is called the sluice-keeper. During the day, he allows as much water to flow, as is necessary; but at night he takes good care to shut the panel fast, else the water would run and run, and overflow its banks, and at last inundate the country and drown the inhabitants. Our sluice-keeper had one child, a boy eight years old. It happened one day that his mother had baked some nice white cakes, and this little boy asked permission to carry one of them to a poor old blind man that lived at some distance. "You may go," said his father, "but do not delay long." "I am only preventing the water from flowing,"replied the child simply, little knowing that he had displayed that night the courage and endurance of a hero. The curate hastened to put in a temporary plug, as a substitute for the poor little stiffened finger, and taking the child tenderly in his arms, had the pleasure of restoring him to his parents, who were wandering about, distracted at his absence. It is a pity that history has not preserved the name of this brave and good little Hollander. VAUCANSON. "Ah, how tired I am!" said one day a child, who had been for some time standing alone in an ante-chamber in a large house in Geneva. A servant who had just entered, with a tray in her hand, looked round. "Why don't you go into the drawing-room, Master Jacques?" asked she. "Because 'tis still more tiresome there," was the reply. "How old are you, Master Vaucanson? asked the servant. "Nine years, the twenty-fourth of last February, Madeleine; I was born in 1709." "And how do you pass your time?" rejoined Made His way lay along the canals, and it was the month of October, when the waters are greatly increased by the rain of autumn. Now and then the little boy stopped to gather some pretty little blue flowers, which his mother loved and, while doing so, he sang a merry little song she had taught him, for his heart felt light and happy.leine, delighted at having even a child to talk to; for she He stooped down and stood up, and jumped and sang was the only domestic kept by Madame Tell, the lady in until he forgot how time passed. The road became very whose house Madame Vaucanson and her son were staylonely; the shouts of the villagers ceased to be heard, the ing on a visit. song of the birds was hushed, and the little fellow soon perceived that he could no longer distinguish his blue flowers from the green leaves that surrounded them. He looked at the sky; it was darkened by the approach of night, yet the objects around were still seen, though dimly. He thought of his father and the injunction he had given him, and he hastened his steps homewards. Suddenly a sound of trickling water drew his attention. He was near one of the sluice-gates, and looking at it narrowly, he discovered a small fissure in the wood, through which a slender stream was running. Young as the child was, he well knew the danger of the water enlarging the hole, then rushing out, becoming a torrent, and at length causing one of those terrible inundations, which often bring ruin on a whole district. Not for a moment did he hesitate, but throwing away his flowers, and climbing from stone to stone, he succeeded in reaching the fissure. Then he boldly thrust his finger into the hole, and saw with delight that the water ceased to flow. For a short time, all was well, and the child rejoiced at his success; but as the night advanced, the cold became piercing. The little fellow looked around and shouted; no one answered, no one came, and he resolved manfully to wait for the daylight. But the cold grew more and more intense, the poor little finger in the hole became numbed; then the hand and the whole arm stiffened, yet the child stirred not. At length the pain reached his shoulder, and the agony became intolerable, but still the little sluice-keeper would not move. He wept, he thought of his father and mother, how uneasy they would be! and he wished for his warm little bed where every night he slept so sweetly; yet he held bravely on, knowing that if the water broke the barrier which his finger opposed to its fury, not only would he be drowned, but also his parents and his neighbours. Therefore he wept, but stirred not. Daybreak found him, supporting with unfailing courage, his horrible position. Just then, it happened that the curate of the parish was returning home, after having passed the night by the bedside of a dying man. Hearing a voice in the dyke, he stooped down and saw the child seated on a stone, his face pale, his eyes filled with tears, and his whole body writhing with pain. "What are you doing there?" cried the good man. "I study all day, Latin, Greek, French, geography, arithmetic, geometry." "In short, all kinds of fine learning," interrupted Madeleine, who was not made much wiser by this list of names. "But when do you amuse yourself?" "Never!" said the child, with a solemn air. "But, there's a smell of something burning, Madeleine," added he, snuffing up a certain odour that came in through the open door. "Goodness! my roast beef is burning!" cried Madeleine. Master Vaucanson," added she hastily, "every one says you're a little destroyer; perpetually in mischief, breaking and spoiling every thing you touch. Now I beg of you not to