curiosity at Walsingham and Hastings, whom, except in large societies, she had never seen before. The poet was a man of middle age, and memorable appearance, with a face at once calm, thoughtful, refined and elevated. He was not so remarkable for the grace of manner which is spontaneous, and the result of the whole character and structure, as for the dignity which is its origin, and, till quite habitual, is always self-conscious. The changes of his countenance were not rapid, and the signs of emotion were few and slight. His conversation was ready, universal, finished; and it would have been hard for any cultivated person to see him without receiving an impression of the utmost height and fulness of mental accomplishment. Every body admitted that he said to them all that they had a right to hear, and even gave them images and thoughts of which they had little previous conception. But almost every one also felt that between the inner man and them there was an insurmountable barrier, a medium of most shining and crystalline, but most cold and massive ice; and from this very cause he had the greater power of alluring and fascinating, by free and spontaneous movements, the few, and those chiefly women, with whom he had ever chosen to appear on terms of sympathy. His poems were pre-eminently light, clear, and rounded, delineating innumerable shapes of beauty, chosen with rare felicity from all nature and life. But they dealt with the painful, the austere, and the sublime only so far as these could be subdued and brightened to the purposes of graceful and serene art. Nay, even his own existence, which had been to him a work of art, seemed constructed on the same principle. He had apparently cut off from it whatever elements of ampler and more awful being he could not, as an artist and a worker in outward life, thoroughly comprehend, rise above, and at will control. He seemed frivolous only to the gravely trivial. He passed for oracular and prophetic with many of those whose faith in the invisible is cherished as a sense of dominion over a nobler realm than the outward, rather than as the consciousness of a thankful subjection.

To him, in some things, Hastings afforded a pleasant contrast. He was a man on whom twenty years of

hardship and adventure sat lightly and cheerfully. His set and alert figure suited well with his undistinguished, but lively and shrewd countenance. His conversation was in a great degree made up of common remarks upon uncommon things and people; and where he had only com. mon objects to deal with, commonest of the common were all his views and feelings. But when he spoke of the Brazilian forests, the Steppes of Tartary, or the plains of Caffraria, the topic gave an interest which never would have arisen from the speaker. Light-hearted courage, and good-hu. moured kindliness, had been the ostrich wings to help him smoothly over the world. By profession a sailor, and still holding a lieutenant's commission, he had spent the long intervals of his service in travelling. He had been present, in the same year, at the levees of the American President and the Persian Schah, and had made the Pope laugh by an anecdote which he had picked up a few weeks before in a Turkman tent. In every land he had made friends of all he had lived among, and even seemed to have formed an amicable acquaintance with the beasts, and plants, and the very aspect of the different countries. He knew something of natural history, and had a collection of curiosities, some of which, as they happened to fall under his hand, he would carry with him for a week or two, wherever he might be, and then lock them up again, in some huge sea-chest, for another imprisonment of years. Men he knew superficially, but on many sides, and dealt with them by instinctive cheerful readiness and good-fellowship, rather than from any systematic views. No man saw more clearly and moved more lightly within his own limits, but no limits could be more definite or impassable than his, and although they embraced the five regions of the globe and all its seas, they were still but narrow. All men, however, derived pleasure from so clear, self-possessed, and bright a presence. He was to many a cordial against that melancholy which he had never felt, for the first shadow of it drove him on new undertakings; and fresh scenes and objects were to him always delightful.

Of the rest of the company, Maria found none so noticeable as these.

Some had carried their peculiar technical talent, whatever it might be, up to considerable skill; but the man had dwindled within the workman. Others appeared to have merged their whole individual charac

ters in habit and social position. In the best, what there was of genuine and large, did not come so prominently on the surface as to be discernible by a rapid glance.

On the day after their arrival at Beechurst, Sir Charles Harcourt rode with Maria, and two or three others, through the park, and into the wildest of its forest scenery. The shifting vistas, broken openings, and deep recesses, afforded an ever varying interest. One or other was perpetually calling the attention of the rest to the rough baronial boldness of some huge old stem-to the graceful outline and noble branchings of some mature, still undecaying tree-to the full and splendid colourings of the foliage. An artist who was with them, often tried to mark out some view into a distinct and framed picture. Walsingham, too, entered eagerly into this study, but often, also, spoke to Maria, in a strain that she better sympathized with, of the merely artificial technical character of all such attempts, and how completely they confess our incapacity to apprehend and represent the unity of nature as a whole, and so endeavour to impress a fictitious unity on some smaller and more manageable part. She was full of enjoyment, and said that a forest was, to her, imperishable fairy-land.

