. This sum may again be divided under two heads, one payable in money and the other depending on the price of grain. The following items appear to be made up of produce raised and consumed on the farm, viz.:

to farm overseer

to shepherd, cattle-keepers, and labourers

Expense of keep of riding horse

Food for reapers in harvest

Food for dairy-maid and boy

38 0 0

£3550 6 7

Which leaves for tradesmen, harvest expenses, women workers,
taxes, and all other expenses payable in money

1930 19 0

Constituting the total of Mr Howden's expenses

£5481 5 7

The value of the gross produce Mr Howden states to be £9608:5:11 d., and we see from the above, that all the payments really made in cash to obtain this large sum only come to £1930: 19s., or about 20 per cent. of the whole. In the account of produce, the turnips, potatoes, and grass are put down at £2340. Part of this would go to maintain the horses, but the greater part would be converted into beef and mutton, with the sale of which free trade does not materially interfere, as the importation of live stock and cured provisions has never yet exceeded 3 per cent of the consumption of the country, and is, besides, gradually falling off.

In the statement of the income and expenditure, by the late Mr Bell of Kidduff, of his farm in Berwickshire, for crop and year 1835, wheat is reckoned at 40s. per quarter, oats at 22s., and barley at 26s. ; and the total gross produce is given as amounting to £2333:15s. In the expenses, lime, bone-dust, and draining are charged at £143: 7:4d.; besides £40 a-year for keeping up implements, over and above £61 for tradesmen's accounts the whole expenses amounting to £1143:13: 1d., which, taken from the gross produce, leaves £11902: 11d. for rent and profit. Three items alone of the expenses amount to £636:3:9d., which are paid in farm produce, viz., seed-corn, corn consumed by horses, and wages to yearly servants; so that in this case also the payments in cash are comparatively small.

Mr George Robertson, a farmer, and agent for several estates, residing

in Kincardineshire, within six miles of Montrose, gave in a statement of the product and expenditure of a strong clay sand farm, containing 253 imperial acres. The expenditure, including wear and tear of implements and stock, tenants' expenses, going to market, and £200 a-year for remuneration and interest of capital, amounts to £710:10:5d., or about 56s. per acre. He gives the total income of the farm-charging wheat at 45s., beans and barley at 30s., and oats at 22s. per quarterat £1204 14 1d., which, after deducting expenses and tenant's profit, leaves £494:2: 8d. for rent-being about 39s. per imperial acre, or 49s. per Scots. Mr Robertson also gives the cost of production where no rent is paid, by which he makes out that wheat can be raised for 28s. 6d. per quarter, beans for 17s. 6d., barley for 18s. 6d., and oats at 13s. 6d. ; hay for 3s. a stone, and potatoes for 4s. a boll. The true way to discover the actual cost of a quarter of grain, or any other agricultural production, is to ascertain the proportional part it bears to the value of the total produce, and then to divide the actual expenses by this proportional part. On trial, it will be found that, in many cases, the cost will be positively less than the sums condescended on by Mr Robertson. From this it will be seen, how idle are the fears of those who affect to believe that land in this country will go out of cultivation, and how ridiculous are the calculations made to show, that the repeal of the Corn Laws is a loss to the agricultural interest of a sum far beyond the rental of the kingdom. Even non-agricultural readers must perceive that it is only on a small portion of surplus produce that prices have any effect whatever.

Anxious as we are for the prosperity of agriculture, and the wellbeing of all connected with it, we cannot conclude without protesting against the extraordinary step taken by the government, of lending to proprietors millions of money for the drainage of their land, and that at a period when private capitalists have the greatest difficulty in finding safe investments. It certainly does not form part of the duties of the state to supply money for private undertakings, whether for the manufacture of corn or of cotton. The one class of manufacturers are surely as well entitled to favours as the other. There is no want of wealthy tenants, ready to execute properly every description of improvement, provided they obtain leases of suitable duration, and be guaranteed the value of their improvements at their close, in so far as they enhance the value of the farms. And yet, at least in Scotland, calculating proprietors obtain the money of the state to drain their lands. The tenants pay 6 per cent. as interest for twenty-two years, and at the end of that time the proprietors find their estates increased in value, without their having contributed to it one farthing. This is unfair to the tenantry, and to every other class in the community. Let the British farmer have a fair field; let him be encouraged to lay out capital by some guarantee that others shall not come in and reap the benefit of it; and let him bring to his assistance all the aids which skill, and science, and contented perseverance supply, and then, we venture to predict, the condition of Agriculture under Free Trade will be ultimately better than under Protection.