meddle with anything here, else 'tis I who shall be blamed: for Madame Tell charged me not to leave you alone." "What can I meddle with here?" asked Jacques, quietly. "I don't see anything I can break." So saying, the littie Genevese looked around, and suddenly his eyes sparkled with extraordinary brightness. They were fixed on a large old-fashioned clock fastened to the wall. Madeleine neither remarked the look, nor the smile that accompanied it: the smell of burnt meat becoming still stronger, she ran with all speed towards the kitchen. "Certainly, I wont break it," said Jacques, climbing on a table placed under the clock, "but I must find out how the works are moved." Then whispering to himself, "examining the mystery of this machine is very different from breaking it," he took out one by one the little wheels that caused the hands to move. Absorbed in this occupation, Jacques did not hear the door open, until a cry of surprise and anger roused his attention. "My clock!" cried the mistress of the house. Mischievous little urchin!" added his mother. But without moving, Jacques replied, "Any harm I have done, I can repair." And then, without descending from where he stood, he replaced every wheel, readjusted the hands, stirred the pendulum, and then seeing mechanism restored, and the clock going as steadily as if it had not been touched, he cried, "I have found it!" and jumped joyously to the ground. The taste, thus early displayed, grew with his growth, and Vaucanson became a most celebrated mechanist. In 1738, ali Paris flocked to his house to see an automaton which played eight or ten airs on the flute. Encouraged by his success, he made a duck which both ate and digested corn; besides a player on the tambourine, which performed twenty different pieces. Afterwards his genius took a more useful direction: he invented mills for weaving silk, by means of which a child could produce the most beautiful fabrics.. He was occupied in perfecting some curious machinery, when he was seized by his death sickness. "Hasten," said he, to his workmen, "I shall not have time to complete it." His words came true, he expired without finishing his design on the 24th of November, 1782. CONVERSATION. OUR best gifts are least praised, perhaps least prized. Whatever outward good enters into the very texture of our life's life has little chance of being duly honoured. Those pleasures, without which we should be wretched, we treat as insignificant, because they are indispensable. It is so with conversation,-a pleasure for which all men have a taste; one which is never relinquished except by compulsion, or some motive almost as potent. The silence of monastic life is the highest triumph of asceticism; that of prison existence the utmost cruelty of the law. Joy prattles; grief must talk or die; both are eloquent, for passion is always so. A feeling too strong for words is agony; if they be too long withheld it becomes madness. The chattering of youth is the overflow of animal spirits by the stimulus of new ideas; the garrulity of age seems an effort to excite the fainting animal spirits, by recalling the ideas which once stimulated them. Let us have a little talk about talking. Our object shall be to show that we do not give it a due share of attention, or at least to inquire whether we do or not. Goethe advises that we shall at least "speak every day a few good words." Do we concern ourselves about this when we are making up the day's account? Did we begin the day with any resolves about it, as if it were a thing of consequence, or have we maundered on, dropping tinkling words about trifles, or evil words like firebrands, or words of gloom and repining, insulting Providence, or words of hatred, piercing hearts that love us? Each day's talk is surely no trifle; we can hardly help sowing the germs of many thoughts in a twelve hours' intercourse with our co-mates, in the ordinary duties of life; and allowing our words only a negative value, we rob our friends of all the good and pleasure that we might bestow and do not. Young and old alike have claims upon us for the cheap gift of our good thoughts; the young, because it is their spring-time, and they must have good thoughts or bad ones, flowers or weeds; the old, for that life's troubles have cast so many shadows upon their minds, that it is cruel to let slip any chance of cheering them by means of whatever advantage we possess. If they despond habitually, a few rightly-chosen words may present a new side of affairs for their relief; if they are soured, words of affection are all-powerful to neutralize such acids. Let us not dare to put them off with silence; in such a case it is a confession of the weakness of our virtue. Incommunicative households are only a step behind quarrelling households. Some people are taciturn only because they cannot open their mouths without saying something disagreeable. They have just goodness enough to be silent, not enough to reform the inward sullenness of their temper. We are always sensible of the pleasure of conversation, when it is what it should be; but we do not find it easy to prescribe rules for it. There are, indeed, plenty of formal rules, but they are too formal. We do not find that