After a ride of an hour, they passed out of the enclosed park and woodland, and came through a deep green flowery lane, on to the edge of a common covered with furze and heath, and saw at no great distance a small but very neat farm-house, with its farm-buildings close about it, overshadowed by three or four old elms, and appearing the ancestral abode of quiet prosperity. Maria was so pleased at the sight, that Sir Charles proposed to visit the farmer, who was a tenant of his; and they were all soon at the gate of the little garden in front of the house. Under the guidance of their host, who knew the house, they went straight into the kitchen. Wilson, the farmer, had come in from the fields, and was sitting in his brown arm-chair, while his wife was busy preparing dinner. The man was dark complexioned, spare,

and tall, with a keen and honest look, which gained strength and character from a certain twist of the face, drawing one eyebrow somewhat up, and similarly disposing one side of the firm mouth. The wife looked clean and kind; and in both, the ease and decision of manner were remarkable with which they received their landlord and his companions. Sir Charles, when out shooting, had often visited them, and now asked for their only son, James, who had not yet come in from work, but was said to be quite well. Maria spoke quietly and goodnaturedly to the woman, who answered her with sufficient intelligence, till the visitors were all surprised by the entrance of a young woman from another room. She was a tall and handsome country girl, in her common dark dress, with her arms bared, and looking as if she had come straight from the dairy. Sir Charles asked who she was, as he did not remember to have seen her, and the farmer said she was an orphan niece, who had lately come to live with them. Ann blushed all over when she saw the unexpected company; but even when the blush subsided, she had a deep and bright red complexion, which looked all warm and living, and in her was pleasing, though in a lady it would hardly have been admired. Her rather square face was, however, regularly formed; and her dark eyes and hair, white teeth, and look of perfect good-humour and simplicity, made her a very agreeable spectacle. Her figure was robust, but graceful. Every one looked at her with a smile, and Maria with the kindliest goodwill and admiration. The landlord first spoke to her, and said he hoped she liked Burntwood.

"Yes, sir, very much; uncle and aunt are very good to me."

"And, I am sure," he said, laughing, "James is equally good to you." "Yes, sir;" and the girl coloured and looked down.

"Well, you must not be ungrateful to him for his kindness, you know." Maria made an answer unnecessary by asking for a glass of water, which the girl went for, and, before she returned, James himself came in. He was an active, well-tempered, and lively-looking man, with less appearance of hard strength than his father -for he had not had so much to fight against-but a face and manner that were sure signs of thorough truth and affectionateness.

"That scene," said Walsingham, after they were all again on horseback, "is a complete Idyll. There are people whose aspect and manner give one at once so satisfying an image of active cheerful life, in perfect harmony with their circumstances, that one feels, to enlarge their sphere or their minds would be to spoil the whole; and if you suppose both changed, it becomes not an altered, but a totally different thing. Those people are, without knowing it, and so long as they do not attempt to be any thing other than what they are, a perfect representation of nature and life. The mere limits of the family mark them out as distinctly as a poet could desire; and, at the same time, they are in constant living combination with all the world in which they act, and with a whole human neighbourhood. But if you tried to make them reflect more widely, or to feel more earnestly than they do, you would, no doubt, introduce confusion and anxiety among them.'

"If all there," said Maria, "be as peaceful as it looks, I cannot imagine it to have become and continued so, except by means of religious faith and principle; and, surely, no feelings or reflections of any other kind could raise them so high as that."

"Probably," replied Walsingham, "their faith is a mere dutiful warmhearted acquiescence in things that they as little understand as if their Bible were still in Hebrew and Greek. And well for them that it is so. What vain self-upbraidings and fears, and what vague monstrous images of fancied good and evil, would press on and destroy their quiet hearts and confound their cheerful activity, if you could awaken self-consciousness in them, and make them dream of conversions, beatitudes, and perditions!"

Maria looked down and spoke in a low voice, but very earnestly, while she said-" Surely, however little they may understand their faith, it must, if they have it at all, be essentially the same, and produce the same fruits in their hearts, as in the most intelligent and expanded Christians.'

