limo ranæ cecinere querelam,'* the frogs in the slime have sung their old complaint. Lo Virgil is up in the clearing, obtaining statistics for a new edition of the Georgics, and here in the reeds are the Lycian boors who would not let Latona quench her thirst, but muddied and jumped into the water, and were in consequence changed into-Canadian nightingales. And Aristophanes, did he not write. much about these noisy fellows and give us the very words of one of their choruses, ‘Greck ree grex ki ax, ki ax ?' Horace also has something to say of them, and not much in their favour'Mali culices ranœque palustres avertunt somnos, *the wicked gnats, we would say mosquitoes, and the marsh frogs drive away our slumbers. Surely the poet was not journeying to Brundisinum, but rather from Grand Falls to Riviere du Loup, and stopped for the night at Timiscouata. To further illustrate the truth of the theory which we have been urging, that the man who slips from the Academy into the Grove carries with him a goodly number of classical notions which he cannot but use, we now propose to do a very desperate thing, and that is to cite the scientists as witnesses. From the lowest depths of the coal-pits we hear the protests of the geologists that they are not sentimentalists, but they do not tell the truth. Perhaps the gentleman who named the ancient deep mawed Canadian lizard Bathugnathus Borealis gave to his fellow-countrymen a jaw breaker rather than a sentiment, but we defy him to deny that the whole system of geological phrasiology is replete with sentimentality. So too the grave-faced chemist, working among smoke, retorts and crucibles; the astronomer, with his eyes fixed upon the distant stars, and the physiologist, with scalpel in his bloody hand, have each his flirtation with

Virgil Georgics, Book I., line 378.

Horace Iter Brundisinum,' lines 14 and 15.

the muses. But of all scientific men the botanist ranks first as the retailer of sentiment. It is he who found ‘Arethusa' and 'Calypso,' lifting their sweet, pink faces from among the moss. Like the Prince in the fairy tale, he discovered, not indeed the slipper of Cinderella, but the buskin of Venus, and it is he who can point out the fly-trap and the mirror of that goddess. The unlearned reader might well conclude that 'monesis uniflora' is in part an Indian name, but he would be wrong, for 'monesis' is purely Greek, and it means the single desire.* Would it not be advisable for our large array of lovely Canadian spinsters to prevent botanical gentlemen from wandering into the woods and losing their hearts to the flowers?

We have endeavoured to give some idea of the various influences which control the thoughts of those among us who hold communion with nature, and to analyze the incense which is sometimes burned in Canadian forests. Can it be said that the intellectual ichor of Pan is drained quite dry. We think not, we believe that our Canadian lakes and rivers, cliffs and valleys, trees and flowers, have something to give us in return for the pretty borrowed compliments which we continually are offering them.

That natural features and objects are very important factors in the production of literary works is undeniable. Walter Scott most certainly felt their power, and so did Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and everyone must admit that some of the poems of Joaquin Miller are permeated with the sights and sounds and even the very odours of the Sierras. We admit that these writers are to a large extent descriptive, but we contend that, even when they are not pretending to

*The Arethusa, Calypso and the Venus's Buskin, Mocasin Flower, Lady's Slipper or Cypripedium, are Orchids; the Venus's Fly Trap is one of the Sundews; the Venus's Looking Glass is a Campanula, and the Monesis Uniflora is a very beautiful member of the Heath family. All these flowers grow wild in Canada,

describe, they show that their minds are largely trained by natural surroundings, and we venture to assert that the same thing may be said of the greater number of literary men. Henri Van Laun, in the introduction to his interesting History of French Literature, writes truthfully and succinctly upon this point. To read the work of a German as we should read the work of an Italian, ignoring the features in each which are attributable to the sky beneath which they were born, and the scenery amidst which their ideas have taken shape, would be to read with closed eyes, and a mind wilfully insensible to one of the greatest allurements of literature.

And this is true, not only

of works which confessedly depend for their interest upon descriptions of external nature, or in which the con- |

con

ditions of climate and the impressions of physical surroundings are stantly being drawn upon for the purpose of illustration, but also of those more subtle and less manifest phases of the human intellect and imagination, which reveal themselves in manner and in mannerism, in various degrees of sprightliness and of sobriety, in richness or in poverty of thought, but which are none the less a result of the modifying influence of nature.' The more we learn to appreciate the beauty of the objects which surround us the better able will we be to extract from these ideas not only beautiful but useful. If we have but faith in our own resources there need be no doubt that we can produce a literature which will be at the same time excellent and essentially Canadian.

