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aloud, can I never, can I never be mistaken; these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes of my lost love—of the Lady— of the Lady Ligeia!'

There is certainly something very thrilling in the minute description in this tale of the persevering and awful struggle of the Will to break the trammels of death, and in the strange gradual transformation of the second wife into the first. Poe prided himself much upon the psychical ingenuity of the conception. He tells us he regarded the piece as containing the highest-class thought which he had ever written.

Our space forbids that we should give any further specimens of the wild and strange fictions which proceeded from the dark and distempered imagination of this miserable but extraordinary genius. Should any of our readers desire to extend their acquaintance with the works of Poe, we may refer them to the pieces entitled The Masque of the Red Death, The Teli-tale Heart, William Wilson, and The Fall of the House of Usher, as specimens of his power in the realm of the eerie and fearful; and to the pieces entitled The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Gold-bug, Hans Pfaal, and The Purloined Letter, as specimens of tales which draw their effect from their circumstantiality of detail and the closeness with which they follow up a train of reasoning. Hans Pfaal is the account of a voyage to the moon, given with such an appearance of truthful simplicity, and with such an apparent earnestness of desire to explain the precise rationale of every step in the process which brought the voyager to his destination, that one can almost fancy that the story

might, in many quarters, receive implicit credit. The sketches called The Domain of Arnheim and Landor's Cottage are remarkable examples of Poe's power of life-like description.

On the whole, it appears to us that, whether we regard the character of Poe's genius, or the nature of his career, we are looking upon as sad and strange a phenomenon as can be found in literary history. Principle he seems to have had none. Decision of character was entirely lacking. His envy of those more favoured by fortune than himself amounted to raging ferocity. He starved his wife, and broke her heart. He estranged the friends who were most firmly resolved to hold by him. He foully slandered his best benefactors. He had no faith in man or woman. His biographer tells us that he regarded society as composed altogether of villains.' He had no sympathy, no honour, no truth. And we carry with us from the contemplation of the entire subject the sad recollection of a powerful intellect, a most vivid imagination, an utterly evil heart, and a career of guilt, misery, and despair.

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VII.

GEORGE STEPHENSON AND THE RAILWAY.*

ONCE upon a time, the idea called up before the

mind's eye of an Englishman by the name of a

Railway, was that of a rickety and uneven track, consisting of two parallel bars of cast-iron, with a horse-path, deeply indented and never repaired, between these two iron bars. Along this track a wretched horse, probably blind and certainly lame, drew three or four rudelyconstructed wagons a few miles from the coal-pit where they were filled, to the wharf where their contents were tilted on shipboard. Even at that day the advantages of the railway were manifest; for the poor animal already mentioned was able, without any considerable effort, to draw along this tram-road a burden four or five times as great as that which it could have drawn along an ordinary highway. Next there came a period when the steam-engine, at that time associated in the minds of most men with smoke, noise, and dirt, came to be employed to convey the wagons of coal

*The Life of George Stephenson, Railway Engineer. By Samuel Smiles. London: 1857.

from the fields of proprietors of an enterprising turn and with a taste for novelty. The engine made use of was extremely heavy and clumsy: it gave forth horrible screams as of a being in torment, the result of steam escaping at high pressure: it poured out volumes of smoke; and while it succeeded partially in dragging heavy weights, it succeeded thoroughly in disseminating along the track it followed all the benefits of immediate vicinity to the coal-pit it came from. It was, as far as dirt, smoke, and noise were concerned, a travelling coal-pit brought to the door of each house it passed. It blighted all the neighbouring fields with smoke: it alarmed horses and men by its unearthly noises and its unwieldy movements: it jolted and strained along at the rate of two and a half miles in the hour; and in some cases it was regularly attended by a team of horses, who were to draw it home when it broke down, which it did daily.

Such was the earliest type of the railway and the locomotive. Never was there contrast more complete than that between these things as they were forty years since, and as they are to-day. For the slow, awkward, dirty engine of former times, we have the elegant, smokeless, noiseless locomotive, so neat and ornamental with its burnished brass,—with all its parts playing so smoothly and exactly,—with its pace of fifty or sixty miles an hour,-ready to dash out into the bleak waste upon the dark winter night, no man dreaming that it will fail to bear him safely and swiftly over it,— coming in to the minute assigned by Bradshaw after a run of four hundred miles. And as for the railway

itself, it has changed from the old blighted track to a trim road between green slopes of cutting and over graceful viaducts of better than classical design; its stationhouses along the way being pretty little cottages covered with flowers and evergreens; winding through parks and pleasure-grounds, where, if it be not too near, there is a positive beauty in the rapid flitting of the train of carriages among the clumps of wood, and the white vapour dying away after it is gone. And for the old plateway (for so it was called at first), laid down in the rudest way, and only on a dead level, we have now gigantic roads which hold right on in spite of all intervening obstacles,-piercing underneath the hills, flying over rivers and valleys, spanning across stormy arms of the sea,--the grandest triumphs of modern engineering skill. And while railway and locomotive have thus changed, an equal change has passed upon the burden they convey. Not that British Railways have ever quite forgotten their old freight—coal, once their only freight : but after all, the great feature in railway traffic is the conveyance of passengers. And among the millions who yearly avail themselves of the facilities afforded by the railway are numbered people of all sorts and conditions from our good Queen, who flits through her country in the state carriage of a special train, to the poor working man or woman who pays a penny a mile for a seat in the third-class carriage of a parliamentary one. As for the moral effects of the railway in abolishing local prejudices and enlightening men's minds, we can only say that they are wholly incalculable.

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