Maria blushed deeper and deeper while saying this, for she felt herself engaged unawares in a dispute with one of the most celebrated of her contemporaries. But he only answered, with a bland smile-"I fear we often deceive ourselves by using the same word for very different things, and perhaps 'faith' is one of them. In a wise man it means knowledge, and in a foolish one ignorance." He then turned to Sir Charles, and asked him if he could tell them any thing of the history of the family.

"I have been thinking," he replied, "how little we can trust appearances such as those which you and Miss Lascelles have been talking of. So far from the Wilson family having had the quiet and happy existence you imagined, they met with a domestic misfortune little more than a year ago, which seemed likely to kill both the father and mother. Besides the son whom you saw, they had an only daughter-a small, delicate-looking, pretty blue-eyed girl. She seemed only eighteen or nineteen, but I believe was in reality of age, when she became acquainted with a young man who was private tutor in a family in the neighbourhood. After a few months' acquaintance she was persuaded to go off with him. It was said that they were secretly married; but from that time to this nothing has been heard of either of them."

"Ah!" said Walsingham; "I dare say he talked sentiment and speculation to her, and turned her head with the uncongenial element. Had she fallen in love with a farmer's son who had never thought beyond his calling, no harm could have happened."

Maria said nothing, but she thought, Had she been a person of religious principle she would not have defied her parents in such a matter, nor run the risk of breaking their hearts; and religion might have enlarged her mind as effectually as her lover's philosophy.

The afternoon of the following day was so rainy that none of the party could leave the house, and several of them were assembled in the large and noble library. Walsingham talked to Maria, and evidently felt much pleasure in drawing out her clear and strong sense for all that had lain with in her sphere, as well as much admiration of her beauty. She had at first been a little afraid of him, for genius is a power which, till we become familiar with it, has something that disturbs, nay repels, as well as fascinates. But she possessed herself too deeply for this to last, and was too open to all higher impressions not to be won by his calm and manifold signifi

cance.

I

Miss Constable, who was near, then said "How tiresome this rain is! wish one could have a world without rain !"

A man of science, who was standing near, immediately began to explain, learnedly, how impossible this would be, without changing all the other characters of the globe as to its atmosphere and productions.

Walsingham turned, smiling, to Maria, and said "In truth we can form no complete and consistent picture of any other state of existence than this, nor construct the ideal of any fairer world."

"Do you think this state of existence complete and consistent? It seems to me full of endless contradictions."

"Our business here is precisely that of removing or reconciling these, and rounding-off our life into as smooth and large a circle as possible."

"I cannot get over the feeling that the work is here hopeless, and that we can never be at peace but by trying to grow out of our natural state into a totally different, and far higher and purer one."

"But can you form any distinct image of such a state, with all its suitable outward accompaniments? They must, I fancy, be only fragments and shadows of what we see about us here. One swallow, you know, does not make a summer, nor will one picture of an angel with white wings and a diamond

crown fill up the notion of an eternal heaven."

"Perhaps we cannot frame any such ideal as you speak of. I am sure I cannot. But, on the other hand, there is surely a want in human nature of a higher life than that of mere labour and pleasure. We cannot say exactly in what forms that life, if it were all in all, would clothe itself. But it would be misery and despair to give up the hope of it."

"I believe that whatever it really promises of good is attainable now by due cultivation, and that, too, in a real world which perfectly suits us, and which we may daily better understand, rule, and embellish."

"I cannot even wish to subdue the longing after a blessedness for which this world affords no adequate image and no congenial home."

"I fear it is this vague longing for that which we can do nothing to realise that renders all our efforts uncertain, sad, and fruitless. Believe that here, on this earth, is our true heaven, and we can make it so. Thus, too, only can we escape all the inward struggle and convulsion between the inevitable Actual and a Possible never to be attained."

"No doubt you would then cut the knot; but is there not still a thread which unites us to the hope, vague and colourless as it is, of a nobler being in a more appropriate scene?"

"Be it so," said Walsingham, with his tranquil smile. "For my part, I only hope at present that you will not send me away from you to look for any happier ideal position. I am contented where I am."

Maria, too, smiled faintly, but said nothing. After a pause, Walsingham, who had looked down as if in thought, went on,

"In fact, we lose by our careless indolence the advantages we might enjoy, and at the same time dream of those which are impossible. We will not walk because it is less trouble to dream of flying. No wonder we make little of our lives compared with their capacities, when so few ever think of what they are capable. The world we live in is to most of us so mean,