his Tract on Baptism, and started the Library of the Fathers. He at once gave to us a position and a name. Without him we should have had little chance, especially at the early date of 1834, of making any serious resistance to the Liberal aggression. But Dr. Pusey was a Professor and Canon of Christ Church; he had a vast influence in consequence of his deep religious seriousness, the munificence of his charities, his Professorship, his family connections, and his easy relations with University authorities. He was to the Movement all that Mr. Rose might have been, with that indispensable addition, which was wanting to Mr. Rose, the intimate friendship and the familiar daily society of the persons who had commenced it. And he had that special claim on their attachment, which lies in the living presence of a faithful and loyal affectionateness. There was henceforth a man who could be the head and center of the zealous people in every part of the country, who were adopting the new opinions; and not only so, but there was one who furnished the Movement with a front to the world, and gained for it a recognition from other parties in the University. In 1829 Mr. Froude, or Mr. Robert Wilberforce, or Mr. Newman were but individuals; and when they ranged themselves in the contest of that year on the side of Sir Robert Inglis, men on either side only asked with surprise how they got there, and attached no significancy to the fact; but Dr. Pusey was, to use the common expression, a host in himself; he was able to give a name, a form, and a personality to what was without him a sort of mob; and when various parties had to meet together in order to resist the liberal acts of the Government, we of the Movement took our place by right among them. Such was the benefit which he conferred on the Movement externally; nor were the internal advantages at all inferior to it. He was a man of large designs; he had a hopeful, sanguine mind; he had no fear of others; he was haunted by no intellectual perplexities. People are apt to say that he was once nearer to the Catholic Church than he is now; I pray God that he may be one day far nearer to the Catholic Church than he was then; for I believe that, in his reason and judgment, all the time that I knew him, he never was near to it at all. When I became a Catholic, I was often asked, "What of Dr. Pusey?" When I said that I did not see symptoms of his doing as I had done, I was sometimes thought uncharitable. If confidence in his position is (as it is) a first essential in the leader of a party, this Dr. Pusey possessed preeminently. The most remarkable instance of this was his statement, in one of his subsequent defenses of the Movement, when, moreover, it had advanced a considerable way in the direction of Rome, that among its more hopeful peculiarities was its "stationariness." He made it in good faith; it was his subjective view of it. Dr. Pusey's influence was felt at once. He saw that there ought to be more sobriety, more gravity, more careful pains, more sense of responsibility, in the Tracts and in the whole Movement. It was through him that the character of the Tracts was changed. When he gave to us his Tract on Fasting, he put his initials to it. In 1835 he published his elaborate Treatise on Baptism, which was followed by other Tracts from different authors, if not of equal learning, yet of equal power and appositeness. The Catenas of Anglican divines, projected by me, which occur in the Series, were executed with a like aim at greater accuracy and method. In 1836 he advertised his great project for a Translation of the Fathers: but I must return to myself. THE PILLAR OF THE CLOUD.' BY JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. LEAD, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, The night is dark, and I am far from home- Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou I loved to choose and see my path, but now I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, So long Thy power has blessed me, sure it still O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till And with the morn those angel faces smile, 1 By permission of the Rev. Father Neville. LEGEND OF THE DROPPING WELL. BY HUGH MILLER. [HUGH MILLER, Scotch geologist and author, was born at Cromarty, October 10, 1802. His chief works were: "The Old Red Sandstone" (1841), "Footprints of the Creator" (1847), " My Schools and Schoolmasters" (1852), and "Testimony of the Rocks" (1857). He also published "Poems" (1829), "Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland" (1835), etc. He committed suicide December 2, 1856.] IN perusing in some of our older Gazetteers the half-page devoted to Cromarty, we find that, among the natural curiosities of the place, there is a small cavern termed the Dropping Cave, famous for its stalactites and its petrifying springs. And though the progress of modern discovery has done much to lower the wonder, by rendering it merely one of thousands of the same class, - for even among the cliffs of the hill