Rousseau indites an upbraiding protest against having been born with exquisite faculties, and denied scope for their fitting exercise. "Il me semblait que la destinée me devait quelque chose qu'elle ne m'avait pas donné." Destiny was in his debt, on the score of this alleged "injustice,” and the creditor rather exults than otherwise in asserting his dues and presenting his balance sheet.

Beethoven's plaint is in another key; the strain we hear from him is in another mood. “O Providence! vouchsafe me one day of pure felicity. How long have I been estranged from the glad echo of true joy! When, O my God! when shall I again feel it in the temple of nature and of man? Never? Ah, that would be too hard."

Mrs. Schimmelpenninck in her autobiography owns, while shuddering at the retrospect, that at one time she, in the depths of her heart, although with the lips she did not confess it, rebelled against her Maker as One who had doomed her to a life of misery, giving her no hope of life beyond the grave; and binding her by an iron law, which He had given her no heart to love and no power to fulfil; and subjecting her, in His providence, not only to ill health, but to the unkindness of some around her, who seemed to preclude her even from plucking the brief blossoms which sometimes occur to the most desolate. As though she had been, like Ginevra in the Legend of Florence, a creature that from childhood upwards had known not what it was to shed a tear, which others met with theirs. Wherefore, hers "did learn to hush themselves, and young,

1 Quoting the common proverb with respect to honesty, "It is hard for the empty purse to stand upright," the devout author of Select Memoirs of Port Royal thinks it to be as true with respect to kindness, "It is hard for the heart that is not replenished with a sense of receiving love to give forth love." If such be the deplorable result on hearts which have wanted the fostering effects of human love, "what must be the state of that miserable heart which is destitute of the Fountain of all love, which has no perception of the love of God!" In such an instance, calamities are met, according to this author's experience as well as observation, by stupefying the soul in indifference, hardening the heart in rebellion, or sharpening the spirit in acrimony against God and against man.-Autobiography of M. A. Schimmelpenninck, vol. i., pp. 306, 310, seq.

grew dry." Est-ce juste, O mon Dieu ? the querulous query of M. de Bernard's distressed dame, is a stereotyped phrase in French fiction. Such a book as George Sand's Lelia, in which she "revels in all the abysses of scepticism," our English critics designate a mere tissue of blasphemous nonsense, if we judge it only by the results to which it leads; no one is made happier or better by reading it, its philosophy is "nothing but a senseless screech against God." In France this may be done, a

1 When Chateaubriand's Chactas, in his despair at the death of Atala, breaks out with "Périsse le Dieu qui contrarie la nature!" and fiercely demands what the old missionary, le père Aubry, is come to those forests for,-" -"Te sauver (dit le vieillard d'une voix terrible), et t'empêcher, blasphémateur, d'attirer sur toi la colère celeste! Quand tu auras, comme le père Aubry, passé trente années exilé sur les montagnes, tu seras moins prompt à juger les desseins de la Providence."

Chactas the uncivilised has more than a match in the Valentine of Charlotte's Inheritance, whose "prayers" for the deliverance of his beloved from the jaws of death take this almost naïf form of blasphemy: “All my days will I give to Thy service, if Thou wilt spare her to me. If Thou dost not, I will be an infidel and a pagan, the vilest and most audacious of sinners. Better to serve Lucifer than the God who could so afflict me." This is almost better than the celebrated story of that "most learned and unfortunate Italian," Anthony Urceus of Forli, who, when his library was on fire, broke out into a frantic address to the Second Person of the Trinity, demanding of Him by His human name, "What mighty crime have I committed? whom of your followers have I ever injured, that you thus rage with inexpiable hatred against me?" And worse follows.

Dr. J. G. Holland's Kathrina, though of the Angel in the House school, is curious in its redundance of experiences and thence of expressions that pertain to the blasphemy of despair. The poet autobiographer (for the second title of the book Kathrina is, Her Life and Mine) very frequently in early life finds his prayers unanswered, and he is frenzied accordingly. That his gentle father should die in his prime, how could One presumably “ineffable for strength and tenderness, permit such fate to him and woe to us?" That his mother should lose her reason, though praying hard to retain it, "ah, why should she, who only sought for God, be given to a devil? Why should she who begged for bread be answered with a stone?—questions all the fiends within me answered as they would.

"O God! O Father! how I hated Thee!
Nay, how within my angry soul I dared
To curse Thy sacred name!"

Later again, under fresh disaster, "To what blaspheming utterance I gave my raving passion, may the God I cursed forbid my shrinking memory to recal!" Every pitying friend had flown his presence and the room, to escape the sound of words "that roused their superstitious souls to fear that God would smite him through the blinding smoke of his great torment."

reviewer of that book goes on to say; there, a woman is quite at liberty to shriek about the universe if she likes; and in Lélia we see how it may be done. “In England we manage things differently. We do not want to have people here pouring out their crude philosophy, or sounding the abyss of doubt, or calling God to the tiny bar of their babyish insolence. We think them silly and wicked if they do anything of the sort, and we tell them so, and kick them, and keep them under if they defy our prohibition."

Woe to him, said the prophet, that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. But the potsherd is for aiming higher than that.