agreeable people talk by them, and we say such an one has a gift for conversation, as if confessing that rules have little to do with the matter. And, indeed, how could we talk by rule any more than we can breathe by rule? We never think of counting or measuring the delicious inhalations of a rural walk, or those which sustain the life of a year. Talking is quite as natural, and almost as necessary as breathing, for the few taciturn people we meet are only enough to prove the universality of the impulse. Of course, we put out of the question those who are silent through sulkiness or stupidity, or by design, and consider only people who behave naturally. The impulse to impart our thoughts is so strong, that it is proverbially necessary to keep a guard over our lips, lest we tell what should not be told. To what a pitch then must our sophistication by false notions of society have arisen, when we become able to talk for hours the very thing we do not think, pouring out empty words, while the under-current of our thoughts sets in quite a different direction. The " bald, disjointed chat" thus produced, is what we call "conversation in company," and no wonder we dread "company!" A diet of stale crumbs and tepid water would be quite as agreeable. Listen to the conversation of a morning call. First the health branch. "How do you do and how is your mother-and is your sister quite well--and has your aunt recovered?”an unexceptionable strain of talk in itself, but usually a mere form, from the fact that we have had daily opportunities of ascertaining the condition of these good people, and know that nothing of consequence can have befallen them without our knowledge. It wears the semblance of friendly feeling and humane sympathy, however, so we must not condemn it when it includes one grain of sincerity. But we proceed. My own health has been miserable. I have had And here follows a train of symptoms minutely given, even as to days and hours, with the fears of friends and the judg ment of physicians, until the listener yawns so perceptibly that it is impossible to proceed. The children's cases come next, and it is well if their afflictions do uot occupy the remainder of the visit. 66 Next comes the weather branch, if there be time enough. "What dreadful weather we have had! It is enough to kill anybody. The thermometer fell ten degrees on Saturday. My brother, who has been all over the world, says that ours is the very worst climate on the face of the globe. Nobody can be well in such a climate," &c., until it is made perfectly clear that Providence, either through especial spite or general incapacity, is doing its worst for us in the way of weather. The faults and follies of our neighbours and friends afford, perhaps, the most fertile of all subjects for conversation, when it is at all spontaneous. The study of character is one of the pleasures of life, but we are not particularly fond of exercising it upon ourselves, or at least of divulging the results of our practice. The habit of discussing character in ordinary conversation is apt to be a little chilling all round. It is hardly possible to feel quite at ease and to behave unconstrainedly, if we know that as soon as we depart we shall be coolly analyzed for the benefit of those who remain. We are not quite so confident of the impartiality and discernment of others as of our own, and we would rather not feel that every word and action of ours is being treasured up as material for future sketches of character. So that this style of conversation, while it exercises the intellect, is likely to harden the heart, and instead of diffusing an affectionate confidence through social intercourse, will probably end in putting each individual secretly on the defensive. Some frigid soul devised the maxim, "Live always with your friend as if he might one day be your enemy;" and those must have kindred notions of the spirit of society, who consider the peculiarities and shades of character of their friends matter for habitual discussion. any heart-touching sorrow is sure to awaken; but if this be construed into a disparagement of innocent mirth, at proper times, we must rebut it by another proverb of the same teacher of wisdom-" A merry heart is a continual feast," a feast, we venture to add, quite as much Egotism may be reckoned a kindred vice of conversa- to those about it as to itself. We have no patience with tion, equally tiresome, but not so bad in itself, because it those who despise mirth as mirth; who fix a cold glance is truer. Egotism is either the pouring forth of a vanity upon the vivacious talker of pleasant nothings, as who too egregious to be politic, or the effort of a desire to should say, "Behold a zany !" One might almost be please, to bring up its claims to notice, or the mere morbid tempted to remind these unhappy wise men, that the The and painful action of an unhealthy mind, attempting to most immovably grave of all creatures is the ass. share its troubles and vexations with others, or to enforce best wisdom is humane and humble, not stilted and selfthe attention which such minds are apt to think wrong-glorifying. We would not recommend to a man of sense fully withheld. In either of these cases, tediousness