in which the cavern is perforated there is scarcely a spring that has not its border of coral-like petrifactions, and its moss and grass and nettle stalks of marble, the Dropping Cave may well be regarded as a curiosity still. It is hollowed, a few feet over the beach, in the face of one of the low precipices which skirt the entrance of the bay. From a crag which overhangs the opening there falls a perpetual drizzle, which, settling on the moss and lichens beneath, converts them into stone; and on entering the long, narrow apartment within, there may be seen by the dim light of the entrance a series of springs, which filter through the solid rock above, descending in so continual a shower that even in the sultriest days of midsummer, when the earth is parched and the grass has become brown and withered, we may hear the eternal drop pattering against the rough stones of the bottom, or tinkling in the recess within, like the string of a harp struck to ascertain its tone. A stone flung into the interior, after rebounding from side to side of the rock, falls with a deep hollow plunge, as if thrown into the sea. Had the Dropping Cave been a cavern of Greece or Sicily, the classical mythology of these countries would have tenanted it with the goddess of rains and vapor. The walk to the cave is one of the most agreeable in the vicinity of the town, especially in a fine morning of midsummer, an hour or so after the sun has risen out of the Firth. The path to it has been hollowed out of the hillside by the feet of men and animals, and goes winding over rocks and stones-now in a hollow, now on a height, anon lost in the beach. In one of the recesses which open into the hill, a clump of forest trees has sprung up, and, lifting their boughs to the edge of the precipice above, cover its rough iron features as if with a veil; while, from the shade below, a fine spring, dedicated in some remote age to "Our Ladye," comes bubbling to the light with as pure and copious a stream as in the days of the priest and the pilgrim. We see the beach covered over with seashells and weeds, the cork buoys of the fishermen, and fragments of wrecks. The air is full of fragrance. Only look at yonder white patch in the hollow of the hill; 'tis a little city of flowers, a whole community of one species- the meadowsweet. The fisherman scents it over the water, as he rows homeward in the cool of the evening, a full half-mile from the shore. And see how the hill rises above us, roughened with heath and fern and foxglove, and crested atop with a dark wood of fir. See how the beeches which have sprung up on the declivity recline in nearly the angle of the hill, so that their upper branches are only a few feet from the soil, reminding us, in the midst of warmth and beauty, of the rough winds of winter and the blasting influence of the spray. The insect denizens of the heath and the wood are all on wing; see, there is the red bee, and there the blue butterfly, and yonder the burnet moth with its wings of vermilion, and the large birdlike dragon fly, and a thousand others besides, all beautiful and all happy. And then the birds. But why attempt a description? The materials of thought and imagination are scattered profusely around us; the wood, the cliffs, and the spring-the flowers, the insects, and the birdsthe shells, the broken fragments of wreck, and the distant sail -the sea, the sky, and the opposite land- and all tones of the great instrument, Nature, which need only to be awakened by the mind to yield its sweet music. And now we have reached the cave. The Dropping Cave ninety years ago was a place of considerable interest; but the continuous shower which converted into stone the plants and mosses on which it fell, and the dark recess which no one had attempted to penetrate, and of whose extent imagination had formed a thousand surmises, constituted some of merely the minor circumstances that had rendered it such. Superstition had busied herself for ages before in mak ing it a scene of wonders. Boatmen, when sailing along the shore in the nighttime, had been startled by the apparition of a faint blue light, which seemed glimmering from its entrance: . . . the mermaid had been seen sitting on a rock a few yards before it, singing a low melancholy song, and combing her long yellow hair with her fingers; and a man who had been engaged in fishing crabs among the rocks, and was returning late in the evening by the way of the cave, almost shared the fate of its moss and lichens, when, on looking up, he saw an old grayheaded man, with a beard that descended to his girdle, sitting in the opening, and gazing wistfully on the sea. I find some of these circumstances of terror embodied in verse by the provincial poet whom I have quoted in an early chapter as an authority regarding the Cromarty tradition of Wallace; and now, as then, I will avail myself of his description: When round the lonely shore So very old, ages had passed Since he who made had told it last. Like hill stream, flowed his shoulders o'er, |