94

IN MEMORIAM.*

THERE is now left of the greatest poet of modern times nothing that is mortal. No English bard has ever been so deeply and widely beloved in his life, and so profoundly regretted in his death, as Wordsworth. Thousands have felt his loss as they would that of a near friend, or a dear relative and these thousands are made up from the best hearts and most cultivated minds in the empire. Bad and ignorant people have paid to him their tribute of honour in the only way they could; that is, by indifference, ridicule, and hatred. These dogs have had their day; and now the fame of Wordsworth shines lustrous, serene, and permanent and as little liable to obscuration, by the doubts and mocks of the few infidels who have yet to discover that their heresy is obsolete, as is the glory of the moon endangered by the yelping of curs, that are said to become insane when they look upon her beauty.

For a few days, we were without a poet whose right to the throne and sceptre of the dead king had been fully and publicly asserted and allowed. This brief interregnum has been closed by the appearance of a volume of verse, as remarkable for its excellence as for its peculiarities. Very general report attributes this production to a poet who, in the absence of this new claim, must still have occupied a position made solitary by its eminence. Assuming, upon what we take to be unquestionable internal evidences, the accuracy of that report, we shall speak of this volume as the matured work of a mature writer; and we desire that our praise of it (for we have little else than praise of it to utter), may be understood to be without the least allowance for defect of time or practice in the poet.

"In Memoriam" consists of a series of elegies upon the death of a friend; they are all more or less related to each other; they are all written in one and the same measure, and this displays the excellent and most rarely united qualities of complete novelty, simplicity, and adaptation to the subject. The theme and its mode of treatment present unusual difficulties to the writer, who is called upon to give an account of, and to judge concerning them. The critic of a really new poem is always in a hazardous and often in a false position. He can scarcely fail to form his judgment upon principles which have been deduced from foregone developments of art; indeed, unless he be an artist himself, it is impossible that he should do otherwise: and yet the subject of his judgment, if it is what it pretends to be, must include either unprecedented artistical principles, or pre-existent principles acted upon in a manner so unprecedented as to conceal the fact of their pre-existence. Deep and loving study, renewed from time to time, with long intervening periods of repose for intellectual digestion and assimilation, are necessary, as it seems to us, in order to qualify even the most just and tender apprehension for delivering anything like a safe judgment upon a true poem: nor is our sense of the difficulty of speaking rightly concerning a work like that which is before us at all diminished by the perusal of the dashing criticisms of certain of our contemporaries, who

* London: Moxon.

manage to cut the leaves, read the book, write their judgment, and correct the proof of it, in surprisingly rapid, and perhaps nearly equal periods of time. The process whereby the results of the labour of, maybe, half the life of a great man are thus summed up and disposed of in the course of half an evening, by sometimes a very little man, reminds us too forcibly of that, by which (as it is averred) one ass may deny more in one hour than can be proved by a hundred doctors in a hundred years. We say that it is always an onerous task to arrive at a true judgment of a true work of art; it is so, when the form of the work is an accepted and established matter, as in the case of a tragedy, an epic, or an ode; but, in the present case, we are aware of but two works which offer any sort of precedent of form: these are, the sonnets of Petrarch upon Laura, and the (so called) sonnets of Shakspere. Yet, even to these the resemblance of " In Memoriam" is so slight that we are not tempted to elaborate a parallel. Persuaded as we are that time will place the poem before us side by side with those famous monuments of personal attachment, we feel that our safest course is to avoid detailed comment, and to make the new and crowning work of our first poet, as far as possible, explain itself.

The two following elegies, although not among the earliest in the volume, supply its preface and apology:

I sing to him that rests below,

And since the grasses round me wave,
I take the grasses of the grave,
And make them pipes whereon to blow.
The traveller hears me now and then,

And sometimes harshly will he speak-
'This fellow would make weakness weak,
And melt the waxen hearts of men !'
Another answers, 'Let him be;

He loves to make parade of pain,
That with his piping he may gain
The praise that comes to constancy.'
A third is wroth- Is this an hour

For private sorrow's barren song,
When more and more the people throng
The chairs and thrones of civil power?
A time to sicken and to swoon,

When science reaches forth her arms
To feel from world to world, and charms
Her secret from the latest moon ?'
Behold! ye speak an idle thing:

Ye never knew the sacred dust; I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing:

And unto one her note is gay,

For now her little ones have ranged; And unto one her note is changed, Because her brood is stol'n away.