is to be "the fiddle of the company;" but there is at least its worst effect. We fly an egotist, but we do not fear equal and less amiable folly in gathering one's self up or hate him. If vanity prompts his fault, we smile solicitously, lest any one in the mélée of conversation secretly at the weakness; if a desire to make an impres- should tread upon the corns of our dignity. Wisdom sion, we revenge ourselves on his tiresomeness by con- that is rich and ample can afford some derogation. trasting in our own minds his real with his imaginary claims. It is of such as he that people say, "I would like to buy him at my price and sell him at his own," and the saying arose from the frequency of the appearance of such characters in society. Notices of New Works. Panthea, the Spirit of Nature. By ROBERT HUNT, author of "The Poetry of Science." Reeve, Benham and Reeve. A still less agreeable class of talkers are they who seem to listen for no other purpose than to entrap the speaker. They lie in wait for petty errors and apparent discrepancies; things whose consistency might be vindicated after a world of words, but which we have a right to expect will be taken for granted as correct, by those who know us to have a regard for truth. These are minute and matter-of-fact people, in whose minds the main idea is of no more importance than the most insignificant accessory. To talk with such people, is subjecting one'sself to the labour of proving a continual negative. This cavilling habit is completely contradictory of the genial and confiding spirit which is the life of conversation. It resemblance between them; Froude's book, in all that is insulting to the speaker, whose flow of talk returns indignantly upon itself, to await listeners who are too conscious of their own love of truth lightly to suspect another of disregarding it. It is found generally either among persons whose pursuits have led them into close investigation of minute points; among hard and coarse business-men or sharp lawyers; among the self-righteous of either sex; among people who, being devoid of imagination, are habitually suspicious of those who appear to possess any. : With these enemies of conversation we may rank such as frown upon every little playful sally, snapping at each unconsidered word, and pretending to be puzzled by every witticism, in the spirit of him who asked, of a poem, "What does it prove?" The truth is, folly is almost as requisite to pleasant general conversation as wisdom. Highly condensed aliment is healthful neither for mind nor body. As a little bran left in our bread makes it more wholesome, so does a little harmless folly in our talk, Those who despise it are very apt to suffer and look glum under a mental dyspepsia, and they deserve it. Until philosophers become predominant in society, wisdom will not be best commended to popularity by showing it as the antagonist of mirth and when they are so, they will show how cheerful wise men can be. Were our laughing muscles given us for nothing? When Solomon compared the laughter of fools to "the crackling of thorns under a pot," he was thinking of wicked fools, undoubtedly; there are many such, and their laughter is anything but cheerful. But some gloomy people say, "There is too much sin and sorrow in the world for Christian people to be anything but sad." To this we would assent with all our hearts, if habitual sadness were in itself likely to better the state of things. It is true that," by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better," viz., that unmingled prosperity and happiness is apt to make our poor humanity cold and unfeeling, leaving dormant those tender sympathies with all human woe which THIS is a prose poem, with Science and Nature for the themes. A story is interwoven with it, but the thread is so slender that it seems barely sufficient to hold the dramatis personæ together. On opening the book, and reading the preface, we were led to anticipate a work of a similar character to Froude's "Nemesis,"―this dealing with the scepticism of Science, as that with the scepticism of Faith. There are, however, no points of regards delineation of character, human passion and human interest, and the tremendous struggles of conscience, standing boldly out from all recent books of a similar character. Panthea" is, however, a much healthier book. Its subject-Nature-is one that tunes all hearts to Love; it leads from joy to joy; and impresses the mind deeply with the sense of quiet power and beauty. 