shadow world the unexpected moods to which it is due that

"not the tenderest heart, and next our own, Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh.'

Every change of mood, from monotonous gloom, through gentle melancholy, to joyous brightness, seems expressed more definitely in their varied influence than by any words.

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The clouds in another respect mirror the influences of human companionship,-they go with us everywhere; we do not quit them as we turn to realms given up, except for their bright presence, to hopeless ugliness. As we pace dreary, monotonous streets, or squalid alleys, we may lift our eyes to their pearly shadows and amber lights, and follow their invitation into the far above and the far beyond which they express and suggest. They do not call us away from earth,-in the crowded haunts of men, indeed, all they can do is to invite us to soar above what is unlovely-but give them only space to work on, and they turn a mere stretch of tillage or pasture into a succession of pictures. The gleam which they pursue seems to bring Art into Nature, for it invests the commonplace with that expression of sympathy which is of the very soul of Art. There, there," the hurrying sunbeam calls to us; "look at these despised meadows, these uninteresting middle aged trees, that new, dull farin, that every-day haystack; look at everything you quit in order to hunt the picturesque in Switzerland or Italy, and see, for a moment, its beauty and charm." Banish these limiting shadows, let the sunbeams have it all their own way, and you need an artist to show you all that you were forced to see when sudden, transient brightness touched this and that point in the landscape, and by the mere magic of selection banished the commonplace from Nature. An empty sky is almost as unpicturesque as one completely covered; before we can see a picture, some influence must make a selection for us, and no merely natural scene so much seems to copyor might we not rather say, to suggest?— the sympathetic touch of an artist, as the fitful, evanescent glimpses of landscape shut in by the shadows of the clouds. The traveller to Southern lands knows best the charm only he can lose; he learns to loathe the monotony of blue above, of dazzle everywhere; but now and then, even in

our watery England, a few weeks of summer approach the lesson of the tropics. "Another blue-sky day," the artist sighs. as he opens his eyes on the fine-weather horizon so dear to children, and feels his powers wane apart from the inspiration of Nature's fitful suggestions and varying moods. None of those moods can be recorded without creating a picture; never can a picture charm the eye of an artist without some such record. Careful portraiture of an Alpine valley gives less pleasure than hasty suggestion of a suburban common, if the first lack all impression of a passing gleam or gloom, and the second mark its influence. Where the pencil has failed to fix some record of what is transient, there the characteristic charm of Art is lacking.

We see this charm of the transient most commonly in pictures of twilight. Such a one hangs before our eyes as we write, painted a hundred years ago by Wright of Derby for a friend. Nothing, probably, would be less picturesque than the scene, if you were to look at it under a noonday sun. A steep hill shuts in the spectator so closely that the bushes at the top are clearly seen; an eight-roomed house, in sufficiently good repair to be taken for

one's

's summer lodgings, stands at its foot, that is all; not a single picturesque object to be seen. Uniform dark-brown below meets uniform pale-gray above; nothing of the exceptional is present in earth or sky. Yet the picture breathes the very spirit of all that gives a picture charm. It expresses that vague feeling of satisfaction and repose in the coming darkness that Wordsworth has given in more than one of his sonnets, and which the poetic Scotch tongue gathers up in a single word,

it paints the "gloaming." We have not yet the twilight commemorated in the poet's stately verse, twilight "studious to destroy Day's mutable distinctions;" we look into the lingering clearness that just precedes that obliteration, when the advancing darkness has washed out color, while it still spares form,- an interval dear to the heart of the artist and the poet, although many persons pass their lives without feeling more about it than that it is time for the candles to come in. The painter, with the temperance of true art, trusts to the faithful expression of a fieeting phase of every day's decline, and gives us nothing that we might not see for our

selves every twenty-four hours, if we had eyes to look for it. One passes the picture, for the hundredth time, with a sort of fresh surprise to see that the twilight holds out--that we can still so easily make out those clothes hanging out to dry, when manifestly in a few minutes one will have difficulty in picking one's way along the muddy road. The impression of a moment is all there is, but it is all we want. The evening of the year is a subject no less dear to artists than the evening of the day, and although the russet and orange of autumn may seem enough to justify their choice, yet in truth those glowing hues would lose half their charm if they were permanent. "October's workmanship to rival May" touches us all as with a sense of music, we feel, as it were, the dominant chord, seeking its resolution. Perhaps, indeed, the wonderful power of music has this among other elements of its mystic charm,-that it addresses itself to the time-sense in us, that the voice which in twilight and autumn whispers softly, "Passing away," here attains its full scope, and breathes a meaning from the suggestion of which all other art takes its purest charm. At any rate, what may be called the musical element in Nature and in Art is inseparable from the sense of Time. Trite words touch the spring of tears if they do but bring the far near; and a vivid then makes poetry, as a vivid there makes a picture,-indeed, we cannot have the one without the other.

