readers. There will never be a rush for it to the book-club in the county town. Young-lady readers will for the most part vote it a bore: and solid old gentlemen of bread-and-butter intellect will judge Thorndale and his friends a crew of morbid dreamers, -though the book, amid sublimer speculations, sets out here and there much common sense on the affairs of practical life. But we trust that Mr. Smith may find an audience fit, and not so few. It elevates and refines the mind to hold converse with an author of his stamp. Ard how much the world must have gone through before such a character as Thorndale's became possible! No appliance of modern luxury, no contrivance of modern science, 'says so much as the conception of such a character for the civilisation and artificiality of our modern life. Although the book is mainly dissertational, the reader will find in it much exquisite narrative, and much skilful delineation of character, in the history of the hero and his friends, their views and fates. Yet, while we cordially acknowledge in Mr. Smith a man of refined and pathetic genius, we should not be doing justice to ourselves if we did not say, that in all the views of life and society, whether hopeful or desponding, which are set out in the book, we have felt strongly a great blank and void. We believe, and we humbly hope we shall never cease believing, that Christianity shows us the true stand-point from which to look at man, and the true lever by which to elevate him. We believe that the same influence which has raised our hopes to 'life and immortality,' must and will elevate and purify this

mortal life. We believe that it is false philosophy to ignore the existence, power, and teaching of the Christian faith and to take pains, before looking into the framework and the prospects of society, to exclude the only light which can search out the dark recesses, and dissipate the gloom that hangs before. Why should a man persist in wading through Chat Moss on a drenching December day, when the means are provided of flitting over it, light and warm and dry? Why should we go up to Box-hill, and declare we shall dig our way through it with our own nails and fingers (being in haste); when we know that it has been nobly tunnelled for us already?

The first book, entitled The Last Retreat, consists of disjointed fragments of thought, cast upon the page with little effort at arrangement. All these fragments are well worthy of preservation; many of them are of striking originality and force. The dying man becomes aware that a peculiar beauty has been added to the beautiful scenes around him by the close approach of death. He says:

I owe to death half the beauty of this scene, and altogether owe to him the constant serenity with which I gaze upon it. . . . Strange! how the beauty and mystery of all nature is heightened by the near prospect of that coming darkness which will sweep it all away!-that night which will have no star in it! These heavens, with all their glories, will soon be blotted out for me. The eye, and that which is behind the eye, will soon close, soon rest, and there will be no more beauty, no more mystery for me.

What an air of freshness, of novelty, and surprise does each

old and familiar object assume to me when I think of parting with it for ever!

There is no more of ennui now. Time is too short, and this world too wonderful. Everything I behold is new and strange. If a dog looks up at me in the face, I startle at his intelligence. I am in a foreign land,' you say. True, all the world has become foreign land to me. I am perpetually on a voyage of discovery.

Very true, very real, is this feeling, drawn from the much-suggesting Νυξ γὰρ ἔρχεται! We really do enjoy things intensely, because we know we are not to have them long. And how well does experience certify that the most familiar scene grows new and strange to us when we are forthwith to leave it. The room in which we have sat day by day for years,-rise to quit it for the last time, and we shall see something about its proportions, its aspect, that we never saw before. The little walk we have paced hundreds of times, how different every evergreen beside it will seem, when we pace it silently, knowing that we shall do so no more!

Here is an apt and happy comparison :

When the lofty and barren mountain, says a legend I have somewhere read, was first upheaved into the sky, and from its elevation looked down on the plains below, and saw the valley and the less elevated hills covered with verdure and fruitful trees, it sent up to Brahma something like a murmur of complaint, 'Why thus barren? Why these scarred and naked sides exposed to the eye of man?' And Brahma answered, "The very light shall clothe thee, and the shadow of the passing cloud shall be as a royal mantle. More verdure would be less light. Thou shalt share in the azure of heaven, and the youngest and whitest cloud

of a summer day shall nestle in thy bosom. Thou belongest half

to us.'

So was the mountain dowered. And so, too, have the loftiest minds of men been in all ages dowered. To lower elevations have been given the pleasant verdure, the vine, and the olive. Light, light alone, and the deep shadow of the passing cloud,— these are the gifts of the prophets of the race.

Thorndale felt strongly what every reflective man must feel, that the ordinary arguments for the immortality of the soul, drawn from the light of nature, are quite insufficient and unsatisfactory. It is upon entirely different grounds, and these grounds partaking often but little of the nature of argument, that the belief in the doctrine really rests. Still the argument fills the page; and is appended to the doctrine much as in cheap Gothic buildings a buttress is added to a wall which does not need its support, because it at least looks as if it supported the wall. Thorndale's illustration is this:

In old woodcuts one sometimes sees a vessel in full sail upon the ocean, and perched aloft upon the clouds are a number of infant cherubs, with puffed-out cheeks, blowing at the sails. The swelling canvas is evidently filled by a stronger wind than these infant cherubs, sitting in the clouds, could supply. They do not fill the sail; but they were thought to fill up the picture prettily enough.

In truth, the usual arguments for immortality are quite futile: none more so than that founded upon the immateriality of the soul. The soul's immateriality is assumed to be proved by a manifest petitio principii, to use the logician's phrase. The soul is immaterial, we are told, because it thinks and feels; and matter

H

cannot think and feel. But if the soul be material, why then matter can think and feel. Thorndale indicates as follows the foundation of his own belief:

I think the contemplation of God brings with it the faith in immortality. The mere imperfections of our happiness here, our blundering lives and inequitable societies, our unrewarded virtues and unavenged crimes, our present need of the great threat of future punishments, these do not, in my estimation, form safe grounds to proceed upon. They enter largely as grounds of a popular faith; but it would be unwise to build upon them because to rest on such arguments would lead us to the conclusion, that in proportion as society advances to perfection, and men are more wise and just, in the same proportion will they have less presumption for the hope of immortality.

:

We confess that we stand in no great fear of this last suggestion. There is little prospect, as yet, of this world becoming too good to need another. We need now, and we shall need for many a year, all the comfort and help we can draw from the world that sets this right.'

Our readers will thank us for extracting the following passage

A fond mother loses her infant. What more tender than the hope she has to meet it again in heaven? Does she really, then, expect to find a little child in heaven? some angel nurseling that she may eternally take to her bosom, fondle, feed, and caress? Oh, do not ask her! I would not have her ask herself. The consolatory vision springs spontaneously from the mother's grief. It is nature's own remedy. She gave that surpassing love, and a grief as poignant must follow. She cannot take away the grief: she half transforms into a hope.

It is indeed quite true, that in the attempt to define with precision the consolations and hopes which