66 We wonder not at the simple faith of the old Pagan Pantheists, who saw their god in the glorious sun, heard him in the winds whispering through the forest groves, and felt him in the silent beauty of earth, and air, and sky. To this the Greeks added the classical mythology which sprung from the cultivated brain of that highly civilized people; and the Hebrews, whose religious ideas were far in advance of the Greeks and all other ancient nations, added the sublime conception of God himself, as the active ruler and governor of Nature, riding upon the wings of the wind, shaking the earth and making the pillars thereof tremble, quieting it by the south wind and making the morning stars sing together for joy, wrapping himself about with thick darkness, and employing the lightnings and the thunders as the ministers of his judgments. Thus, in all the aspects of Nature did the Hebrew recognise his God; and alike in the sunshine, the rain, the fire, and the tempest, did he hear "the voice of the Lord." Hence the sublime grandeur of the inspired Israelitish poets stands out with startling brightness from the material Pantheism of remote times, and their great thoughts have descended through the circling ages of the world, to beacon the way of truth and life to all men. The hero of "Panthea"-if we may venture to call him such-is Julian, Lord Altamont, a young man of highly sensitive and imaginative mind, who is captivated by the beautiful in nature, and seeks to unravel its great Mystery. He finds a congenial guide in an aged student, Laon Ælphage, a mystic and follower of Jacob Behmen, who is regarded in his own neighbourhood as a con juror or a madman. The old man thus addresses the youth: "Associated with the world, Julian, you cannot free yourself from the chain of its errors. A web of thoughts and feelings, peculiar to the age, imperceptibly involves your mind, and even when you free yourself, on one hand, from the besetting sophistries of society, and get a glimpse of truth, your progress is restrained on the other by many hereditary superstitions. The characteristics of a race are the habits of its individual members. How can one man escape from those external agencies which influence all around him, or expect to be free from those mysterious impulses which, with the utmost subtlety penetrate and move the mass? Yet you are the child of a period in which the triumphs of mind-the proud conquests of thought- -are our boasted achievements. Man has more than realized the dreams of romance. By the power of heat, employed in changing the form of matter, he drives his chariot with strange velocity. Julian, you are a type of the age. The giant element of thought, which grows strong with toil, is encrusted by indulgence. The eagle eye of the soul, which should gaze steadily on the fixed centre of truth, is weakened by looking on the ground, and the flickering of puny stars now dazzles it. Unable to comprehend, to reach the reality, man contents himself with the semblance. A thousand facts are recorded, all expressing but one law, and man is confused amid the multitude of isolated instances, which appear distinct phenomena only, because the truth which lies hidden under a film is missed in the hurry of the age. As man, knowing good and evil, stood bewildered at the gate of Eden, surveying the second chaos which his rashness had produced, he now stands on the frontier of the land he would conquer,-proud, but nearly powerless." Julian is dazzled by the temptation to unravel the great law and mystery of the world, and to see through the Iris-veil which covers creation, and he gives himself up entirely to the precepts and guidance of Laon, abandoning, for a season, the lordly home of his father, the Earl of Devonport, the love of his Eudora Spencer, and the tutelage of his domestic tutor, Cheverton. Altgiva, the daughter of Laon, is presented as a beautiful young sorceress, possessed of a mystic sympathy with the musical pulse of Nature. Altgiva is not an Undine; notwithstanding her remarkable grace and beauty, we could have spared her; for though she is made to talk very poetic philosophy, she does not help forward the story much, nor tend to dovetail the characters together. But the story is by far the least interesting portion of this certainly interesting book; and we believe the author when he says, that to tell a story was not the object of his writing. Julian follows his guide Laon in a course of study and of travel. He studies the progress of error, and learns from sad experience, the degrading influences of mere worldly ambition, sensual pleasure, and human pride. His thoughts become of a higher order, and his feelings more sensitive. "A veil had been removed from his eyes; all things appeared more clear; a greater transparency was, as he thought, exhibited in nature. Beauty was in and around all things; as a flood of light it diffused itself over the whole world. He saw nature in its brightness and purity, reflecting back to Heaven the smile of God." The man, young and impetuous, had become staid and patiently enduring. Life was in him spiritualized; its impulses were higher and stronger; the soul had become more powerful than the body. The philosopher had become the poet. From all men, in all countries, he had gathered knowledge. "From the scanty vegetation of the arctic regionsthrough the wild steppes of Siberia, and the great plains of Tartary-each form of vegetable life had been sought for. From the luxuriant valleys of southern Asia to the mighty forests of the Himalayan range, they had travelled. Africa, from its northern deserts to its southern wilds; from the mountains of Nubia to the pestilential delta of the Niger, they had traversed. The isles of the Eastern and the Western Ocean had swam in all their beauty of vegetable covering before the eyes of the overladen brain of Julian. He felt as if swung from island to island, or as if floating in a magic shell, on the