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If he would come to-day, to-day, to-day,
Oh, what a day to-day would be!
But now he's away, miles and miles away
From me across the sea.

O little bird flying, flying, flying

To your nest in the warm West; Tell him as you pass that I am dying As you pass home to your nest.

I have a sister, I have a brother,

A faithful hound, a tame white dove; But I had another, once I had another, And I miss him-my love, my love!

In this weary world it is so cold, so cold While I sit here all alone;

I would not like to wait and to grow old, But just to be dead and gone.

Make me fair when I lie dead on my bed, Fair where I am lying:

Perhaps he may come and look upon me dead

He for whom I am dying.

Dig my grave for two, with a stone to show it,

And on the stone write my name; If he never comes, I shall never know it, But sleep on all the same.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.

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From The Edinburgh Review. THE NEW SCOTTISH NOVELISTS.1 We hail the revival of the rural Scottish novel as a welcome sign of healthy reaction. In the multiplication of novel writers, we make much allowance for the intensity of competition at fever heat and the difficulty of finding attractive subjects. Sensation of every kind has been carried to excess, and it is the doom of the sensationalist who has made a popular hit to endeavor to surpass himself in successive productions. That inevitably leads to mad outrages on common sense, as he passes from the improbable to the incredible and impossible. Of the fashionable novels we get as blasé as of the insipid gaieties they affect to reproduce, and even the conventional domestic novel, with its trivial incidents and everyday characters, can only be indefinitely repeated so as to interest, by such masters of the art of weaving webs of gossamer as the author of "The Chronicles of Barset." If abor insipiḍities were the worst, we should have the less to complain of. A book which is merely aggravating or wearisome may be tossed aside; it can do harm to none but those who consent to be bored by it. Infinitely more objectionable are the novels of the newest school, which outrage old-fashioned notions of decency. They are Mesdames Bovary without the psychological genius of Flaubert; "Assommoirs" without the dramatic realism of Zola,

surdities

11. Auld Licht Idylls. By J. M. Barrie. don: 1888.

Lon

2 A Window in Thrums. By J. M. Barrie London: 1889.

3. When a Man's Single. By J. M. Barrie. London: 1888.

4. The Stickit Minister and Some Common Men. By S. R. Crockett. London: 1893.

5. The Raiders. By S. R. Crockett.

1894.

6. Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush. Maclaren. London: 1894.

7. The Green Graves of Balgowrie. Helen Findlater. London: 1896.

London:

By Ian

and not infrequently in feminine hands they verge on licentious audacities. For we need hardly say that with one or two exceptions which will suggest themselves to everybody, the gravest offenders are of the gentler sex. And, to quote old Mr. Weller, "very soft they must be" to fancy that these perverse and revolting fantasies will bring them either reputation or permanent profit. For assuredly we do these advanced writers no injustice when we assume that it is the latter consideration which chiefly weighs with them. The book which seeks its subjects in a museum of moral monstrosities, which launches itself with the startling or shocking title that strikes the keynote to the

offensive contents-even those which do nothing worse than reverse the relations of the sexes in imagining some ideal hermaphrodite of the futuremay have an ephemeral and discreditable success. But the success is seldom repeated, and the sensational extravagance has a depressing effect even on those who profess to admire it. We believe that the surest test of a genuinely good novel is that it leaves a pleasant flavor behind. Novelists of what Southey styled the "Satanic school" can have no touch on the chords to which our finer feelings will vibrate. The most vicious of men or the most frivolous of women have still susceptibilities for better things which it is the privilege of genius to awaken. World-worn, demoralized, or unsexed as they may be, they will be all the more grateful to the enchanter who transports them out of themselves and for the moment identifies them with ideals which had well-nigh faded from the memory.

For love of art or lust of lucre the provincial novel has always had a high place in English literature. Since the days of Fielding and Oliver By Jane Goldsmith, we have had a series of vivid pictures of English country life

and scenery, and of life in the great industrial centres as well, from the dales of Yorkshire to the deans of the Southdowns. The Brontes in the bleak seclusion of Haworth; Mrs. Gaskell in Manchester; George Eliot in Stafford and the eastern shires; the Kingsleys with their Devonshire worthies; Blackmore in Devon, Somerset, and Sussex; Hardy, who has made Dorsetshire his own; Mr. Baring Gould and Mrs. Humphry Wardthese are but a few of the names which suggest themselves in a host of others. Nor should we forget such old evergreens as Harrison Ainsworth, whose fertility was fatal to lasting fame, and whose inartistic abrupt ness is always irritating, but who, nevertheless, was as genuine an Englishman at heart, as passionate an admirer of English scenery, as the Romany Rye or William Howitt.

