Christianity affords us with respect to our departed friends, we sometimes only destroy what we desired to grasp. And it would be hard for us to say exactly how and in what form we hope to meet again the dear ones who have gone before us. Perhaps Archbishop Whately is right, when he suggests as one possible reason why revelation leaves the details so little filled in of the picture of immortality which it draws, that some margin may be left for the weakness of human thought and wish; and that in matters beside the great essential centre-truth, each may believe or may hope that which he would love the best. And in the matter of a little child's loss, we know that two quite opposite beliefs have been cherished. For ourselves, it seems more natural to think of the little thing as it left us; we believe that, in the case of most of us, the little brother or sister that died long ago remains in remembrance the same young thing for ever. Many years are passed, and we have grown older and more careworn since our last sister died; but she never grows older with the passing years; and if God spares us to fourscore, we never shall think of her as other than the youthful creature she faded. Still there is pathos and nature in Dickens's description, how the father and mother who lost in early childhood one of two twin sisters, always pictured to themselves, year after year, the dead child growing in the world beyond the grave, in equal progress as the living child grew on earth. And Longfellow, in his touching poem of Resignation, suggests a like idea :

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Day after day, we think what she is doing
In those bright realms of air:

Year after year, her tender steps pursuing,
Behold her grown more fair.

Thus do we walk with her, and keep unbroken,
The bond which nature gives,

Thinking that our remembrance, though unspoken,
May reach her where she lives.

Not as a child shall we again behold her;

For when, with raptures wild,

In our embraces we again enfold her,

She will not be a child.

It is worthy of notice, how the death of little children has formed the subject of several of the most touching poems in the language. Only those could have written them who have children of their own; and few but parents can fully enter into their pathos. We may remind our readers of Mr. Moultrie's best. poem, The Three Sons; of Mrs. Southey's (Caroline Bowles) beautiful picture of an infant's death-bed; and in a volume lately published by Gerald Massey, natural feeling has kept affectation from spoiling a most touching piece, called The Mother's Idol Broken. And no one needs to be reminded of what it is that has afforded scope for the most pathetic touches of Dickens and Mrs. Beecher Stowe.

Thorndale puts a somewhat startling question as to the extent of the gift of immortality.

Why must I accept the alternative-all or none? Why every Hun and Scythian, or else no Socrates or Plato? Why must' every corrupt thing be brought again to life, or else all hope be denied to the good and the great, the loving and the pious?

Why must I measure my hopes by the hopes I would assign to the most weak or wicked of the race? Let the poor idiot, let the vile Tiberius, be extinct for ever: must I too, and all these thoughts that stir in me, perish?

Probably Thorndale was not aware that this notion, which he throws out on merely philosophical grounds, is one which, in a modified form, has been suggested, if not maintained, upon theological principles, by the most independent and original theologian of the agewe mean the Archbishop of Dublin. Dr. Whately has proposed it as a subject for inquiry, whether those passages of Scripture which describe the everlasting destruction of the finally impenitent, may not be justly interpreted as signifying their total annihilation; and thus, whether evil and suffering may not entirely cease to be in God's universe, not by an universal restoration of all things to the good and right, but by the total disappearance of that which has been marred past the mending? No doubt, there is something unutterably appalling in the thought of a soul in everlasting woe; no doubt, to our finite minds, it appears the most consistent with the divine glory and happiness, that a time should come when there should be no more pain, sin, and death, anywhere; but the Christian dares not add to or take from that which is written; and few, we think, can read the words even of the Saviour himself as bearing any other meaning than one. And as for the difficulty suggested by Thorndale, we confess we can discern in it very little force. It is a humble thing, always and everywhere, to be a man: whether the man be Plato or the Hun. We do not look for

immortality on the ground that we deserve it, or that

we are fit for it. And although there may be truth in Judge Haliburton's bitter remark, that there is a greater difference between some men and some other men, than there is between these other men and some monkeys; still, in looking down from the divine elevation, we believe that the distances parting the lowest and highest, the worst and best, must seem very small. Look down from the top of Ben Nevis, and the tuft of heather which is a dozen inches higher than the heather round it, differs not appreciably from the general level. Nor should it be forgotten, that in the lowest and the worst, there is a potentiality of becoming good and noble under a certain influence which philosophy does not know of, but whose reality and power we are content to test by the logic of induction. The coarse lump of ironstone is in its essence the selfsame thing as the hair-spring of a watch.

We e pass to the second part of Thorndale's manuscript, The Retrospect, which will be much more interesting to ordinary readers than the first book. And here we find à graceful and beautiful sketch of the history of his life, from the dawn of consciousness down to the time when he came to Villa Scarpa to die. He was the happy child of a gentle and loving mother, over whom early widowhood had cast a shade of melancholy. His father he never knew. A poor lieutenant in the navy, he died of fever caught as his ship lay rotting off the coast of Africa. The mother's piety was deep, and her faith undoubting; she knew nothing of the world beyond her own little daisied

lawn. And the remembrance of the prayer she early taught her child to utter, has inspired a passage which will come home to many hearts.

Very singular and very pleasing to me is the remembrance of that simple piety of childhood; of that prayer which was said so punctually night and morning, kneeling by the bedside. What did I think of, guiltless then of metaphysics—what image did I bring before my mind as I repeated my learnt petition with scrupulous fidelity? Did I see some venerable form bending down to listen? Did He cease to look and listen when I had said it all? Half prayer, half lesson, how difficult it is now to summon it back again! But this I know, that the bedside where I knelt to this morning and evening devotion became sacred to me as an altar. I smile as I recal the innocent superstition which grew up in me, that the prayer must be said kneeling just there. If, some cold winter's night, I had crept into bed, thinking to repeat the petition from the warm nest itself, it would not do!it was felt in this court of conscience to be an insufficient performance: there was no sleep to be had till I had risen, and, bedgowned as I was, knelt at the accustomed place, and said it all over again from the beginning to the end. To this day, I never see the little clean white bed in which a child is to sleep, but I see also the figure of a child kneeling in prayer at its side. And I, for the moment, am that child. No high altar in the most sumptuous church in Christendom could prompt my knee to bend like that snow-white coverlet, tucked in for a child's slumber.

The mother early died; and her brother, a baronet, who dwelt in a noble house standing in a fine old English park, adopted the desolate child as his own. Grand were the trees and fair the shrubberies of Sutton Manor; but its great attraction to Thorndale was his little cousin Winifred. He loved her, he tells us, before he knew what love was, and long before he knew the vast worldly distance that parted even such