mighty ocean, enjoying the tranquillizing rocking of its restless waters. They were now in the Continent of America.. The earth-wide wanderers passed over a wide and undulating country, rich with masses of forest-trees, and with every variety of vegetation. Jagua palms, with light and airy tufts of leaves rising above columnar trunks, covered by twining-plants, profusely decorated with flowers of every hue, waved near masses of the darkly noble cedar trees. The humble chamaerops and the lordly cocoa-palm threw their shades over the thick and massy groups of aloes which shot up thin spires of flowers to the summer sky, and spice-bearing trees, which perfumed the air." "We stand now," said Laon, " upon one of those centres, about which revolve all those forces which tend to produce the full development of the great phenomena of life. We have seen the manifestations of living power in the lords of reason, and marked its phenomena in those creatures which obey the humble laws of instinct. We have now traced this principle-this all-exciting power-through every form of vegetable creation, from the cedar which is on Lebanon to the hyssop which groweth on the wall;' and yet our task is not ended. The mysteries of the life which brings the mute atoms into form, and which determine the conditions of any stone upon which we tread, are still to be surveyed. Onward to the task-my Julian, onward!" They ascend one of the great mountain-ridges of the Andes, rising high among the bleached and barren rocks, and struggling up the steep ascent with bleeding feet, till darkness fell on the naked region of chasms and gorges. Far above them, they discovered, yet among cloud-land, the snow-clad topmost peak, silvery in the first rays of the rising moon. "Upwards and onwards was the cry of Laon, and they plodded upwards and onwards, till Julian's senses began to fail him; "things swam round him-strange lights flashed and flitted before his eyesthe external world had vanished; but he had a dim consciousness of a mysterious change; a new existence appeared opening before him. He felt himself lost in an atmosphere of wild light." They enter the bowels of the earth by a great cavernous passage, and pass onwards through arborescent gold and silver, and minerals of all hues and forms, studded with "The life," says gems of great brilliancy. The wonderful powers of crystallization are everywhere at work. Laon, "which works in your organized form, is but an exalted condition of the power which occasions the accretion of particles into this crystalline mass. The quickening force of nature through every form of being is the same. Through all we see the power of life, and man stands only superior to the molecule in that development of soul, which enables him to search all things-to reach all things-and even to commune with the God who is above and beyond all existence." We have next a chapter entitled "The Vision of the Mystery," in which Julian feels as if resolved into a state of extreme ethereality-all feeling as if concentrated in one exquisite sense of hearing. Murmuring music sounds in his ear to the cadence of verse "From the moonlit bowers We wonder whether Mr. Hunt has read the exquisite "Prometheus Unbound" of Shelley? And yet we need not wonder; for this prose poem reminds us of it in its best passages. The Prometheus of Shelley is certainly one of the grandest Pantheistic poems ever written. Julian moves through the starry space, approaches the central sun, looks through the myriads of planetary systems, perceiving, as a small speck of light, his own Earth amid the congregated band of planets forming the little Solar System. "Panthea" the Universal Spirit, reveals herself to him, and at her command there appears before his eyes the grand procession of Creation. A chaotic mass floating in dense vapour shows itself at length as a globe, in which the seas are separated from the dry land, the mountains are thrown up, and the valleys are filled with streams; vegetable life springs up, from the film on the marsh to the mightiest trees and the loveliest flowers; strange creatures swim in the waters, curious forms crawl on the dry land, and the air is full of winged life; then the lion's roar, in the pride of his strength, sounds fearfully through the thick forests, and the gigantic elephant crushes the soil of the luxuriant jungle with the weight of his tread. At last, after the earlier-created forms of being have passed away, having prepared the globe for the habitation of a superior race, the highest forms of being appear, and Man himself-the lord of the animated creation. "The days you have seen," said Panthea, are ages which man cannot count. We know not time-time is the division of a period. To the Infinite there are no periods; past and present are lost in eternity." "Man finds a bone imbedded in a rock-he learns at length, that the world on which he lives is older than his creation, and he strives to reckon the centuries during which the mystery of life may have moved upon the earth; but his arithmetic is at fault; the mind of man cannot reckon the ages which passed, before man was. The God of the carth was before the Earth. The Creator of man, in pursuing his grand design of framing