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fifty yards, it could have been of no avail: eye could not see her, ear could not hear her in that howling wilderness. But that low prayer was heard in the centre of eternity, and that little sinless child was lying in the snow beneath the all-seeing eye of God.

The maiden, having prayed to her Father in heaven, then thought of her father on earth. Alas, they were not far separated! The father was lying but a short distance from his child; he too had sunk down in the drifting snow after having, in less than an hour, exhausted all the strength of fear, pity, hope, despair, and resignation that could rise in a father's heart, blindly seeking to rescue his only child from death, thinking that one desperate exertion might enable them to perish in each other's arms. There they lay, within a stone's-throw of each other, while a huge snow-drift was every moment piling itself up into a more insurmountable barrier between the dying parent and his dying child.

3. CRITICAL EXTRACTS: THE POETRY OF WORDSWORTH: HOMER.

With all the great and essential faculties of the poet, Wordsworth possesses the calm and self-commanding powers of the philosopher. He looks over human life with a steady and serene eye: he listens with a fine ear" to the still sad music of humanity." His faith is unshaken in the prevalence of virtue over vice, and of happiness over misery, and in the existence of a heavenly law operating on earth, and, in spite of transitory defects, always visibly triumphant in the grand field of human warfare. Hence he looks over the world of life and man with a sublime benignity; and hence, delighting in all the gracious dispensations of God, his great mind can wholly deliver itself up to the love of a flower budding in the field, or of a child asleep in its cradle; nor, in doing so, feels that poetry can be said to stoop or to descend, much less to be degraded, when she embodies, in words of music, the purest and most delightful fancies and affections of the human heart. This love of the nature to which he belongs, and which is in him the fruit of wisdom and experience, gives to all his poetry a very peculiar, a very endearing, and, at the same time, a very lofty character. His poetry is little coloured by the artificial distinctions of society. In his delineations of passion or character, he is not so much guided by the varieties produced by customs, institutions, professions, or modes of life, as by those great elementary laws of our nature which are unchangeable and the same; and therefore the pathos and the truth of his most felicitous poetry are more profound than of any other, not unlike the most touching and beautiful passages in the sacred page. The same spirit of love, and benignity, and ethereal purity which breathes over all his pictures of the virtues and the happiness of man, pervades those too of external nature. Indeed, all the poets. of the age and none can dispute that they must likewise be the best critics have given up to him the palm in that poetry which com

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merces with the forms, and hues, and odours, and sounds of the material world. He has brightened the earth we inhabit to our eyes; he has made it more musical to our ears; he has rendered it more creative to our imaginations.

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We are no great Greek scholars, but we can force our way through the Iliad. What we do not clearly, we dimly understand, and are happy in the glorious glimpses; in the full unbroken light, we bask like an eagle in the sunshine that emblazons his eyrie; in the gloom that sometimes falls suddenly down on his inspired rhapsodies, as if from a tower of clouds, we are for a time eyeless as blind Mæonides," while with him we enjoy the "darkness that may be felt;" as the lightnings of his genius flash, lo! before our wide imagination ascends "stately-structured Troy," expand tented shore and masted sea; and in that thunder we dream of the nod that shuddered Olympus. Some people believe in twenty Homers—we Nature is not so prodigal of her great poets. Heaven only knows the number of her own stars-no astronomer may ever count them; but the soul-stars of earth are but few, and with this Perryan pen could we name them all. Who ever heard of two Miltons of two Shaksperes? That there should even have been one of each is a mystery, when we look at what are called men. Who, then, after considering that argument, will believe that Greece of old was glorified by a numerous brotherhood of coeval genii of mortal birth, all" building up the lofty rhyme," till, beneath their harmonious hands, arose, in its perfect proportions, immortal in its beauty and magnificence," the tale of Troy divine?"

in one.

