"I believe you are right. I will do as you advise me, fully and without reserve, this evening. I will think over it in the meantime. And now, my dear sister Ellen, you must leave me immediately, or they will be wondering what has become of you. For I can tell you we must make a secret of our friendship, or they will find means to break it off.” "I will go," said Ellen; "remember our agreement."

She left him with a smile of kindness and encouragement which lingered long in his heart, and, for a considerable time to come, prevented him from feeling inclined to sit down, and draw more devil's dances and skeletons. In the approbation of a pure and affectionate girl, he had now an object in life, which he no longer regarded as the mistake and unreality he had delighted to consider it before. Oh! young ladies, friends and sisters, how much of our lives is in your power! How many of us, in doubt and trial, in temptations of which you never dream, have been saved and purified by the memory of a few kind words from you!

The rest of Ellen's day passed monotonously enough, in certain household duties assigned to her by Miss Casey. Not, perhaps, very unpleasantly, unless (which we do not presume to determine) there be anything less interesting in needlework of a strictly and severely useful description, than in those inscrutable devices of ornamental work, on which ladies are more usually engaged when visible to the world at large. Miss Casey beguiled the time with various conversation, and pointed out to Ellen the great reason she had to be grateful to herself and Mr. Field for the comfortable home they were providing for her at Grove Lodge.

At 5 o'clock Mr. Field returned. Ellen heard him walk into his study, which was the room directly opposite to that where she was sitting. Presently afterwards she heard James's step as she came down stairs; knowing for what purpose he came, she listened with much anxiety for what might follow. The first voice she heard was that of his father. From the tone he seemed to be in much irritation.

"How dare you, sir, intrude yourself on me? I thought I ordered you to remain in your room."

"But father"

"I will teach you, sir, to obey my orders," she heard Mr. Field roar out; then followed a heavy sound as of some one being struck violently to the ground, and immediately afterwards a series of blows as of a horsewhip. There was no cry or other sound to indicate what was passing. Presently James was heard to say-he spoke in a low and agitated tone, but firmly

"I came here, sir, not with any intention of disobeying your direc

tions, but to apologize to you for any undutiful and wrong conduct of mine that may have given you offence yesterday."

Mr. Field made no reply, but as James left the room Ellen thought she heard him whistling. It was evident he did not care much about the deep moral injury his ill-directed punishment might have brought upon his son.

We see them go in wedding-robes and hearses,
Uncaring what may fail or pass away,

Until our clique of friends at last disperses.

II.

The curse of work and death, still unexpired,
Clings to our mother-age in all her glory;
And it appears the Fates are not yet tired
Of making human life the same old story.

III.

Else, why do they who rule us as they will

Still make the bad on each occasion winners?

Why do disease and debt and failure still
Make us such very miserable sinners?

IV.

Alas! all generous faiths are overtopped

By selfish facts; and I, a fond romancer,
May question Fate until my mouth is stopped
By churchyard dust-Is this the only answer?

C. P. M.

ALEXANDER SMITH'S CITY POEMS".

If we were to judge of the demand of the public for poetry by the quantity of the supply, we should conclude that this present age is very clamorous for verse and song. Either we are gone headlong into poetical madness, or the mania for publishing works of poetry is the recoil of the wave of a materialistic era. This latter we believe to be the

case. Once grant that an age is money-making, cold, and realistic in its broad features, and you must also allow that it is passionate, dreamy, and sentimental in its complement; for every era is a complete duality, consisting of its actual tendency and its reactionary complement. In an intellectual point of view, the years behind constitute eras, varying in duration, but all possessing this dual aspect, if we scan them narrowly, a truth which experience informs us of, and reason confirms.

But, to apply this principle, it will not be denied that this age is materialistic, hard, cold, and mammon-loving in its plain and true tendency. Granting that such is the case, we look for its complement, and find it in sickly verses, endless novels and fairy tales, Barnums and paste diamonds. The era is hard worked, plenty to do, because plenty to get. The current literature must be, then, soothing and imaginative. If the life of the age is real, much of the literature must be unreal. And because men are all day employed upon facts in the counting-house, the chamber, the sick room; because during the working hours they are knocking their heads against iron, wood, and coal, or even brick and mortar, being realists all day, they must be idealists in their hours of relaxation, and so they greedily devour fiction, poetry, false painting, and humbug. But observe, though there is this hunger after a false literature, and though the public libraries groan with the weight of novels, and unreal poems, and morbid tales, yet this is the false side of the age. It is the looking back to Egypt which ever accompanies the progress of the times; which must be borne with, because we are not a perfect social community, and can only paint on air our ideal happiness and home.

