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self-sacrifice, no effort but for redemption, no travail but for expiationa life that should hold its holiest as nothing worth, its best as nothing given.

And the tender chastened light of the morning stars, growing clearer and clearer to the dawn in which the shadows of the night were fading, shone on him where he knelt beside the deep pure sleep of innocence.

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Away in the deep heart of the great western forests, in the silence of the solitary swamps, where pestilence is abroad in the torrid noons, and miasma rises with every night that falls, where the dank leaves drop death, and the graves lie thick under the cypress-woods, a woman in the Order of St. Vincent de Paul lives ever among the poor, the suffering, the criminal, the shameless, sparing herself no pang, fearing no deathdead to the world, as the world is dead to her. For the dying her voice has a strange rich music, far beyond all other; for the innocent her look has a nameless terror, it is often very evil still; for those who are in dishonour, or in danger, her lips have a wild, sweet eloquence that scares them back from their abyss, and leaves them saved but sore afraid; for none has she a history. Once, when in her path some summer roses bloomed, and in the sunlight threw their soft fragrance on the wind, they saw tears gather in her eyes, and fall, slowly, as though each tear were a pang; then alone did they ever see that she thought of her youth, that she remembered her past.

In the press of the great world, far sundered from her by whom his guilt came, through whom his guilt still pursues him, one man lives who joins to the life that is known of men, a life that is unknown by any; a life, in which those who weary and are heavy laden are aided by a hand that they never see; in which every shape of suffering is sought and succoured; in which all evil memories that tempt, are crushed out, as in a debt that is due; in which all deeds of sacrifice are done with a strength that is merciless only to itself; in which a sweet and sinless happiness sheds its divine radiance; yet in which the poignancy of one remorse, the memory of one crime, are never lulled to peace or to oblivion, but, following the appointed travail of a silent expiation offered only to the dead, and of a supreme duty rendered only towards God, lay subject the stained greatness of a grand guilty life, and lift it upwards into holier light.

By passion his life fell, lost in darkness of the night, and sunk in lowest deeps; yet, though once fallen, who shall dare deny that, in the end, it shall not reach to that atonement which unceasingly is besought, obedient to the law which lies on every human soul, seeking for purification, striving for immortality, rising nearer and higher towards the perfect day, onward to

Other heights, in other lives, God willing?

THE OPERA.*

THE IDEA FROM PANNARD.

BY CYRUS REDDING.

"TWAS there I saw the sun and moon
Holding a chit-chat merrily,
And the god Neptune, fierce to view,
Rise in a court-dress from the sea.

There I the goddess Venus saw,
With tender look, and painted mien,
In a new patent car, surrounded

By nymphs and loves of Drury Lane.
I saw great Jupiter with thunder
Awaiting right majestically,

To launch his lightnings on the world
Upon the order of a valet.

I saw from the infernal pit,

With fire and many a hideous caper,
Fifty young fiends appear, and burn
A palace built of paste and paper!
There dragons crawl'd, quite tractable,
Showing their tusks with no ill will,
And daggers flash'd, so wisely made,
That without wounding still would kill.
I saw a shepherdess's lover,

She near him sleeping in a wood,
Command the birds to hush their songs,
In alt, with all his lustihood.

I heard brave warriors wondrous stout,
Standing stock-still, their bodies straight,
Cry furiously, "To arms! to arms!"
Without a change in look or gait !

And, can I be believed! I saw

Tritons, and gods marine with flippers,
Dance, having truck'd their ocean fins
In change against a pair of slippers!

In contre-dances and gavots

I saw the ocean waves combined,
And with two jolly sailors dance,

Three fish, six pleasures, and a wind.

* The absurdities of the Italian opera have been proverbial since the days of Addison. "Nothing," says he, "is capable of being set to music that is not nonsense." Still there was the music itself. The ballet was left in its old form. Now it appears the ballet is to draw a host of brainless heads, being set off by a dancer who has but one leg! This will suit the taste of the many-headed multitude, no doubt! How much more captivating to the multitudinous intellect it would be to have a dancer with no legs at all. London would be in raptures!

The blazing chariot of his sire
I saw young Phaeton tremble in,
And set the universe in flame

With beams from highly polished tin.
I saw the brave Roland in rage
Strain his strong arms and body tall,
To tear from earth enormous trees
That never were in earth at all!

There, too, were furies, hell's prime breed,
Who suddenly soft love confest,
Magicians that grew saints at once,

Ne'er perhaps "great" conjurors at best.

Ghosts palpable as day I saw

On Styx' dark shore together meet,
And Hell, with all its hideous route,
From Paradise not twenty feet.
Diana coming full in view,

Following the stag with loud acclaim,
I saw behind the scenes reversed,
The huntress hunted by her game.
There one Squalini dame I viewed
Play Hannibal, with helm and truncheon,
Haranguing-while behind the scenes®
Her army took a hasty luncheon.

I saw young damsels twist and frisk
In flesh-hued tights, and muslin skirting,
While nature's graces half unveil'd
Fusty old bachelors set flirting.*

I learned how youthful beauties know

To spare the blush that once they nourished,
And in the figurante's twirl

Admire how modesty is cherished.

In place of praise for comedy
By Jones, or tragedy by Talma,
Young misses to the fiddles simper,

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Che piacer via caccia l'alma!"

That is when knowing what is spoken

In foreign tongue with accent various,

The opera-goers chance to find

If comic be the strain, or serious.

