CONTENTS.

I. PAUL PELICAN

A lost friend.-Time and space.-Human portraits the wel-

comest pictures on human walls.-A characteristic appel-

lation.-Pelican not a genius, but simply a dweller in the

wilderness. People who cannot be classified.-Pelican's

legacy. The Literary Society at Brookfield.-My first

evening there.-Brookfield orators.-Pelican speaks.—A

presentiment of friendship.-A walk and a supper.-A

library indicative of character.-Pelican is critical.-The

"Eclipse of Faith" and its place in the museum of the

future.—Autobiographies.—"Phantastes.”—The causes of

its unpopularity.-Tupper and A. K. H. B.-Parodies.-

Literary enthusiasm.—Pelican's intellectual obligations.—

Valets and hero-worshippers.-John Sterling.—The artist

and the saint.—Pelican's bad reputation.—His defence of

sarcasm.-Goethe's Mephistopheles not sarcastic.-Latent

sympathies and unwelcome isolation.—A sonnet on Self-

revelation.

II. A CHAPTER OF POETRY

One sign of a poetical nature.—A pleasant intimacy.—My

poem. A friend's ideal.-Pelican's theory of anticipation.

-A batch of poems.
"The Red Thread of Honour."-

An example of non-Christian chivalry.-Sunsets and their

classification." Evening Calm."—"Two sides of a Love.”

-Plagiarism.—The impossibility of stealing from Shak-

speare.-The Chelsea philosopher.-"To Carlyle, and

back again."-Two depreciatory criticisms.-God Himself

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too indefinite for some people.-Pelican's religious system.
-The heresy of believing too much.

III. LITERARY ARCHERY.

Silent members in the Literary Society.-A manuscript

magazine.—" The Target."-Its editors and contributors.

-Secessions.-"The Lady of Shalott: a tentative inter-

pretation."-Hidden meanings in works of art.—A woman

in a conventional world.-Dissatisfaction with the mirror

life. People whose aspirations are larger than their

capacities. Their fatal fall.-Pelican's humour.-Pelican

and Dickens.—Shakspearean heresies.—“The Mill ́on the

Floss."-Its characters more complex than those of

"Adam Bede."-How the highest ideas of power are

conveyed.-Maggie's history not a mere history, but a

revelation.—Emerson worships ideas, but will worship no

idea exclusively.-Ruskin's fluency and Tennyson's finish.

-Arrow flights from a home-made bow.-The forces of

nature limited.-No man ever does his best.-The effect

of beautiful scenery.—The final perfection of literature.—

Charlotte Bronte and her knowledge of human nature.—

Genius nothing but persistent sensibility.-Problems solved,

not by toil, but by revelation.-Pelican's sole poetical con-

tribution." An Invitation."

IV. OUT Of Doors

Pelican's vagabond soul.-Unconventionalities of costume.-

Right views of things only to be arrived at in the country.

-Cowper corrected.-"The Peregrinations of Paul and

Solomon." "In the Wood: a Windermere Reverie."-

The vitality of commonplaces.-Pelican's estimate of the

ordinary tourist.-Wise passiveness.-Painful and painless

joy.-Christopher North.—His life essentially one of sen-

sation.--A spirit in the woods.-No man the slave of logic.

-Nature's songs without words.-The characteristics of

the beech-tree.-God's delight in His own works.-—Why

is the world green ?—Everything in nature representative.

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"Man and his Dwelling-place."-"Poetry and Poetry."

"Life in Nature."

V. A CHAPTER OF TALK.

The second winter of our acquaintance.-An unsympathetic

circle.-Pelican's belief in a punishing God.-How I

became a Boswell.-Originality.-The multiplying or en-

larging power of affection.—Insincere religion.—Mental

and spiritual colour-blindness.-What a mirror fails to

reveal.-Love of truth sometimes a matter of taste.-

People from whom it is easy to bear scolding.—A revival

meeting.-Belief possessed and possessing.-Mock modesty

and real anger.-A waste of power.-The self lies deeper

than the character. The effect of unpleasant work.-No

giants in these days, but the average stature higher than it

was.-People with whom we quarrel most bitterly.-More

difficult to make resolutions than to keep them.-A man's

noblest utterance.-Poetry in solution.-Liberalism and

Conservatism.-One necessary for the individual, the other

for the community.-Smart criticism.-Impartiality not

always desirable.-Pencil-marks in books.-Love of system

a dangerous passion.-The uselessness of discussion.-

Poem: "The Years take all."

A man best known by his loves and hatreds.-Men and

women not the only friends.-Opinion no basis of pre-

ference.—Interesting people.—Individuality one of Peli-

can's idols.-Nonconformity of nature.-Caste friendships.

-Pelican's idea of a gentleman.-Gentle breeding gives

quick and broad sympathies.-Medical friends.—Mr.

Brownlow. The fluidity of his mind.-Men of piety and

men of science.—Dr. Wade a realization of the poetic ideal.

-Every kind of sense but common sense.-A Berkeleyan

philosopher.—What he did for Pelican.-Robert Browning.

-His music.-A noble verse.-Pelican not a good hater.

—Unimaginative people the objects of his greatest dislike.

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-How he chose his book friends.-Books which show the

inside of people.-Limits to his catholicity.-Miscellaneous

enmities.

Out of sorts.-A water hater.-An organized hydropathic
conspiracy.-Pelican is vanquished.—A split in the camp
of advisers.-Arrival at Avondale.-The manager and the
doctor. A pleasant scene.-'
-The breakfast table.-A

newspaper editor.—Oratorical devotion.-Contending the-

ologians. The Billingsgate Brethren.-How the battles

were begun.—A mystery explained.—“The advantages

of Christian society."-Eccentric patients.-Pet subjects

of conversation.-The nonconformist.-The astronomical

heretic. The missionary.-Congenial spirits.-The bright

side of Avondale.

VIII. THE AVONDALE CORRESPONDENCE.

Pelican's flippancy a surface deposit.-The dogmatism

which he hated.-Social republics.-Pelican's letters.-

Literary fasting.-George Eliot's "Spanish Gypsy."—Its

subject. A man's past his absolute master.-How far are

the laws of fate moral laws?-A noble passage.—A black

sheep. Swedenborg's science of correspondences.-No

royal road to the spiritual significance of the universe.—

A sceptic.-A phrenological examination.—Pelican's news-

paper. A grotesque biography.-The scientific side of

filial affection.-The phrenology of common life.-Pelican

not open to conviction.-Opinion and knowledge.—A de-

nunciation of the evidences of Christianity.-George Daw-

son's lecture.-An Erasmus, not a Luther.-The fly in

amber.-Effects of wet weather.-G. H. Lewes as an

historian of philosophy.-Philosophy and faith.-Some

poems have the characteristics of music.-" Break, break,

break!"—The great pulpit question.-The combination of

the intellectual and the spiritual in preaching very rare.—

An argument with a missing link.-Spirituality and elec-

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