The Iliad was written by Homer. Will Wolf and Knight1 tell us how it happened that all the heroic strains about the war before Troy, poured forth, as they opine, by many bards, regarded but one period of the siege? By what divine felicity was it that all those sons of song, though apart in time and place, united in chanting the wrath of Achilles? The poem is one, like a great wood, whose simultaneous growth overspreads a mountain. Indeed, one mighty poem, in process of time, moulded into form out of separate fragments, composed by a brotherhood of bards—not even coeval-may be safely pronounced an impossibility in nature. Achilles was not the son of many sires; nor was the part he played written for him by a succession of "eminent hands," all striving to find fit work for their common hero. He is not a creature of collected traditions. He stands there a single conception-in character and in achievement; his absence is felt like that of a thunder-cloud withdrawn behind a hill, leaving the air still sultry; his presence is as the lightning, in sudden illumination, glorifying the whole field of battle. Kill, bury, and forget him, and the Iliad is no more an Epic.

1 Two noted critics, who maintained that there was no such man as Homer, and that the Iliad was the work of a number of unknown bards-an opinion which Wilson treats as worthy only of verbal critics and "gerund-grinders," as Carlyle calls them.

XVI. HUGH MILLER.

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HUGH MILLER was born in Cromarty in 1805. His only education, in the scholastic sense of the term, was received at the burgh school of his native town, and on completing it he began life as a stonemason. He had, however, an inquiring mind; he was blessed with some shrewd and intelligent relatives; he was given to reading; and his work in the sandstone quarries naturally attracted his attention to the practical study of geology. At length he began to write poetry; and, encouraged by the approbation of his friends, he issued at Inverness a volume of "Poems by a Stone-Mason," which, though thrown into the shade by his future works, is possessed of considerable merit. A more congenial occupation than that of a stone-mason was found for him as accountant in a bank; but literature was his proper pursuit, and fortunately an opportune and able Letter to Lord Brougham on the Church Question " obtained for him the post of editor of the "Witness," which he held with so much honour to himself till his melancholy death by his own hand in 1857. His works are," Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland," "The Old Red Sandstone," "First Impressions of England and her People," "Footprints of the Creator," My Schools and Schoolmasters" (an autobiography), and "The Testimony of the Rocks." Without ranking him with the first geologists of the day, it must be at least admitted that Miller made important geological discoveries, and it is equally undeniable that no one has done more to make geology a popular study. His style, in his earlier works especially, is exceedingly graceful and easy, resembling that of Goldsmith; his descriptions are often marked by a happy union of poetry and fancy; and, on the whole, it may be doubted whether any other self-taught writer can be placed in the same rank with Miller.

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1. IMPROBABILITY OF ANY GREAT ADVANCE IN THE PRESENT STATE OF THINGS.

It is in the dynasty of the future than man's moral and intellectual faculties will receive their full development. The expectation of any very great advance in the present scene of things, great, at least, when measured by man's large capacity of conceiving of the good and fair, seems to be, like all human hopes, restricted to time, an expectation doomed to disappointment. There are certain limits within which the race improves; civilisation is better than the want of it, and the taught superior to the untaught man. There is a change, too, effected in their moral nature, through that Spirit which, by working belief in the heart, brings its aspirations into harmony with the realities of the unseen world, that, in at least its relation to the future state, cannot be estimated too highly. But conception can travel very far beyond even its best effects in their merely secular bearing; nay, it is peculiarly its nature to show the men most truly the subjects of it how miserably they fall short of

