discords of this world's wild music must be attuned at last. There is a sharp pain—past pain-in that letter which you sent me, but yet how instinctively one feels at once that the tone of Christianity is wanting. I do not mean the cant expressions, but the genuine tone which numbers of real men and women have learned by heart.

It may be hereafter mellowed into this, as I hope my tone will; but neither are as yet, though I have got what your correspondent has not, the words of the Song; only I have not the music. And what are the words without? Yet it is something to feel the deep, deep conviction, which has never failed me in the darkest moods, that Christ had the key to the mysteries of Life, and that they are not insoluble; also, that the spirit of the Cross is the condition which will put any one in possession of the same key: 'Take my yoke upon you, and ye shall find rest for your souls.' It is something, much, to know this; for, knowing it, I feel it to be unphilosophical and foolish to quarrel with my lot, for my wisdom is to transmute my lot by meekness into gold. With God I cannot quarrel, for I recognise the beauty and justice of His conditions. It is a grand comfort to feel that God is right, whatever and whoever else may be wrong. I feel St. Paul's words, 'Let God be true, and every man a liar.'

Letters from January 1852 to December 1852.

CXXIV.

My dear,-If I do not reply at once, I may possibly never reply at all, so much has the habit of procrastination or the à quoi bon question taken possession of me. Secondly, if I do not reply at once, I may in honesty, after reading your heterodoxy, be compelled to administer castigation. And, thirdly, a slight épanchement de cœur says, ‘I shall not last long in your bosom, cold sir, so write to your friend while the fit is on you.' Well, I am no heretic in my affections either, and my friendship is as truly yours as ever, my dear As warmly? Hum-why all was warm and effervescing once, now all is cold

and flat. If a mouse could change into a frog, or a falcon into a penguin, would the affections be as warm as before, albeit they might remain unalterable? I trow not, so I only say, you have as much as a cold-blooded animal can give, whose pulsations are something like one per minute.

I cannot agree with you in wishing for a war. It is very horrible, and though I think there is nothing of personal danger in it that appals, the thought of what would befall our women gives me many a sleepless night. I expect an invasion; nevertheless, I detest war. But Mr. Cobden and Co.'s doctrines prostitute national honour to the 'wealth of nations,' and have left us unable to defend ourselves, or even to arm our soldiers as well as savages can afford to arm themselves.

CXXV.

I do not remember exactly what I said on E- V's birthday about God's designs. A conversation grows out of warm striking of mind on mind, and it is almost impossible to reproduce it. At this moment it has as entirely gone from me as if it had never been. I can only conjecture that I said something to the effect that God's plan was not thwarted by transgression and a new plan begun ; as, in a siege, the plan of the invader is frustrated by a sap meeting him, and then a countersap and fresh mines carried on below to foil that; but that God's idea of Humanity is, and ever was, Humanity as it is in Jesus Christ; that so far as it fails of that, His idea may be said to have not been realised; but we must be cautious of first using this language to express rudely our mode of conceiving a truth, and then arguing from it, as if it were real, and not merely a human mode of thought. The idea of a tree or plant-say the vine—is of the tree in its perfection. In the English climate you may say it has failed, that is, it has not attained the stature which of right belongs to the plant; it is a fallen, abortive thing; but you do not mean by that, that its Creator intended that particular plant to succeed, and was disappointed in the attempt. Fallen, man is, in comparison of the Divine idea of Humanity,

but it was no failure. However, it is impossible to write out in cold blood, unstimulated by something naturally going before, on such a subject. It becomes a mere dry essay.

CXXVI.

Lewes Friday, 7'45 p.m.

From Tuesday until this moment I have scarcely had an instant. We are in court by nine, and directly it is over I dine either with the judges or the high sheriff. We are this moment out, after eleven hours' sitting. A horrible murder has occupied them all day, which is not over yet. We begin to-morrow at eight a.m. I shall write to you shortly, with an account of the last few days. I am thoroughly and completely tired.

I write during an interval of a most painful character-during the trial of an unhappy woman for the murder of her husband. She is at this moment in a swoon. The judge has stopped the case until her recovery. I am sitting close to him, and his observations to me from time to time seem to show that there

is not the slightest chance of her escape. It is a horrible case. She poisoned him in order to marry a young man, or boy, who has just given evidence against her in a disgraceful way. His only excuse is, that she had already tried to throw the murder upon him, and I believe he had a hand in it; so, too, Baron Parke has just told me he thinks. The last witness is now giving his evidence; and when the counsel for the defence has spoken, and the judge has given his charge, I imagine the jury cannot doubt ten minutes about their verdict-that being 'guilty,' her fate is sealed. No, I am wrong, her own child is just called to witness against her a poor little boy seven years old. The poor miserable creature herself, during the trial, which lasted all yesterday, and for the hour which it has continued this morning, has been almost in a swooning state. A quarter of an hour ago Dr. Taylor, the celebrated analyst, descended into the dock, and prescribed for her, the court meanwhile waiting several minutes in dead silence for her recovery.

Dr. Taylor gave most interesting medical evidence yesterday, respecting the chemical analysis by which he discovered the presence of arsenic in large quantities in the deceased. The judge said to me as he took the book, 'Now you will hear some evidence worth listening to.'

I am thankful to say the little boy has not been permitted to give evidence; he knew nothing about an oath. Nothing could have been more horrible than an only child taking his own mother's life away.

I could write no more yesterday: the trial became too intensely interesting and painful to do anything. The judge's charge lasted, I should think, an hour and a half. The jury retired. An hour and a half passed in terrible suspense. At last they came the foreman said at once, 'GUILTY.' Baron Parke put on the black cap. The poor woman, with burning cheeks and eyes as brilliant as fire with excitement, was held up between two turnkeys to receive her sentence. 'My lord,' said the clerk of arraigns, 'you have omitted two essential words: you did not say what death she is to die.' So the fainting thing was held up again, and the last sentence of the award repeated, with the words 'hanged by the neck.' I felt as if I were a guilty man in sitting by to see a woman murdered. But my eye caught the figure of the scoundrel Hickman, standing by to hear her who was suffering all for him condemned to die, without the slightest appearance of emotion. It was a most sickening spectacle from first to last; and there is not the smallest chance of her life being spared.

My sermon was delivered badly and hurriedly. On Friday and Saturday the sheriff was away, and I did his duty for him of escorting the judges. Every time I returned to my lodgings alone in the carriage-and-four I was not a little amused by the blast of trumpets which saluted me the moment I put my foot upon the carriage steps, and the mute awe of the crowd, who were imposed upon by my robes with the idea of something very grand. I felt half inclined to bid the row of javelin-men who uncovered in a line as I passed, and the trumpeters, have done

with the solemn absurdity, at least in my case but I reflected that forms and pageants are of far deeper importance for the masses than at first sight appears. A judge in black robes, instead of scarlet, would not be half a judge. Many reflections of this kind occurred to my mind, some of which I put into my afternoon sermon; in the morning I was too hoarse and unwell to preach.

CXXVII.

March 26.

That miserable murderess, it is said, has confessed her crime, and exonerated Hickman entirely; but the truth of this latter portion of her story I rather doubt. Hanging a woman is a hideous thought. The impressions of last week will, I think, reverse for ever all my intellectual convictions of the need and obligation of capital punishment; yet I think I could have strung up Hickman with my own hands with considerable satisfaction; so strongly do natural instincts, partly dependent upon the mere difference between man and woman, bias, and even determine, judgments that seem purely intellectual, and framed in what Lord Bacon called 'a dry light.'

It shows, besides, how utterly unfit woman would be for innumerable functions which American speculation would open to her; for her feelings warp even more than ours, and that which is her glory in its place, would unfit her for all those duties which require the abeyance of the feelings. This is the very reason, viz., her deceivability through feeling, which St. Paul wisely assigns against her usurpation of the offices of public teaching, &c., that Adam was not deceived, but Eve, &c. How deep inspiration is! so deep that, like the clear sea around the West Indies, it seems shallow until you try to dive into it.

A thought occurred to me while writing, about invasion, which escaped by the time I got to the end of the above paragraph. It was this—the distinction between the French spirit in war and ours. Theirs is 'La Gloire !' Ours is 'Duty!' And this was the real source of England's sublime battle-cry at Trafalgar, and the reason, too, why English troops can stand to