The poetic affinities of the mere thought of Time must have been brought home to our readers of late by the various specimens of inscriptions on sun-dials contained in these columns, and the discovery how little is needed to make such an inscription poetic. Take one of the last given us by a correspondent :

"L'ombre passe et repasse,

Et sans repasser l'homme passe."

There we have a mere truism, and there we have poetry. The writer of our most graceful vers de société-Mr. Austin Dob

son

-has rendered the same thought in some poetic lines, the point of which is given in these two,

"Time flies, we say-ah no!

Alas! Time stays; we go:" -and probably we could fill many pages with citations which told no more than this, and yet should be felt to say much.

The tranquil rhythm of this fair Nature, the hurrying throb of the human interests it measures, there is the eternal poem of human life. It is already familiar in Homer; it is not stale after the two and a half millenniums by which we are divided from him; and when an equal space divides our descendants from us, it will, we believe, keep all its freshness. For it depends on principles deeply rooted in the permanent part of our nature, and which no advance of civilization can render obsolete.

How shall we explain this mystic alliance between the sense of Time and all that is most catholic in Poetry and Art? It results, we believe, from man's craving for the Eternal. Our nature discovers everywhere the throb of rhythmic vibration that demands opposites, and whichever element of the contrast be suppressed, that which is left loses half its meaning. When the Everlasting loses its awfulness, then the fleeting will lose its pathos. "The clouds that gather round the setting sun" will cease to take their coloring from an eye" that hath kept watch o'er man's mortality." The thought of man's mortality, when it is dissociated from that of his immortality, will become a fact of science, and lose all connection with the ideas of poetry. The transient lights that flit across the landscape will lose the symbolism by which they associate themselves with fleeting dreams; for if everything be transient, it is all one as though nothing were so. But what are we imagining? Our theme recalls us to the world of reality. These vapors veil and hide the orb to which they owe their existence; but without them his powers would lack half their manifestation; his effulgence is manifested to our eyes mainly through their splendor. The hidden sun glows in the visible cloud, and in the daily drama of the sunset and the dawn, the changeless and the changing meet in an embrace as old as Time itself,-an embrace recorded in the first legends of our race, and hymned in the songs that our Aryan ancestors knew before they left their Asiatic home. We and they look on the same sun, and no one looks twice on the same cloud; yet, as we gaze upward and around, it were impossible to separate the influence of either. So inseparable, we believe, is the influence of the Eternal, from the play of art, the melody of words and of music.

mony to truths which they can never establish, which they always ignore, and which at times they may appear to deny.

Temperley. I am very glad you have looked in upon me this morning, Grimston. I am expecting our friend Luxmore, whom I have asked to come and assist me in a somewhat difficult matter. But your aid, too, will be welcome. Ah, here he is !

Luxmore. Yes, here he is; delighted, as always, to be of use to you, Temperley, if he can. A pile of letters, I see. Something for Grimston and me to advise upon ?

Temperley. Well, I did not expect Grimston, but I am glad he has come. I shall ask him to take the part of Devil's Advocate in our conversation. It is a part not unfamiliar to him, nor, if I may say so, altogether distasteful.

Grimston. Thanks. It is always a rule of mine to interpret in a complimentary sense anything that admits of it. Yes, I flatter myself that I am one

of those honest few

Who give the Fiend himself his due.

I accept the brief; and, whatever the matter at issue may be, I do not doubt of being able to make out a good case for his Satanic Majesty.

Temperley. Well, the matter is this. Last year, while I was travelling in India, I made the acquaintance of a singularly interesting Hindu gentleman, who has ever since kept up a somewhat brisk correspondence with me. These papers are letters from him, with memoranda, and in some cases, drafts of my answers. He is a man of good family, of considerable fortune, and very highly educated. English is as familiar to him as his own vernacular Tamil. He is an excellent Sanscrit scholar, reads Greek and Latin easily, knows German fairly, and French very well.