It seems strange that when novel writers were everywhere on the search, like hungry trout in some highland tarn on the feed after a thunderstorm, that the Scotland of Scott was comparatively neglected. We have no such belief in the modesty of the modern littérateur as to believe that the lustre of Scott's fame scared imitators away. He had shown what a rich field lay open to those familiar with it, apart from the thrilling historical romance of a country whose history was tragedy written in blood. Take the single scene of the funeral of Steenie Mucklebackit as an example of what may be made of unpromising materials. With the magic of a Shakespeare, with that instinctive gift of appreciating the innermost feelings of all ranks and conditions of men, Scott gives the bereavement of those prosaic Forfarshire fishing folk the pathetic sublimity of a drama by Aeschylus. The speechless grief of the rugged fisherman, the softening of the termagant house-mother, the stupefaction of the children at the splendid festivities

when the black ox had set his hoof on the humble threshold, are all presented with simple though exquisite skill which should have incited to imitation, for literary ambition makes light of difficulties. Yet since the wizard's wand was buried with him in Dryburgh, the Scottish novels of any mark might almost be counted on the fingers. Wilson, oddly enough for the versatile and rollicking author of the "Noctes" and the "Recreations," sinned on the side of excessive sentimentalism in the "Shadows of Scottish Life" and the "Trials of Margaret Lyndsay." His collaborator Lockhart audaciously ran counter to the prejudices of his countrymen when he gravely compromised а worthy Presbyterian minister in the brilliant "Adam Blair." Even Hogg, who had been brought up in the cottage ingle neuk, and nursed his poetic fancies when watching the sheep on the fells, though of course there are passages of tenderness and pathos, made a signal failure in his pastoral tales of the Borders. As for Miss Ferrier's novels, they are rather pseudo-fashionable than tales of lowly life. Does any one now read the "Cottagers of Glenburnie," though in its day it had no little popularity? We fear we might ask the same question as to "Mrs. Margaret Maitland" and "Adam Graeme," with which Mrs. Oliphant first gave the world assurance of her genius. They well deserve the honors of a reprint, which they will assuredly have sooner or later, but, like her "Katie Stewart" and the admirable "Minister's Wife," they are studies less of the lowest orders than of well-to-do manse folk or the country aristocracy.

For the genuine paternity of the present-day novelists we must go back to Galt, the contemporary of Scott, who was criticised and discriminatingly commended by him. So it is but fair that Galt should have the tardy honor which is his due, in the

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form of new editions of his works, issued simultaneously by rival publishers. Galt was essentially the memorialist of the cottager, the small farmer, and the struggling shopkeeper in the rural burgh who rises to local eminence and sometimes to wider notoriety and wealth. He is prolix and trivial, he is very frequently vulgar, and not unfrequently coarse. But, like Mr. Barrie and some of Barrie's ablest imitators, Galt has described and analyzed with intimate knowledge and intense personal sympathy the joys, the troubles, and the aspirations of the poor. For intimate knowledge, born in no small degree of similarity in rank and lot, is essential to giving vivid effect to the pictures, unless, indeed, the novelist have the genius of a Shakespeare or a Scott. Equipped with the indispensable qualifications, the opportunities for microscopic observation are considerable, even within a necessarily limited horizon. The austere race of intelligent farmers have pronounced national virtues, with individual foibles or vices. To the casual observer they may resemble each other like so many sheep in a flock, but the shepherd in the habit of reading the faces can tell each from the others by significant signs. The mechanics of the towns differ as much from the men of the country as from the neighboring fisherpeople, with whom they have never intermarried. Are those stolid and seemingly quiet-going souls insensible to the noble infirmity of ambition? Very far from it. There are few who do not struggle and save that they may win a step upwards on the social ladder. Hardly a farmsteading, as all those writers peatedly remark, that does not hope to send a son to the college, with the expectation that he may wag his head in a pulpit or, at the worst, fall back upon a parish school. And, except for pride of kinship, it is an unselfish ambition, for as in Brittany a Scottish

household will cheerfully stint its expenses that the kloarec may have the chance of taking holy orders. The very boy from the turf-roofed hovel, herding the cow or scaring crows from the potatoes, may be dreaming of winning favor in the eyes of the schoolmaster and being passed on from the master to the notice of the minister, and from the minister to the generous patronage of the laird.

So all save the hopeless dullards make a certain progress in letters, and rub up the intellectual faculties in a rude kind of intellectual controversy. A cheap press circulates a hundred journals, where a single paper a generation back served the community. All are profoundly versed in secular politics, and burning questions come up for fiery discussion. But it is religion that really underlies everything-that addresses itself to the best and the worst of their passions. The ways of the Almighty are mysterious, leading either to acquiescence or revolt. The sullen, smouldering fires are ever ready to burst out. The Scotland of the persecution times and the covenanting martyrsthe Scotland of Knox and Henderson, of Peden and Cameron, of Lauderdale and Claverhouse-is still the battleground of creeds and conflicting sects. At this day, in Thrums, if Sydney Smith were to preach one of his sermons on toleration as a primary article of the Christian faith, he would probably be stoned like St. Stephen by a mob of honest-minded bigots. But to do the fanaticism justice we should in fairness remark that it is still the Scotland where, in the memorable disruption year, four hundred and sixty-four clergymen resigned their livings, to be followed by their flocks into the wilderness, and where two hundred probationers cast in their lot with the seceders, instead of making a rush for the vacant pulpits. Profound conviction of any kind is infinitely preferable

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