If these brief lays, of sorrow born,
Were taken to be such as closed
Grave doubts and answers here proposed,
Then these were such as men might scorn.
Her care is not to part and prove;

She takes, when harsher moods remit,
What slender shade of doubt may flit,
And makes it vassal unto love:
And hence, indeed, she sports with words;
But better serves a wholesome law,
And holds it sin and shame to draw
The deepest measure from the chords :
Nor dare she trust a larger lay,

But rather loosens from the lip
Short swallow-flights of song that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away.

Our next quotation contains an assertion of the tenderness of the attachment and grief whereby these poems have been inspired, in words of a loveliness which has been rarely equalled. Let the tears and swelling hearts of those who read and feel such verses as these interpret our silence concerning their merits:

He pass'd-a soul of nobler tone:

My spirit loved and loves him yet, Like some poor girl whose heart is set On one whose rank exceeds her own.

He mixing with his proper sphere,
She finds the baseness of her lot;
Half jealous of she knows not what,
And envying all that meet him there.

The little village looks forlorn;

She sighs amid her narrow days,
Moving about the household ways,

In that dark house where she was born.

The foolish neighbours come and go,

And tease her till the day draws by; At night she weeps-'How vain am I! How should he love a thing so low ?'

The following verses contain the justification of the grief which is shadowed forth by the foregoing passage:

Thy converse drew us with delight,

The men of rathe and riper years:
The feeble soul, a haunt of fears,
Forgot his weakness in thy sight.
On thee the loyal-hearted hung,

The proud was half disarm'd of pride,
Nor cared the serpent at thy side
To flicker with his treble tongue.
The stern were mild when thou wert by,
The flippant put himself to school
And heard thee, and the brazen fool
Was soften'd, and he knew not why;
While I, thy dearest, sat apart,

And felt thy triumph was as mine;
And loved them more, that they were
thine,

The graceful tact, the Christian art;

Not mine the sweetness or the skill,

But mine the love that will not tire, And, born of love, the vague desire That spurs an imitative will.

As sometimes in a dead man's face,
To those that watch it more and more,
A likeness hardly seen before
Comes out to some one of his race:
So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,

I see thee what thou art, and know
Thy likeness to the wise below-
Thy kindred with the great of old.
But there is more than I can see,

And what I see I leave unsaid,
Nor speak it, knowing death has made
His darkness beautiful with thee.

So much for the depth of the grief, the adequacy of its cause, and the surpassing loveliness of its expression. But the poet does not content himself with recording his loss, and with raising a monument of immortal words to the memory of his friend. This loss and this monument soon become, as far as regards the reader, wholly secondary to the tearful glories which begin to radiate about them, and to illuminate the world with heavenly light. Here is a poem, one of many, each of which would be enough to preserve the name of the writer alive for ever. It expresses one of the earliest stages of the happy and natural change from earthly sorrow to spiritual joy:

With trembling fingers did we weave

The holly round the Christmas hearth,
A rainy cloud possess'd the earth,
And sadly fell our Christmas eve.
At our old pastimes in the hall

We gamboll'd, making vain pretence
Of gladness, with an awful sense
Of one mute Shadow watching all.
We paused: the winds were in the beech;
We heard them sweep the winter land;
And in a circle, hand in hand,
Sat silent, looking each at each.
Then echo-like our voices rang:

We sung, though every eye was dim,
A merry song we sang with him
Last year; impetuously we sang.

We ceased: a gentler feeling crept

Upon us. Surely rest is meet.
"They rest,' we said, 'their sleep is sweet,'
And silence follow'd, and we wept.
Our voices took a higher range;

Once more we sang: They do not die,
Nor lose their mortal sympathy,
Nor change to us, although they change:
Rapt from the fickle and the frail

With gather'd power, yet the same,
Pierces the keen seraphic flame
From orb to orb, from veil to veil.
Rise, happy morn, rise holy morn,

Draw forth the cheerful day from night! O Father! touch the east, and light The light that shone when hope was born.'

The greater part of the poem is like a clearing sky, half azure and half obscured by clouds-some dark, but most of them dashed with fragments of rainbow. We subjoin examples of various tones of thought and feeling: