She got her wish; but it was not until she had become ossified.

Upon the post-mortem examination I could not, however, but remark that, even denaturalised as her discipline had made her, she did not look like genuine healthy bone, but a sort of gristle, neither red nor white, neither hard nor soft, but tough—altogether an unnatural, morbid, amorphous mass, like unprepared caoutchouc when you cut it through, only not so elastic.

The surgeon shrugged his shoulders, and dropped her into a jar of spirits of wine, to take her place among the monstrosities of an anatomical museum, observing that she was too hard for a feminine pincushion, and too soft for a masculine cannon-ball. Glenara, Glenara, now read me my dream.

XCVI.

May 7.

was very enthusiastic about Louis Blanc, his philanthropy, his beaux yeux noirs and pensées, his aristocratic bearing, and bien gantées hands. It is very difficult, in a woman's enthusiasm for a system, to eliminate the adventitious and personal influences and get at the real amount of intelligent and genuine admiration of the belles idées which remains as a residuum behind. Ravignan and socialism-nay, perhaps I may add with a little sly malice, Mazzinianism, mesmerism, to say nothing of homoeopathy-would contend against us, dull careworn expositors of threadbare truths, with fearful odds on their side, if beaux yeux noirs and white gloves are to be unconsciously accepted as legitimate weapons.

I am sorry I could not go with you to the Exhibition opening, but as circumstances then were it would have been impossible. I was in a very small humour for any enjoyment whatever. For myself I do not feel the smallest regret. Gala days and processions never, even as a boy, gave me any pleasure, and I always feel inclined to moralise in the Hamlet vein when I see grown men and women playing at theatricals off the stage. For instance, the pageant which I saw on the opening of Parliament suggested no thoughts but those which belong to a sense of the

ridiculous. A review, suggesting the conception of a real battle, is a different thing, and impresses me to tears. I cannot see a regiment manœuvre nor artillery in motion without a' choking sensation, but pomps with feathers and jewels and fine carriages always make me sad or else contemptuous. Pageants never leave a sense of grandeur, but always of meanness and paltriness, on my mind. It is not so with a mountain or a picture. I would far, far rather go through the Exhibition without a crowd, and quietly get a few ideas, as I trust I shall do.

I am delighted to find that you enjoy the Exhibition. When did I despise it as a frivolous thing? The pomp of the procession I cannot care for-the Exhibition itself is improving and intellectual.

XCVII.

Ralph King, Lady Lovelace's son, who has taken a strange fancy to venerate me, came down from town with his tutor to be at church on Sunday, by his own wish. He came to breakfast with me on Monday, and with great naïveté and originality expressed his interest in the view I had taken on Sunday of the non-spirituality of the yearning for death, and remarked 'that it was suicide without the courage of suicide.' An evangelical lady came into the vestry to express her bewilderment at the doctrine. I replied that I thought it was best to set a standard that was real, actual, and human, not one either insincerely or morbidly professed; that many an evangelical clergyman, after an ultra-spiritual discourse, in which desire for heaven and God at once was taught as the only Christian feeling, would go home and sit over his glass of port very comfortably, satisfied with it as before, until heaven comes-which I considered a sure way of making all unreal. 'Well,' said she, 'I thought you, of all people, were like St. Paul, and that you would wish for a heavenlier life as much as he did.' 'First of all,' said I, 'you thought wrong; next, if I do wish to die, it is when I am in pain, or out of conceit with life, which happens pretty often, but which I do not consider spirituality. It is only an ungracious way of saying, "I am dissatisfied with what Thou hast given

me, and do not like the duties that are mine at all. I am in pain, and want to be out of pain." And I suppose a great many very commonplace people could say the same piece of sublime discontent. Could not you?'

The fair saint was silenced.

XCVIII.

To a Member of his Congregation.

Brighton May 9, 1851.