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the high standard of conduct and feeling which it erects, and to teach them, more emphatically than by words, that their degree of happiness must of necessity be as low as their moral attainments are humble. Further, man, though he has been increasing in knowledge ever since his appearance on earth, has not been improving in faculty-a shrewd fact, which they who expect most from the future of the world would do well to consider. The ancient masters of mind were in no respect inferior in calibre to their successors. We have not yet shot ahead of the old Greeks in either the perception of the beautiful, or in the ability of producing it; there has been no improvement in the inventive faculty since the "Iliad" was written, some three thousand years ago; nor has taste become more exquisite, or the perception of the harmony of numbers more nice, since the age of the "Eneid." Science is cumulative in its character; and so its votaries in modern times stand on a higher pedestal than their predecessors. But though Nature produced a Newton some two centuries ago, as she produced a Goliath of Gath at an earlier period, the modern philosophers, as a class, do not exceed in actual stature the worse informed ancients, the Euclids, the Archimedeses, and Aristotles. We would be without excuse if, with the Bacon, Milton, and Shakspere of these latter ages of the world full before us, we recurred to the obsolete belief that the human race is deteriorating; but then, on the other hand, we have certain evidence that, since genius first began unconsciously to register in its works its own bulk and proportions, there has been no increase in the mass, or improvement in the quality, of individual mind. As for the dream that there is to be some extraordinary elevation of the general platform of the race achieved by means of education, it is simply the hallucination of the age, the world's present alchemical expedient for converting farthings into guineas sheerly by dint of scouring. Not but that education is good; it exercises, and in the ordinary mind develops, faculty. But it will not anticipate the terminal dynasty. Yet further, man's average capacity of happiness seems to be as limited and as incapable of increase as his average reach of intellect; it is a mediocre capacity at best; nor is it greater by a shade now, in these days of power-looms and portable manures, than in the times of the old patriarchs. So long, too, as the law of increase continues, man must be subject to the law of death, with its stern attendants, suffering and sorrow; for the two laws of necessity go together; and so long as death reigns, human creatures, in even the best of times, will continue to quit this scene of being, without professing much satisfaction at what they have found either in it or themselves. It will no doubt be a less miserable world than it is now, when the good come, as there is reason to hope they one day shall, to be a majority; but it will be felt to be an inferior sort of world even then, and be even fuller than now of wishes and longings for a better. Let it improve as it may, it will be a scene of probation and trial till the end. And so Faith, undeceived by the mirage of the midway desert, whatever form or name, political or

religious, the phantasmagoria may bear, must continue to look beyond its unsolid and tremulous glitter, its bare rocks, exaggerated by the vapour into air-drawn castles, and its stunted bushes magnified into goodly trees, and, fixing her gaze upon the re-creation yet future, the terminal dynasty yet unbegun, she must be content to enter upon her final rest (for she will not enter upon it earlier), "at return of Him, the woman's seed,"

"Last in the clouds, from heaven to be revealed
In glory of the Father, to dissolve

Satan, with his perverted world; then raise
From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined,
New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date,
Founded in righteousness, and peace, and love,
To bring forth fruits, joy and eternal bliss."

2. TRACES OF THE OCEAN.

Was it the sound of the distant surf that was in mine ears, or the low moan of the breeze, as it crept through the neighbouring wood? Oh, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent since time first began!— where has it not been uttered? There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless desert, where no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand, and the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. It is his sands that the winds heap up; and it is the skeleton remains of his vassals-shells, and fish, and the strong coral—that the rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall mountain-peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where the panting lungs labour to inhale the thin bleak air,-where no insect murmurs and no bird flies, and where the eye wanders over multitudinous hill-tops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests that sweep on to the distant horizon, and along long hollow valleys where the great rivers begin. And yet once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. The elegies of his more ancient denizens we find sculptured on the crags, where they jut from beneath the ice into the mistwreath; and his later beaches, stage beyond stage, terrace the descending slopes. Where has the great destroyer not been,-the devourer of continents,—the blue foaming dragon, whose vocation it is to eat up the land? His ice-floes have alike furrowed the flat steppes of Siberia and the rocky flanks of Schehallion, and his nummulites and fish lie embedded in great stones of the pyramids hewn in the times of the old Pharaohs, and in rocky folds of Lebanon still untouched by the tool. So long as Ocean exists, there must be disintegration, dilapidation, change; and should the time ever arrive when the elevatory agencies, motionless and chill, shall sleep within their profound depths to awaken no more,—and should the sea still continue to impel its currents and to roll its waves,-every continent

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