with strange and stirring thoughts, and I felt as if we knew each other better than I should ever otherwise have believed." ness outside we could not find our way, and if we remain we may be injured by the flames and ruins." They looked again, and saw that the "Dear friend!" he answered gently flames had spread wider among the and sadly-such hours as these set old wood-work, though the rain hissed afloat much that was aground, and on them loudly. Walsingham gazed open much that was closed. What for a minute fixedly upward, and then wonder, when such blasts are beating said,-"We are in no danger. You on the gates of our caverns, that they must continue here in this recess, where should burst open, and apparitions of nothing falling from above can hurt long-hidden truth come out, and leap you; and there are, I think, means of with inspired frenzy in the wide com- obtaining help. See here!" and he motion? When the storm passes, the pointed out to her the rope of the dark gates close anew, and the shapes church-bell still hanging near them. sink back into their cells, perhaps for This he seized, and began to ring it ever. To-morrow we shall wake as with all his strength. The loud a'rm inhabitants of calm day-light; the in- boomed out through the storm, while voluntary and painful disturbance will the crackling flames blazed and smokhave ceased; and the sense of what ed around the spire, but had not yet has been will remain as lasting joy and reached the bell-rope. strength." Quiet passed into her bosom with his words, and she took his hand again, but scarcely had he received and returned this token of good-will, when they both were smitten by a fearful shock. Their eyes seemed seared and blinded, and their ears filled with an overwhelming noise. The air they breathed was thick with dust, and tasted sulphureous. For some seconds the monstrous clamour continued and the racking bewilderment, till Walsingham exclaimed, "Are you hurt?" "No-no," she answered, "What is it ?" "The lightning has struck the church; but we are now probably safe." They were still nearly stifled by the dust, but they could see imperfectlyfor they were no longer in total darkness. He looked up and saw a blaze high in the spire; Maria, too, perceived the fact; but she became at once calm and steady, and said, "What are we to do? In the dark He paused in his work after a time, and said,-"I wonder how it happens that this bell is left here, when the building is otherwise so entirely abandoned." "I think I have heard," replied Maria, "that the parish to which the church belongs, but which has now a more modern place of worship nearer the village, holds some lands on condition of having this bell rung for an hour every St. Peter's day, and that it is never sounded at any other time of the year." He now began to ring again, till at last the rope caught fire and was divided; and soon after, the bell became heated, and cracked. "So much," he said, "for the parish tenure of its lands." He now placed himself beside her, and in a few moments they heard, through the abating storm and the increasing sound of the fire, a human voice and tread, and then a man carrying a lantern appeared amid the smoky gloom. CHAPTER X. "What friend," cried the voice, "are you that have taken possession of the old tower? A pretty beacon and clamour you have raised." "We were driven here," replied Walsingham, "by the storm, and the lightning has struck the building. There is a lady here who wants your help." The man came on, guided by the voice, and when close to them, held up his lantern to see their faces, thus at the same time partly showing his own. "O! Mr. Collins," said Maria, "this is a strange scene that you find us in." 66 It was the friend she had spoken of to Walsingham who now stood before them, his hat dripping with rain, which fell over his long and loose grey hair. "What?"—he answered," Maria and was hardly perceptible, except Lascelles ! Why you are even a from a dull discoloration above it in gayer creature of the elements than the sky, and from the light through a any complimentary young gentleman small window in the lower part of the could have supposed, if you have tower. chosen such an evening for a pleasant ride. And who is this with you?" "Mr. Walsingham, whose name you must have often heard." Collins looked at him with a sharp glance of cold curiosity, and said, "Well, you are as odd a pair of wildducks as ever took wing through a storm. But what must be done now?" He looked up at the burning spire, and said, "We shall have half that wood-work and stuff up there down about our heads in three minutes; but the rain must be near over now; it was clearing off fast when I came in here. Unless you want to be found by half the village, whom that clatter you were making with the bell will set swarming, to say nothing of the bonfire, you had best be off with me to my house. I can manage to shelter you for the night, and I suppose you can provide for yourselves in the morning." They thanked him for his offer, and Maria said she would not accept it, but that