MONG the earlier years of his

manhood, Osmund Faulkner doubtless merited the name of a man about town. He was of personal attractiveness, if by no means handsome; he enjoyed an ample inherited income, and what we usually term social qualities were among his unquestioned possessions. Naturally people sought him, and naturally he enjoyed being sought. It became, in the course of a few years,

somewhat common thing to say of Faulkner that he was extremely fastidious regarding women. People had no reference, however, to that dainty arrogance which sometimes shows itself among fashionable favourites. Faulkner's fastidiousness was never obtrusive; when in the society of women he perpetually sought to hide it, and often with sad lack of success. Among the feminine flowers he was a kind of well-conducted butterfly: he fluttered politely but rather distantly about the dahlias and hollyhocks, not by any means saying 'I am in quest of a real rose,' but implying it through a sort of involuntary remoteness.

The real rose was rather tardy in appearing ; but there is no doubt that when he at last beheld her Faulkner paid devoted tribute to her genuineness. Miss Pauline Delapratte was undoubtedly beautiful; she had starry gray eyes, and chestnut hair, with an occasional golden thread through its flossy luxuriance, and both in face and figure she was of that ethereally delicate type with which the word patrician seems in especial harmony. Faulkner was rather tired of New York society when Miss Delapratte, fresh from Europe, and only nineteen years

of age, appeared like a delightful request for him to linger a little longer among ball-room follies. Everything about her was sunnily and musically new to him. She was pure nature, charming piquancy, lovely reality, and at the same time she held all these beneath the restraint of a delicious high-bred elegance that made him think of the polish on snowiest unveined marble.

Faulkner fell very deeply in love. He went home, one night, after having passed hours in Miss Delapratte's society, and lay awake, thrilled by a truly divine enthusiasm. Miss Delapratte was the incarnate ideal, the vague rosy dream that had seemed so unrealizable. The goddess had stepped down from her cloud. At least, to be more prosaic, Faulkner had no hesitation in believing that she would step down whenever he choose to ask her.

When they next met she was surrounded by devotees, and Faulkner got few chances of even exchanging a word with her. She had become what is called a great belle, and the honour of her notice at different entertainments was quite stoutly fought after. Faulkner felt like one who stretches out his hand to pluck some handsome fruit and hears a bevy of wasps buzz their defiance. Several evenings passed, during which society continued its exasperating monopoly. At last Faulkner saw his opportunity and made a kind of emotional grab at it. There is no doubt that he bore Miss Delapratte into a certain conservatory, one evening, with the hope of being able to make her a decent offer of marriage while the present waltz was in pro

gress; for when it stopped she had given somebody else the right of similarly abducting her.

Faulkner, considering temporal limitations, behaved admirably. All the while he spoke there seemed to him a droll parallelism between his own case and that of one who gulps down an exceedingly savory meal in momentary expectation of a tolled bell and a starting train. But his case lost all suggestion of humour when Miss Delapratte, dealing him a blow of astonishment which was also a pang of actual agony, told him that she had, a few hours ago, become engaged to a certain gentleman, a person of wealth and distinction, whom Faulkner well knew.

Miss Delapratte's engagement was an affair of purest worldliness. Her mother, an ambitious woman, desired it, and Mrs. Delapratte was a person whose will could produce an immense coercive strength, if necessary, upon that of her daughter. Pauline was most certainly in love with Faulkner on the evening he offered himself, but for her suddenly to have flung off the maternal yoke would have been to face conditions of existence almost terrifying in their novelty.

Faulkner never guessed the truth till after she had become Mrs. Hamilton. Pauline went abroad a few months subsequent to her marriage, and returned, three years later, a woman whose faded face and general look of being prematurely aged, still retained, like a sweet persistent fragrance, the old fascination. Pauline's mother was now dead. She had no near relations, though a host of socalled friends on either continent. It was said of her husband and herself that they lived together in great unhappiness. Veritably, this woman had sold herself for a mess of pottage. Her life, when she contemplated its thwarted dreariness, seemed to her like the stairway in 'some ruin, which still leads upward, but leads only to emptiness Every woman worthy of the name, yearns toward some ideal emo

tional happiness; but in the case of this one, whose own marriage vows had sounded to herself like an insolent blasphemy, such happiness had long ago assumed a positive colour, a definate shape. The tendrils and fibres of her nature had reached out toward no imagined support; they had rather been rudely torn away from a realized and satisfying one.