Such is the unprejudiced description,
The sense, taste, moral, scene, and passion,

In England's boasted days of taste,

Where rules the brainless god call'd Fashion!

*It is hardly to be doubted that in France and England, if not in Italy, the ballet is the real attraction at the Opera to nearly all who attend it.

"What pleasure enraptures my soul."

THE DESERT OF GOBI.*

NOTWITHSTANDING the immense progress in geographical exploration made in our own times, there still remain certain lines of route to be traversed, the first opening of which are replete with deepest interest. Such are notoriously the route from Algeria to the Niger; that from Mombas to the Nile; the old caravan route from India to China, by Birmah; the route from the Indus to the Russian Issi Kül (not more than five hundred miles as the crow would fly, but with the fertile vales of Yarkand and Kashgar embedded in snow-clad mountains between); and the route pursued by Mr. Michie.

Our descendants, who will as certainly enjoy railway or steam communication by Constantinople, Tabriz, Teheran, Herat, and Kabul to India, and by Tobolksk, Tomsk, Krasnoirsk, Irkutsk, and Kiachta (to which last point the telegraphic wire will soon extend) to Peking, by Canada and Rupert's Land to Vancouver, by Arkansas to California, and by the Amazon to Lima, as we now do from London to Edinburgh or from Calais to Marseilles, will wonder at the dilatoriness of the present age in availing itself of lines of communication at its very door, and in exploring others that are less known. The steady adhesion to the Red Sea route to India, when that by the valley of the Euphrates offers an abbreviation of travel to the extent of nearly one half, is paralleled only by the long adhesion that preceded it to the circuitous route round the Cape; the neglected facilities of communication from Australia, New Zealand, China, and Japan, with Europe by America, in preference to the old route by the west, and the indifference shown to opening commerce from the seaboard with Central Asia, or with Negroland by the Niger, will, with a hundred other lines of a similar character that might be pointed out, be matters of infinite surprise to future generations, and of not very flattering retrospect at the boasted energy and enterprise of the men of the present day.

Every step taken in a right direction must, in the mean time, be hailed with due gratitude as a contribution in advance of the age. Such was

Speke and Grant's journey from Zanzibar to Egypt; such are the attempts at opening lines of communication between British Columbia and Canada; such are the navigation of the upper tributaries of the Amazons, the projected railway from Mohammerah to Teheran, and last and not least, the trip now before us effected across the Desert of Gobi, from Peking to Petersburg.

Mr. Michie might have come home from Shanghae pleasantly enough by the Peninsular and Oriental steamers, have attended as regularly at meals as his constitution or circumstances might have permitted, have dozed away the intervals, and have reached England in some forty-five or fifty days. To return by the real, and not nominal, overland route was

*The Siberian Overland Route from Peking to Petersburg, through_the Deserts and Steppes of Mongolia, Tartary, &c. By Alexander Michie. John Murray.

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a matter of trouble as well as of additional expense and loss of time; he could not, indeed, expect to accomplish his journey in less than ninety days, and he could not perfectly anticipate what amount of hardships and inconveniences he might be exposed to, but still he spiritedly preferred the more adventurous route, and, as a result, has given to the public a very interesting account of a country the actual condition of which was utterly unknown, and which is, nevertheless, as shown by this very work, one of the highways of Russian commerce, and replete with promises to the future.

A few years ago, Mr. Michie justly remarks, it would have been about as feasible to travel from China to England by way of the moon as through Peking and Mongolia. Peking was a sealed book, jealously guarded by an arrogant, because an ignorant government. The Chinese government still make a feeble attempt to impose restrictions on foreign travellers penetrating into Mongolia, on the ground that, although Chinese, it is not China; but it is to be hoped that any such limited interpretation of the convention of 1860 will not be tolerated. No policy can be worse than that of concession with Asiatics. However unimportant such abandoned rights may appear, experience has shown that the results are not so. Sir Michael Seymour's war at Canton, in 1856-7, could never have occurred if our undoubted right to reside in that city had been insisted on some years previously. Our disaster at the Taku Forts in 1859 would have been prevented if the right of our minister to reside in Peking had not, in a weak moment, been waived. What complications have not arisen in Japan from our consenting to undo half Lord Elgin's treaty, and allowing the port of Osaca to remain closed to our merchantmen!

The journey from Shanghae to Tientsin was performed by steam, and the Peiho river was found, as was testified during the late military operations in that stream, to be unfitted for navigation, except in steamers under two hundred feet in length. Mr. Michie takes the opportunity of dwelling upon a point to which we have also previously had occasion to call attention, and that is the great importance of carrying on the Chinese coasting trade by British steamers. "In all discussions in England," he says, "on the subject of the development of trade in China, the vast coasting trade is generally overlooked, as a matter in which we have no interest." And he goes on to show how grievous an error this is, and what benefit would be derived by our means and appliances for getting that local trade in our own hands.

A marvellous transformation has taken place in Tientsin, renowned in the time of war as the filthiest and most offensive of all the filthy places wherein Celestials love to congregate. A foreign town or "settlement" has now sprung up, laid out in streets, and a spacious quay and promenade On the river bank formed, faced with solid masonry, the finest thing of the kind in China, throwing into the shade altogether the famous bund at Shanghae. The affairs of the settlement are administered by a thoroughly organised municipal council, after the example of Shanghae, the "model settlement." The newly-opened ports have, indeed, an immense advantage over the original five, in having the experience of nearly twenty years to guide them in all preliminary arrangements. The cosmopolite

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