idea, then whatever tends to give depth and vividness to this idea or indefinite imagination, increases its despotism, and in the same proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual." This paragraph from Coleridge sounds like a truism until we have felt its truth.

"LA Volonté, en se déréglant, devient passion; cette passion continuée se change en habitude, et faute de résister à cette habitude elle se transforme en besoin."-St Augustin. Which may be rendered "Out of the unregulated will, springs passion, out of passion gratified, habit; out of habits unresisted, necessity." This, also, is one of the truths which become, from the impossibility of disputing or refuting them, truisms-and little regarded, till the truth makes itself felt.

I WISH I could realise what you call my "grand idea of being independent of the absent." I have not a friend worthy the name, whose absence is not pain and dread to me;-death itself is terrible only as it is absence. At some moments, if I could, I would cease to love those who are absent from me, or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life diverges from mine-whose dwelling place is far off;-with whom I am united in the strongest bonds of sympathy while separated by duties and interests, by space and time. The presence of those whom we love is as

a double life; absence, in its anxious longing, and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

"La mort de nos amis ne compte pas du moment où ils meurent, mais de celui où nous cessons de vivre avec eux; or, it might rather be said, pour eux; but I think this arises from a want either of faith or faithfulness.

"LA peur des morts est une abominable faiblesse ! c'est la plus commune et la plus barbare des profanations; les mères ne la connaissent pas !"-And why? Because the most faithful love is the love of the mother for her child.

46.

AT dinner to-day there was an attempt made by two very clever men to place Theodore Hook above Sydney Smith. I fought with all my might against both. It seems to me that a mind must be strangely warped that could ever place on a par two men with aspirations and purposes so different, whether we consider them merely as individuals, or called before the bar of the public as writers. I do not take to Sydney Smith personally, because my nature feels the want of the artistic and imaginative in his nature; but see what he has done for humanity, for society, for liberty, for truth,-for us women! What has Theodore Hook done that has not perished with him? Even as wits-and

T

I have been in company with both—I could not compare them; but they say the wit of Theodore Hook was only fitted for the company of men-the strongest proof that it was not genuine of its kind, that when most bearable, it was most superficial. I set aside the other obvious inference, that it required to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest, grossest kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost always involved a thought worth remembering for its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its brilliant vehicle: the value of ten thousand pounds sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond.

It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after leaving the society of Sydney Smith you only remembered how much you had laughed, not the good things at which you had laughed. Few men-wits by profession-ever said so many memorable things as those recorded of Sydney Smith.

47.

"WHEN We would show any one that he is mistaken, our best course is to observe on what side he considers the subject,-for his view of it is generally right on this side,—and admit to him that he is right so far. He will be satisfied with this acknowledgment, that he was not wrong in his judg ment, but only inadvertent in not looking at the whole of the case."-Pascal.

48.

"WE should reflect," says Jeremy Taylor, preaching against ambition, "that whatever tempts the pride and vanity of ambitious persons is not so big as the smallest star which we see scattered in disorder and unregarded on the pavement of heaven."

Very beautiful and poetical, but certainly no good argument against the sin he denounces. The star is inaccessible, and what tempts our pride or our ambition is only that which we consider with hope as accessible. That we look up to the stars not desiring, not aspiring, but only loving-therein lies our hearts' truest, holiest, safest devotion as contrasted with ambition.

It is the "desire of the moth for the star," that leads to its burning itself in the candle.

THE brow stamped "with the hieroglyphics of an eternal sorrow," is a strong and beautiful expression of Bishop Taylor's.

He says truly: "It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon men as men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly." And again: "What would not tender woman suffer to hide her shame!" What indeed! And again: "Nothing is intolerable that is necessary." And again: "Nothing is to be esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with eternal sanctions."

There is not one of these ethical sentences which

might not be treated as a text and expounded, opening into as many "branches" of consideration as ever did a Presbyterian sermon. Yet several involve a fallacy, as it seems to me;-others a deeper, wider, and more awful signification than Taylor himself seems to have contemplated when he uttered them.

49.

THE same reasons which rendered Goethe's "Werther" so popular, so passionately admired at the time it appeared-just after the seven years' war, helped to render Lord Byron so popular in his time. It was not the individuality of "Werther," nor the individuality of "Childe Harold" which produced the effect of making them, for a time, a pervading power,-a part of the life of their contemporaries. It was because in both cases a chord was struck which was ready to vibrate. A phase of feeling pre-existent, palpitating at the heart of society, which had never found expression in any poetic form since the days of Dante, was made visible and audible as if by an electric force; words and forms were given to a diffused sentiment of pain and resistance, caused by a long period of war, of political and social commotion, and of unhealthy morbid excitement. "Werther " and "Childe Harold" will never perish; because, though they have ceased to be the echo of a wide despair, there will always be,