the fish in the sea, the squirrel in the wood. It is one thing to describe nature, and quite another unconsciously so to inform nature with a portion of our own life. JOANNA 91. OANNA BAILLIE had a great admiration of Macaulay's Roman Ballads. "But," said some one, "do you really account them as poetry?" She replied, "They are poetry if the sounds of the trumpet be music!" AL 66 92. LL my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase profound cunning" has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased. People dissemble sometimes who yet hate dissembling, but a cunning mind" emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning. That "pleasure in deceiving and aptness to be deceived" usually go together, was one of the wise sayings of the wisest of men. 66 93. IT T was a saying of Paracelsus, that "Those who would understand the course of the heavens above must first of all recognise the heaven in man: meaning, I suppose, that all pursuit of knowledge which is not accompanied by praise of God and love of our fellow-creatures must turn to bitterness, emptiness, foolishness. We must imagine him to have come to this conclusion only late in life. Browning, in that wonderful poem of Paracelsus, a poem in which there is such a profound far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuriance of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth of glorious eloquence, that I know nothing to be compared with it since Goethe and Wordsworth,represents his aspiring philosopher as at first impelled solely by the appetite to know. He asks nothing of men, he despises them; but he will serve them, raise them, after a sort of God-like fashion, independent of their sympathy, scorning their applause, using them like instruments, cheating them like children,—all for their good; but it will not do. In Aprile, "who would love infinitely, and be beloved," is figured the type of the poet-nature, desiring only beauty, resolving all into beauty; while in Paracelsus we have the type of the reflecting, the inquiring mind desiring only knowledge, resolving all into knowledge, asking nothing more to crown his being. And both find out their mistake; both come to feel that love without knowledge is blind and weak, and knowledge without love barren and vain. "I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE, Excluding love as thou refused'st knowledge; Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake! Are we not halves of one dissever'd world, Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part? Never! After all, perhaps, only the same old worldrenowned myth in another form-the marriage of Cupid and Psyche; Love and Intelligence long parted, long suffering, again embracing, and lighted on by Beauty to an immortal union. But to return to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own aimless, dazzling visions, expires on the bosom of him who knows; and Paracelsus, who began with a self sufficing scorn of his kind, dies a baffled and degraded man in the arms of him who loves; - yet wiser in his fall than through his aspirations, he dies trusting in the progress of humanity so long as humanity is content to be human; to love as well as to know; to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as to aspire. L 94. ORD BACON says: "I like a plantation (in the sense of colony) in a pure soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others for else it is rather an extirpation than a plantation." (Bacon, who wrote this, counselled to James I. the plantation of Ulster exactly on the principle he has here deprecated.) : He adds, "It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant" (i. e. colonise). And it is only now that our politicians are beginning to discover and act upon this great moral H truth and obvious fitness of things!-like Bacon, adopting practically, and from mere motives of expediency, a principle they would theoretically abjure! 95. ECAUSE in real life we cannot, or do not, re BECAUSE concile the high theory with the low practice, we use our wit to render the theory ridiculous, and our reason to reconcile us to the practice. We ought to do just the reverse. ། MANY would say, if they spoke the truth, that it had cost them a life-long effort to unlearn what they had been taught. For as the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so through social conventionalism the conscience becomes blinded to positive immorality. It is fatal in any mind to make the moral standard for men high and the moral standard for women low, or vice versa. This has appeared to me the very |