Luxmore. Your correspondence with him seems to have been somewhat voluminous, to judge from this pile.

Temperley. Yes. My friend Dorasaw

my is in search of a religion, and thinks that I can, perhaps, help him. Certainly I can enter into his difficulties and sympathize with them. But to point to "the path of release" is another matter.

Grimston. Why does he not betake himself to one or other of the noble army of missionaries kept up, at such vast expense, to attend continually upon this very thing.

Temperley. He has done that, but to small purpose. He wrote to me a few weeks ago, "The arguments with which these reverend gentlemen attack the religions of India may, for the most part, be directed as effectively against their own; while with the objections current in Europe against Christianity they seem ill acquainted."

Grimston. I can understand that. The reverend gentlemen usually know as little of what they seek to convert the Oriental from, as of what they seek to convert him

to.

And I suppose that the conversion of a really educated native of India is almost as rare as the conversion of a Jew. By the way, a friend of mine, who has gone into the figures carefully, told me the other day that the average cost of a Hebrew proselyte, during the last ten years, is 1,0017. Os. 1d.

Luxmore. It is impossible-at least, so I find it not to sympathize with the good-will, the generosity, the self-denial of those who keep up the great missionary societies of this country. It is equally impossible to deny that those societies are ghastly failures.

Temperley. I saw, the other day, an advertisement which tickled me amazingly. It was on this wise: " Help! help! help! 923,350,000 of heathen waiting to be converted. Pray assist the Little Peddlington Missionary College to send out one more evangelist."

Grimston. Good, very good. One would be inclined to say an enemy hath

Temperley. Certainly, Christianity does. not seem to be making up in the East for its losses in the West. The latest returns which I have seen-I take them from the Imperial Gazetteer of India give the total number of Christians in India at a little under a million and a half, of whom 325,000 are described as "Protestants, baptized and unbaptized." Luxmore. What is meant by an unbaptized Protestant Christian?

Grimston. O sweet simplicity! An unbaptized Protestant Christian is a gentleman who follows the not very laborious vocation of religious inquirer. He often makes a good thing of it. But go on with your statistics, Temperley.

Temperley. I was going to add that to these 325,000 baptized and unbaptized Protestants, about 700 clergymen and some 4,000 "other agents" minister, at an annual cost set down at 300,000l. odd. The expense is, however, a great deal more, unquestionably, for these figures do not profess to include all special funds, or funds subscribed in India. But missionary finance is very puzzling; non mendacium sed mysterium," we will charitably believe.

Grimston.

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We have but faith; we cannot know, For knowledge is of things we see. The supporters of the missionary societies must indeed be strong in faith. It seems pretty clear, however, that the average cost of the clergymen sent out by the Church Missionary Society is 5007. a year, the Society considerately providing for what Voltaire calls the besoins naturels of

its evangelists, by liberal allowances for their wives and children.

Temperley. Wel', certain it is that the married Protestant missionary, with his creature comforts about him, does not impress very vividly the Oriental mind, which regards asceticism and miraculous power as notes" of a divine commission. The one great instance of missionary success in modern India is St. Francis Xavier, who lived like an Indian fakir, walking from place to place barefooted, his food roasted rice, which he begged as he went along, and sleeping on the ground, a stone his pillow. Miracles were profusely attributed to him-raising the dead, among other prodigies. I don't know if he himself laid claim to supernatural power.

Grimston. There is another reason, not generally appreciated, for the failure of Christian missions in India. It is that the missionaries are so unfairly handicapped by the Bible Society. Can there be a less hopeful mode of inducing the Hindu or Mohammedan to embrace Christianity, than to place in his hands the Bible "without note or comment"? He makes his own notes, and supplies his own comments, his endeavor being to read the Scripture "like any other book," as Mr. Jowett recommended us to do, in a once famous essay. The intelligent Oriental's notes and comments would very much astonish Exeter Hall.