a creature which should be trusted with a soul, so tried and tempered matter in every form of existence, that the thing which was, lives in that which is, and that which exists, is that which has existed." In his attempt to solve the Great Mystery-Life-our author must be confessed to be at fault. Mere crystallization will not solve the stupenduous difficulty. "The form of man," says he, "is from the dust of the earth, and the powers by which man lives, are only different in degree from those by which a leaf grows, or a crystal forms." The great miracle is not so to be unravelled. Life-comprehending within it the powers of irritability, sensation, motion, thought, feeling,-how can this problem ever be solved by finite minds? The changes of empires, the revolutions of worlds, the circling of the planetary systems through boundless space, we may comprehend and explain, but how we move that little finger,-what it is that thinks and feels,-and that, passing from the body, leaves it but an inert mass to be resolved into its pristine elements,-that is the great miracle of creation which no man can unravel. Life is the great wonder of the world. All things else sink into nothingness beside it; and yet philosophers may discuss, and explore, and reason, but they will never clear up the mystery. This must ever remain the Great Unknown thing of earth; man ever wondering at his own origin, as Milton describes Adam on feeling himself a living sentient being in Paradise "Thou sun, fair light, From whom I have that thus I move and live, And feel that I am happier than I know ?" We have not space to follow the author in his rapid, but graphic description of the "growth of the human race, the development of its powers, the advance of civilization, the rise of the great thinkers, and the spread of the truth. Julian next mixes with the great world, becomes self-reliant amid its frivolities, is drawn back to the quiet sphere of home, has his affections centred there, and at length becomes an active agent in carrying on the good works of the practical philanthropists of his time. Julian every day becomes more fully persuaded that the only nobility which will bear the name brightly into the great future, must be achieved by those labours of the mind which lift us up above the mere world. "We inherit riches," said he, " bought by the waste of muscle and the shedding of blood on the battle-field; and for some of which a human life was the price paid down. Are we honest in wearing this sword of honour always in its sheath? Are we not mean if we rest content in being admired with the jewels won by our dead ancestors? Does it suit our pride to take the shield so nobly blazoned by the acts of others, and wear it in idleness? No! rather let us win honourable ordinaries, to our armorial bearings. We cannot use the sword of our fathers either against infidel or barbarian; but we can employ the mind which has descended to us, in all that activity which marked the head of our house, in a crusade against ignorance and superstition." After a long illness, brought on by intense thinkingresulting in that physical condition in which the entire nervous system is rendered morbidly alive to the minutest external impressions-a condition favourable to the influence of that agency which we call mesmeric, Julian is recovered by means of the mysterious "passes," and comes out to the world again, braced for a life of hard work, taking his place at once as a worker in the removal of those causes of pestilential disease which make such havoc in the dwellings of the poor. Amid the fine descriptions which run through the book, there is a pervading moral tone of high wisdom, and of pure philanthropy. We conclude our necessarily brief sketch of the contents of the book, with the following fine passage: "The watchword of the present is Peace. Even amid the discord of that tempest which is sweeping like a cyclone over Europe, the voice of the soul-a spiritual music amid the storm-cries Peace. In the conflict of opinions; in the war of creeds; in the riots of crime and ignorance; in the stir and agitation of the virtuous and the educated, still there rises, like a mighty throb from a melancholy breast, the sigh for Peace. The physical world is more quiet than of old; the moral world desires to forget the wrathful feelings of its ancient days. Reason carries a white flag, which she will plant in the centre of the world; but it may be destined to float above hecatombs of the slain, and run over the smoking wrecks of ruined cities, ere yet that ignorance is subdued, by which the struggle of the strong is so lamentably prolonged. The flag of reason, like a meteor, will pass onward; the musical voice of Peace cannot be smothered over by the hoarse screamings of War; and, in proper turn, the snowy pendant will calmly undulate on the air, and the sweet sound of Peace be heard, marking that tranquil reign for which the civilized world so ardently hopes." THE VALUE OF CYPHERS. FROM THE FRENCH. ONE day, during the clerks' dinner-hour, I was seated in my office-parlour, in front of a table covered with papers, among which was a letter that had been brought in earlier in the morning with a visiting card bearing the name |