warmth and delicacy, homeliness and height, with which the passion of wedded love is there exalted to a loveliness surpassed only, in my judgment, by the more than poet who created Agatha and Euryanthe. . . . . The writer has already quoted much in these pages; readers partial enough to prefer his to better words may think too much : yet I confidently look for something beyond pardon from those to whom the passage may be unknown, if I transcribe the verses in which Keats has painted Madeline lying down in her beauty.

-Her vespers done,

Of all its wreathéd pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warméd jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,

But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon perplex'd she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd
Her soothed limbs and soul fatigued away;
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day:
Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain;
Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.

XIV Delightedly too I returned now to converse with friends; delightedly, both from renascent ability to enjoy without reserve their words and affection, and from the sense that, freed from the importunate and unhealthy weight of sorrow, I could meet them henceforth with honest pleasure, sincerely sharing the gaiety I had so often acted. No doubt in the circumstances of my story there is nothing

new or exceptional; yet certainly it is true that amongst friends, taking the word even in its widest sense, I knew of none, I knew indeed there was no one on whom a despair so deep and dreadful as mine of the years since losing Désirée had fallen. Some fair portion of happiness had been within grasp of all and had animated their life; I seemed restored now to my natural position amongst them; -nay, to a superiority of position which was in every other respect not in accordance with nature, by the magnitude and solemnity of my own regained inward blessed

ness.

Yet I should have been ashamed to fill so many previous pages narrating that sense of sadness and perplexity with which the wonder of the world (irrespective of personal feelings,) for many years had seized me, had those convictions depended by any secret or unavowed enchainment from my own individual fate: nor ashamed less, if the brightness of these days had effaced them. Infinite at once and infinitesimal, I knew that my own happy fortune, all to me, to the world was nothing: it was no test of the general course of life; no solution of the 'summa rerum'. To pass unrelieved, to deny the existence of wrong and suffering, because Désirée's love, if love it was—and I hardly allowed that if to be hypothetical—seemed for ever to have enfranchised me from calamity, this would have been a confirmation of the common sophism, that success causes selfishness. Rather, remembrance of the vast transition in the whole aspect of life which this single Hope had caused, ransoming me at once from despair beyond remorse to joy beyond Angels, more forcibly impressed me with the conviction, common no doubt to many to whom the natural voice of conscience is audible,-that no wisdom has yet unveiled the secret of man's fortunes; that there are

more things in heaven and earth (to take in their widest and most serious sense words far oftener quoted than believed,) than are dreamt of or explained in any philosophy; that the mystery of sin is inadequate to solve the riddle of suffering. Man is not born', the wise Goethe said, to read the enigma of Existence; but he must 'attempt it, that he may learn the limits of knowledge'. What strikes me with always increasing force, is to find how near us are these boundaries; how closely, as in some valley towns where rude mountain masses jostle the houses of the market-place, not merely in the sphere of speculative thought, but in the trivial relations of daily life, we are hemmed in by the Inexplicable Powers. The writer, who has of course no solution to offer, will be well satisfied if the iteration of these reflections leads any one to feel—the beginning and the end of what he would reluctantly call by a name so pretentious as his philosophy- that in this very world, the world of all of us, the most commonplace existence is a miracle of superhuman strangeness. have given space that few (yet those in truth the minority for whom I write,) will think insufficient, to considerations which although by their own nature theoretic and general, lie far nearer to ordinary life and practice than most men are willing to acknowledge.

But I

Such thoughts did not belong to the months I am now describing alone. But roused more vividly by the circumstances of that period, hence followed the pressing necessity for one who deeply felt these things, yet had not strength to change or resolve them, to find a holy consolation, a repose how full and satisfying! in the love of her he had honoured from childhood, in the thought of Désirée's peculiar health of heart, and largeness of character, contrasted with the narrow interest and sedulous littleness,

the 'inhuman dearth of noble natures', which he saw, or thought he saw, around him. With her, unpardonable would be the folly, if I too fell into the world's purposeless course, if I too, fluctuating and feeble as the many, did not rise to nobler aims, animated by her courage and enheartened by her affection. That great hope glorified the glare and turmoil and dull 'week-day sky' of London; and meanwhile from without, from the South Spring came 'like a green echo into my heart'. Summer brought the expected letter of warm reinvitation; and then, on the business journey to Paris which I must first despatch, I had leisure again, again felt the pressing necessity, to ask without flinching on what security-the question hitherto deferred-the peace rested, which must now expect its final and absolute close or coronation.

XV But that all was won, where all was not lost, confidence in the force of love, faith that the cry of so many years could not be brought to nothing,-these were the only grounds discoverable. I loved Désirée in truth so much, that, contrasted with the dead negation of the months preceding, even the bare possibility of hope, the license to fancy her mine, had sufficed for the triumph of a

summer.

Che parlo? o dove sono? e chi m' inganna
Altri ch'io stesso e'l desiar soverchio?

-I repeated these lines at Rouen, (my half-way station. to Havre), when after vain endeavour to study the splendid monuments of that most picturesque of cities, I had ascended at last an overlooking hill, and sat with my face towards England, aiming at submission to the future whatever. Though so far dearer than life that this only made life dear, this hope too might be fallacy: Désirée's

bright welcome a sister's kindness: love unreturned: the waste wilderness before me: I would put anticipation aside; I would arm myself with patience. And yet the hour for departure struck below on a hundred bells:-I left St. Gervais, and strode down the long Rue Beauvoisine with childish exultation. I sang aloud: I felt as if marching to a victory already mine, to a triumph beyond any that wound with crowns, and spoil, and proclamation, and the 'alalagmos of legions', and the applause of Rome to the Capitol. Though so lately renounced, I could not chase from me this folle espérance'. I set myself to remember past defeat: the agony of that hopelessness: yet hope came flying back each instant like a brooding bird: Every moment I found the other self saying to the real self, I am going to Désirée. If a cloud from within, a warning sensation of the possible truth overshadowed me, at once the festive feeling, the blessed knowledge, would force its way back with exultation, and lightness of heart, and the cry, I am going to Désirée.

I sat amongst 'grooms and porters' at the Rive Droite Station: I tried to suppress the thought by talking with them. One told me the story of his campaigning through the 'Cent 'Jours'; he was simple and friendly as a man known for years; he pressed me to taste some famous native drink close by. I found myself answering with animation: almost telling this stranger I was too happy for such pleasures. He drove away. I reasoned with myself again : I recalled the circumstances of her affectionate kindness when we had met in late years of the thus far and no further of forbearance more touching yet: of what I might endanger now. But in vain, but in vain was that appeal to reason. The blood would run quicker, the heart beat more airily the soul anticipate what Heaven and she