The passionate Zenobia, of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, confessedly vain, weak, unprincipled ("like most of my sex; for our virtues, when we have any, are merely impulsive and intuitive"), yet cannot refrain from flinging upwards an implied reproach, when she claims to be "a creature whom only a little change of earthly fortune, a little kinder smile of Him who sent me hither," might have made all that a woman can be! Or glance at Mrs. Transome, in Felix Holt, resenting the hardness of the son for whom she has borne so much. "She was not penitent. She had borne too hard a punishment.

And, once more, here is the last of the stanzas he indites on the subject, and with the express title of Despair:

"Oh, man who begot me! Oh, woman who bore!

Why, why did you call me to being and breath?
With ruin behind me, and darkness before,

I have nothing to long for, or live for, but death!"

What had she done, exclaims Longfellow's Flemming, on the tragical ending of Emma of Ilmenau, to be so tempted in her weakness, and perish? "Why didst Thou suffer her gentle affections to lead her thus astray?" But through the silence of the awful midnight the voice of an avalanche answers from the distant mountains, and seems to say, "Peace! peace! Why dost thou question God's providence?"

A dramatic fragment of Mr. Procter's narrates the wild career of a reckless prince, whose fate, by a Spanish superstition, is as that of Lot's wife; for, on one dull dawn, which showed him lurking to relentless foes,

"He flung some terrible reproach at heaven;

Laughed at its God, 't is said, and cursed the sun:
Whereat the broad eye of the day unclosed,
And stared him into stone!"

Always the edge of calamity had fallen on her.

Who had felt for her? She was desolate. God had no pity, else her son "It is too hard to bear, dear," whom in her desolation she expect so little now-a very Why should I be punished

would not have been so hard." she murmurs to the Esther to clings so fast: "I am old, and little thing would seem great. any more?" Compare the strain of the same author's Janet Dempster, in Scenes of Clerical Life. "You are tired of hearing me," she tells her mother: "you are cruel, like the rest! every one is cruel in this world. Nothing but blame, blame, blame; never any pity! God is cruel to have sent me into the world to bear all this misery." Janet is implored not to say that, not to think that. It is not for us to judge, her mother submits; we must be thankful for the gift of life. "Thankful for life!" the other rejoins: "why should I be thankful? God has made me with a heart to feel, and He has sent me nothing but misery. There's no help for me, no hope. I can't kill myself; I've tried, but I can't leave this world and go to another. There may be no pity for me there, as there is none here."1 Janet's mother had sometimes said that troubles were sent to make us better and draw us nearer to God; but what mockery this has seemed to Janet, whose troubles have been sinking her from year to year, pressing upon her like heavy, fever-laden vapours, and perverting the very plenitude of her nature into a deeper source of disease! "Oh, if some ray of hope, of pity, of consolation, would pierce through the horrible gloom, she might believe then in a Divine love-in a heavenly Father who cared for His children!" The day dawns at last when Janet Dempster can refer to the dark and dreary past when she was only angry and discontented 2 because she had pain to bear; and can eagerly

1 The answer to this is a true mother's answer, a true woman's. "Janet, my child, there is pity. Have I ever done anything but love you? And there is pity in God. Hasn't He put pity in your heart for many a poor sufferer? Where did it come from if not from Him?"-Janet's Repentance, chap. xiv.

2 There is a rich banker's daughter in another well known fiction, also of woman's workmanship, of whom we read that, in the sovereign vitality

ask another, her spiritual guide, whether he had ever known the wicked feeling she had had so often, that God was cruel to send her trials and temptations worse than others have.

The reader of The Gayworthys may remember the clergyman's interview, in Selport jail, with Blackmere the sailor, who, warned against hardness of heart, and reminded that he may shortly be sent to meet his God, shocks his spiritual adviser by answering, as he takes the pipe out of his mouth, "I'd like to see that Person. I'd have a word or two to say to Him if I once found Him." The words were blasphemous perhaps, and God's minister was shocked, the author says; but "it may be, God saw deeper, and was more pitiful than angry." Some dozen chapters later, an account is given of Blackmere's previous history-as of a man who had doubted, doubted fiercely, and upbraidingly, as one who felt there ought to be a God, and a guidance, and a good in the world; but who had been hardened and bewildered, till he was all adrift and could not make it seem to be; but he had not positively denied. "In his darkest hour, when, with a seeming blasphemy, he had wished that he might see that Person,' it had been the desperate utterance of a goaded soul, longing instinctively for the One only possible redress." Nobody of the Ned Blackmere type has Mr. Kingsley in view when, contrasting the poetry,

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of her nature, she had rebelled against sorrow as a strange and unnatural part of her life; had demanded happiness almost as a right; had wondered at her afflictions, and been unable to understand why she should be thus afflicted. There are natures, we are reminded, which accept suffering with patient meekness, and acknowledge the justice by which they suffer; but the sufferer in question had never done this: her joyous soul had revolted against sorrow, and she, now the storm cloud had passed and left the sky serene for a while, inclined to challenge Providence with her claim to be happy for evermore.

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Mrs. Oliphant's Grace Maitland, again, confesses to feeling discontented and repining, impious in those strange black moods of mine, as if all the world besides was happy, and I only miserable beyond my desert. Do you remember that terrible scene in the Pilgrim's Progress, where Christian is so sorely assailed in the Valley of the Shadow of Death -sorest of all by the blasphemies whispered in his ear by his spiritual enemies, and which he fears are the product of his own mind? I am growing to a better understanding of that now."-Margaret Maitland of Sunnyside, chap. xii.