My dear -I thank you much for the interesting letter you sent me, which I enclose. I did not know Mr. beyond the acquaintance of a single evening, but was extremely pleased with his son-in-law. He is at rest, I doubt not, now-in that deep awful rest which is the most endearing of all the attributes of the life that shall be the rest which is order instead of disorder—harmony instead of chaotic passions in jar and discord, and duty instead of the conflict of self-will with His loving will. It is a noble thought, and I never hear of any one who has probably attained it without a feeling of congratulation rising to the lips. You sign yourself 'gratefully.' If that is in reference to any good in instruction you may think you have derived from my ministry-and I can conceive no other—there is in the kind feeling far more to humble me than to give me joy. May God bless you!

XCIX.

To the Same.

Brighton May 16, 1851. My dear,I am deeply grateful for your note, but, I can only say again, more surprised and humbled by it than even gladdened. Yet I can rejoice, if not for my own sake, yet for yours. That a ministry full of imperfection and blind darkness should do any good is a source to me of ever new wonder. That one in which words and truth, if truth come, wrung out of mental pain and inward struggle, should now and then touch a corre

sponding chord in minds with which, from invincible and almost incredible shyness, I rarely come in personal contact, is not so surprising, for I suppose the grand principle is the universal one -we can only heal one another with blood-whether it comes from the agony itself, or the feeble and meaner pains of common minds and hearts. If it were not for such rewards and consolations unexpectedly presenting themselves at times, the Christian Ministry would be, at least to some minds, and in the present day, insupportable. Once more thank you. I do trust, with all my heart, that your estimate of the effects of what you hear on your own heart may not be delusive. I know that spoken words impress, and that impression has its danger as well as its good. Hence I cannot even rejoice without fear, for I confess that at best pulpit instruction seems to me to be as pernicious as it is efficacious. And Carlyle's view of stump oratory is only too mournfully true. To spend life and waste all strength of nerve and heart upon it, seems like a duty of sowing the seasand.

Still, some good is done, but much less than people think; and the drawback, which you correctly state, is one which must always be allowed for as a very large deduction from its apparent effects — I mean the absence of any immediate opportunity of carrying transient impressions into action, and the exhaustion of the feelings which are perpetually stimulated for no definite result.

At the highest, all I count on is the probability that in many minds a thought here and there may strike root and grow, mixing with life and ordinary trains of feeling a somewhat higher tone than otherwise might have been, and bringing forth results which will be unconscious and utterly untraceable to the mind that originated them, just as it would be impossible to say whence the thistle-down came, that is resulting now in a plentiful crop of weeds, alas !-the simile is an ominous one--on the downs above.

C.

To the Same.

Brighton May 17, 1851.

My dear -I send you back Carlyle's letter. I have read Bushnell; there are some good things in him, but on the whole I think him most shadowy and unsatisfactory. He does not sufficiently show that dogmas express eternal verities and facts; that they are what a mathematician might call approximative formulas to truth. In this spirit I always ask-what does that dogma mean? Not what did it mean in the lips of those who spoke it? How, in my language, can I put into form the underlying truth, in correcter form if possible, but in only approximative form after all? In this way purgatory absolution, Mariolatry, become to me fossils, not lies.

Of course people speak bitterly against my teaching, and of course I feel it keenly. But I cannot help it, and I cannot go out of my way to conciliate opposition and dislike. Misapprehension will account for part. Partly the divergence is real. But to place the spirit above the letter, and the principle above the rule, was the aim of His Life, and the cause of the dislike he met with: therefore I am content. And this, by the way, affords an answer to one part of your perplexity—viz. whether it be not dangerous to draw so exact a parallel between His office and ours? I only reply that, except in feeling a fellowship and oneness with that Life, and recognising parallel · feelings and parallel struggles, triumphantly sometimes, I do not see how life could be tolerable at all. He was Humanity, and in Him alone my Humanity becomes intelligible. Do not tremble at difficulties and shoreless expanses of truth, if you feel drifting into them. God's truth must be boundless. Tractarians and Evangelicals suppose that it is a pond which you can walk round and say, 'I hold the truth.' What, all? Yes, all; there it is, circumscribed, defined, proved, and you are an infidel if you do not think this pond of mine, that the great Mr. Scott,