But though in its complement we blame the age, and every age, yet, in its broad characteristics, it cannot be untrue to its mission;

"City Poems." By Alexander Smith. Cambridge: Macmillan. 1857. VOL. I.-NO. III.

K

and in every branch of literature and art we have some men living in its true spirit, and loving it, and by act and word furthering its genuine tendency. Let it be clearly understood that the highest art and poetry which any age develops, is that which is at one with its spirit. Therefore, because the era we live in is earnest, strong, free, and ironbrowed, an era which has given us Livingstone, and Elisha Kane, and Brunel, its highest art and poetry, its true literature, must be, as a rule, non-imaginative, real, natural, and brave. Tennyson and Mrs. Browning are the highest living poets, because they reflect the age, its true sorrows and difficulties. "Aurora Leigh" we love, because it strikes at the root of the sin of selfishness; "In Memoriam," because it is true to our own life; and "Maud," because it gives us a picture of a human heart with fine capacities surprised upon the shore of an ever restless age, and distempered by inertia, while Science is an Argus of an hundred eyes, and labour is rife all around us; and because it suggests the remedy for a morbid sloth and a heartless selfishness. For the same reasons pre-Raphaelitism is the truest art of the present age. It contents us because, faithful to the realistic spirit of the times, it represents unflinchingly what is, placing the ideal in the perfection of the real, and not in the unnatural, supernatural, and contemptible. Pre-Raphaelitism is content to take facts as they are, and rejoice over them, recognising every object and phenomenon, aerial, celestial, or terrestrial, as God's creation, and so as worthy of representation just as He has made it, and thinking His work debased, if altered by the caprice of an artist.

And so in light literature we could particularize those whose earnest, purposeful writings class them amongst the true fellow-workers with this era of strong and real men,-Thackeray, and Bulwer Lytton, and Charles Kingsley, who are fast regenerating the English novel, reclaiming it from the paths of a dying obsoleteness, and rendering it pure and high.

Thus far we have arrived at this,- the man who fills up the eye of the age is he who works with and best represents its direct tendency, not he who stirs and dabbles in the waters of its complement. And here we pronounce that Alexander Smith is a poet of the complement, not up to the times. Sorry should we be to assert that the author of "City Poems" has not true poetic capacity; but this we do assert, that upon all the poetry that Mr. Smith has yet given the world is inscribed "Passing away," simply because he cannot take rank among the master-spirits, who preside over the founts of art, whose writings are history as well as verse, the history of the human heart of the year of our Blessed Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven.

We have already noticed the mania for writing poems: let us endeavour to examine a few of the causes which induce men and women to spend their time, and often their health, elaborating poetry.

And first, because they have readers, and the public, undiscerning and ignorant of what is excellent, admit of vicious poetry in the same way as, through carelessness or want of knowledge, immoral journals often find entrance into houses.

Others write for fame-a spectre which they never can or will overtake; a few, because to express their souls in verse is a relief, and a true pleasure; a greater number, because they are in love with Nature or some individual humanity, or, perhaps, they are the victims of disappointment or blighted hopes, and think it right that the world should know where lie its withering flowers. Others write simply because they are young. Youth and poetry are so related and interlaced in their emotions, that to divorce their union even negatively seems to them unkind, and faithless to human nature,—a poor body whom all should assist; and so we have verses written in youth often immoral, more frequently prosy, and generally pretty full of plagiarized ideas.

But there is another class who think right to write and publish poems. Ah, why? pleads a suffering nation. For this reason-they live in a pretty part of the country, and have nothing else to do. Why not, then, be a Wordsworth, and glorify in verse some sweet Arcady? Having premised thus much, we come to our more intimate subject, "City Poems," by Alexander Smith. Now, we are free to believe that Mr. Smith writes for fame. He is ambitious, and with an honourable ambition we find no fault. He does not write because he must, but because he feels he ought,—a sense of duty to himself, to the reading public, perchance to Scotland, is the ready motive; and here is Mr. Smith in a new character as the author of "City Poems."

Mr. Smith first appeared a poet of the passionate school, alias spasmodic. The result of "City Poems" will be, that he still remains a member of that school. His first poetic effort,-"The Life Drama," published some four years ago, was a wild web of tangled passion, beautiful in spite of its absurdity, and showing unmistakeable marks of true genius, though still in a chaotic state, which years and experience, if due care were taken, would have ripened into dignity and poetic worth. A great defect in the "Life Drama," and, we are sorry to say, also in "City Poems," is the want of a due moral sensitiveness to what is right and wrong— offensive and pleasing. There is less railing at the world, and on the whole, perhaps, a greater spirit of contentment, manifested in Mr. Smith's