Temperley. There is a great deal of truth in what you say. The educated Hindu naturally criticises our canonical Scriptures as unreservedly as the Christian evangelist criticises the Qu'rân, or the Puranas; and, in most cases, much more intelligently. When I was in India, a quick-witted Brahmin remarked to me, after a controversial bout with a missionary: "The gentleman takes the Bible to be the word of God, like the perspiration that stood upon the brow of Brahma, and fell, to become the Ganges." And I remember Dorasawmy calling my attention to a paper of, I think, Dr. Bain's, where mention is made of an eminent man, a citizen of Edinburgh," who was a believer in Christianity until he became acquainted with geology, when, finding himself unable to reconcile the first chapter of Genesis with the facts of science, he applied to the whole Bible the rule falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, and straightway abandoned his religion.

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Grimston. Yes: instead of removing mountains, faith is now breaking its neck amorg geological strata.

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were

Luxmore. That citizen of Edinburgh was somewhat hasty, or, as the Vulgate has it, excessive: Dixi in excessu meo. But I suppose the religious traditions amorg which he had grown up i o in broad Scotland, Bible-loving Scotland," more to blame than he. In the famous Swiss Declaration of 1675, the Hebrew Scriptures are declared to be inspired in their consonants, in their vowels, and in their points or at least in the substance of their points-in their matter and in their words; and thus to constitute, together with the New Testament, for which, of course, an equally far-reaching claim is made, the single and uncorrupted rule of faith and life. And I suppose that such is, or at all events was, until lately, the orthodox Protestant view. Even now, five out of every six religiously-minded Englishmen whom you meet, hold Chillingworth's dictum, "The Bible, and the Bible alone, the religion of Protestants," to be the root of the matter. That in the canonical books-that is, practically, in the English version of them-there is a perfect revelation of the Divine Will, per fectly intelligible to every one who can read, so plain, to use a favorite expression, that " a wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err" in interpreting it, is what is called, "the open Bible theory."

Temperley. It is a curious superstition. Considering how extremely miscellaneous. in their character are the writings included in the canon of the Bible, how far removed from our ways of life and habits of thought, how full of difficult problems, historical, metaphysical, and philological, it is not too much to say that their exposition is one of the most arduous tasks in the world-a task for which the ordinary Englishman who so confidently undertakes it, is about as well fitted as he is for lecturing upon the Hegelian philosophy, or for settling nice points of Hindu law. Grimston.

Hic liber est in quo quærit sua dogmata

quisque,

Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua,
Or take a free English translation of it :

One day, at least, in every week,
The sects of every kind

Their doctrines here are sure to seek,
And just as sure to find.

Temperley. My friend Dorasawmy writes of a certain missionary to whom I introduced him in India: "Mr. Smith is an excellent man a truly kind-hearted; but what a wooden head! I was talking to him the other day about the Bible, and stated to him one or two simple objections from science and history. It was curious to see how he put forward all his dialectical skill-which, to be sure, is not vastto tamper with the obvious meaning of the words, in order to save their historical and scientific accuracy. I did not pursue the subject. Of what good? It would have been merely to slay the dead over again. Voltaire suffit,' as Renan says.

Grimston. Very interesting. And that brings us back to Dorasawmy. Your mild Hindu, who quotes Voltaire and Renan, is hardly likely to figure in the missionary reports as a brand snatched from the burning :" Voltaire who gave the coup de grâce to the religion, and Renan who is writing its epitaph. But tell us more about your Hindu; I like that extract from his letter.

Temperley. He goes on: "We then fell to talking about miracles. I said, why don't you work them? I find them spoken of in the Gospel of St. Mark as the signs following,' by which the word was confirmed. But they do not follow to confirm your word. You do not speak with new tongues, unless you have learned them, like any one else. You would not, for your life, take up a cobra; you would run away from him. And if you were to lay your hand upon the sick, do you think they would recover? You might try. But I forgot. The dorisani would not like you to touch the sick, lest the sickness should be infectious."

Grimston. The missionaries must have a lively time with Dorasawmy. But really the Little Peddlington people should send that " one more evangelist" to take a few lessons from Maskelyne and Cook. Good legerdemain would impress the Oriental much more than bad controversy.

And,

Luxmore. My dear Grimston, spare us any more of Little Peddlington. Temperley, pray tell us something further of your Hindu friend's actual position in matters pertaining to religion. I suppose that, like almost all Hindus who have been brought under Western influences, he has

* Lady, i.e. the missionary's wife.