in her works and transitions, mourn that-so much having been discovered, robbed of its glamour, and reduced to prosaic fact-the poet's ancient office is at last put by. Let them take fresh heart, recalling the Master's avowal that Nature's "book of secrecy" is infinite; let them note what spiritual and material spheres are yet untrod; rejoicing over the past rather than hopeless of future achievement, let them examine with me the disillu men and things, they still give rein to fancy and empiricism, for that is still unknown. Hence the new phases of psychical poetry, which formerly repelled the healthy-minded by its morbid cast. But touching material phenomena they no longer accept, even for its beauty, the language of myth and tradition ; they know better; the glory may remain, but verily the dream has passed away. Our first Our own time, so eminently scientific, so devoted to investigation of universal truth, has found such wonders in the laws of force and matter, that the poetic bearing of their phenomena has seemed of transient worth; enjoyment and excitation of the intellect through the acquisition of knowledge is valued more and more. Thinkers become unduly impressed with the relative unimportance of man and his conceptions. knowledge of the amazing revelations of astronomy-which I take as a most impressive type of the cognate sciences-tends to repress self-assertion, and to make one content with accepting quietly his little share of life and action. In earlier eras of this kind, discovery and invention occupied men's minds until, fully satiated, they longed for mental rest and a return to a play of heart and fancy. Too much wisdom seemed folly indeed; dance and song and pastoral romance resumed their sway; the harpers harped anew, and from the truer life and knowledge scientifically gained, broke forth new blossoms of poetic art. But our own period has no exact prototype. It is advanced in civilization; but the time of Pericles, though also exhibit |