It is not strange that after this return from Europe, Faulkner and Mrs. Hamilton saw much of one another. These interviews were sometimes a passionate pain to both; for the love which Faulkner had felt was of that granite strength which time only mosses over with tender memories, not of the clayey sort that absence and change, like the subtle tooth of moisture, can crumble and decay. Far more of discomfort than pleasure came from these interviews, often repeated though they were. It seemed to both that the words of either were often but hollow concealments through which, like streams beneath causeways, flowed some perpetual dark current of regret, of melancholy or of reproach. It may be urged that when a man and woman agree, after this fashion, to play with psychical explosives, for both of them there is always a sense of danger in the atmosphere, like a premature smell of gunpowder. But in the case of Faulkner and Mrs. Hamilton no such feeling existed. Faulkner knew thoroughly the woman with whom he had to deal, and had grown well accustomed to the thought that though the passion of either was still full enough of vital fire, decorum,like some iron trellis-work very open to daylight, lifted between them its blended fragility and strength. A dramatic scene terminated these visits of Faulkner's, but it was one in which he himself played no part. All, in truth, that he ever clearly knew was the fact of Mrs. Hamilton being suddenly taken once more to Europe by her husband. He never saw her again. Two years elapsed, during which he heard no word concerning even her

whereabouts. Finally a letter, which might be said to have reached him from her death-bed in Florence, appalled Faulkner by its unexpectedness. Very soon afterward the news of Mrs. Hamilton's death came to her American friends.

No one ever saw that letter of the dying woman to the man whom she had so mistakenly omitted giving name and wifely trust. But its chief purport doubtless concerned the future of Mrs. Hamilton's infant daughter, named after herself, Pauline; and there can be no question that the thought of this child's future education under the care of a man whom she believed one mass of callous worldliness, was to the poor wife a pang worse than any which either death or disease might inflict.

Whatever she requested Faulkner to do, however, he most absolutely shrank from doing; and this was no doubt because he felt that any interference on his part between father and child would be a role strongly tinged with the ludicrous. Shortly after Mrs. Hamilton's death he went abroad, but made no attempt whatever to fall in with Mr. Hamilton and his little Pauline. Faulkner remained abroad many years. It is even doubtful whether he would even have returned if the death of a rather distant relative, leaving him another fortune which he did not at all desire, had not called him once more to America.

He was now usually spoken of as an elderly man, not being yet supposed to have lost interest in all the vanities, but understood to look upon them untemptedly, like a person set before a palatable supper with his memories of having dined still definitely assertive. Faulkner was in fact but eight-andforty, though an enemy might have dated his birth ten years back with a fair confidence in gaining believers. His hair was of a very positive grayness, and his mustache and beard were both almost thoroughly white. A closer glance than ordinary told you

that these were premature signs, for his complexion, always remarkably clear and healthful, still preserved a beautiful freshness, and there was a soft richness about the blue of his undimmed eyes that made their limpid colour contrast admirably with the whitened beard beneath. I think he is the handsomest old man I ever saw,' declared the young daughter of one of Faulkner's old friends, who had been permitted to see the gentleman with whom mamma used to dance at parties, shortly after his return to America. "For shame, Gertrude,' reproved mamma. 'He is not an old man. I should think any clever barber might sigh for him, as a thrower away of brilliant possibilities.'

But Faulkner felt exceedingly old when he went about among his New York acquaintance. Sometimes it would happen that Maria, whom he had left a tyro at walking, would be having gentlemen callers, full-fledged in her twenties, while he sat with her parents discreetly at a distance, so that some eligible young adherent might receive every possible chance. For some little time he refrained fromì even asking after the Hamiltons, and at length received a shock on learning that Mr. Hamilton returned from Europe with his daughter a long while ago, that he had died several years since, and that Miss Pauline Hamilton was now living with a certain elderly cousin of hers, a Mrs. Fortescue Jones.

Faulkner had a pronounced recollection of Mrs. Fortescue Jones in New York society previous to that lady's marriage. An actual shiver ran through him as he thought first of a certain letter and next of how completely one of its requests had been neglected. But he excused himself, at least partially, by the reflection that he had been wholly ignorant, for years past, of Mr. Hamilton's death.

Almost immediately after learning these facts, Faulkner called at Mrs. Fortescue Jones'. He asked at the door for both Miss Hamilton and her