she really felt weak and ill, and feared she should not be able to ride home. They placed her on her horse, which Collins led, carrying the lantern, and Walsingham beside her leading his, and ready to support her had she required it. The house to which Collins took his guests was about half a mile from the church, and he led them there by steep paths and over ground soaked with the heavy rain. But the sky was now fast opening, and the moon shone bright. Maria looked silently at the sea, but no ship was to be seen upon its broken and shifting surface. Before they reached the place of their destination they passed a cottage, where they procured a man to go on to Walsingham's house and tell Mrs. Nugent of her niece's safety. Turning away from this spot, they had the church in view. The spire, a mass of red and yellow flame, sent up a column of black smoke into the clear sky, and the moonbeams now fell upon that dark aerial structure. While they gazed, the building fell with an audible crash. An explosion of flame, sparks, and smoke flew upwards, and then the conflagration gradually sank down, In a few minutes more they arrived at the house of Collins, which, before he came to it, had been that of a mere labourer. It consisted of only three rooms, two below and one above. The upper one was usually his bedroom, the outer of the lower ones his parlour and kitchen, and the other the chamber of the old woman who was his only servant. Walsingham secured the horse in a shed, while Collins showed Maria into his cottage. He drew a seat for her beside the fire-place, and busied himself in kindling à fire, while he sent the old woman up stairs to prepare his room for her use. Walsingham soon came in, and the three sat round the fire. Collins was a man hardly of middle age, and of rather low stature. That which struck you at first as most remarkable in his appearance was the bright glow of his complexion, and the silver grey of his long and 'floating hair. He had rather small and dark eyes, which did not fix with keenness, but seemed most frequently averted in abstraction. There was, however, an air of quietness and resolution about all his actions. His head always looked firmly set; his hands tense, as if to gripe or clench. His feet seemed rooted where he set them down. Ill health, or grief, or natural character, had added a strong cast of sadness, and even of harshness to his countenance; and there was something so earnest and vigorous about the whole aspect, as to give the notion of a catapult kept ever loaded to discharge its weighty missile. This often came in the shape of some rude and sudden phrase, violent and picturesque, but also luminous as a burning arrow. A broad and rough kindliness, and an adamantine honesty, were apparent at first sight, and gained increased value on better knowledge. He had lived in educated society, had travelled, and read much. But, two or three years before the present time, he had come to the spot where he now lived, hired a cottage with a tolerable garden, and there established a great number of bee-hives, the inhabitants of which drew their fragrant honey chiefly from the heathy surface of their neighbour ing hills. He attended to them him- wood-work; and when Mr. Collins self, and appeared to derive from them and a crowd of country people came his principal, if not his only support. to see what was the matter, he burst Many of his hours he spent in wan- out at the top of the spire in an erupdering alone over the hills. But it tion of flame and smoke, gave a laughwas a pleasure to him to meet with any ing yell as he vanished, and, at the casual strangers, however squalid their same moment, the building fell in, and wretchedness. He also spoke without all the inhabitants of the old churchreluctance to persons of the highest yard were heard to groan in their class of society who happened to fall graves, while Miss Lascelles was obwithin his reach. But if he found liged, by the smell of sulphur, to use them barren and worthless he swung her smelling-bottle. But after all, Mr. them off impatiently, often with some Collins, I doubt whether any apparigrim jest, and, shaking his bent brows, tion you might have found and invited went upon his way sullen and thought- home with you, would have enjoyed ful. your supper as much as we." On the present occasion the wolfman, as he might himself have said, had on his sheep's clothing, and seemed cheerful and hospitable. He desired his ancient helpmate to prepare tea, and fry some slices of bacon; and, with this, and bread and honey from Collins' hives, they had a meal which sufficed to refresh them. "What can have taken you," said Collins, "to the old church at such an hour of such an evening? Did you wait till it was pitch dark in order to see the view the better?" 66 Darkness," answered Walsingham, "is sometimes well worth seeing. We, however, wanted only to view the sunset from the church, and proposed to return by twilight and moonlight. But the storm overtook us, and, no doubt, also detained Mrs. Nugent at the farm-house, where she had stopped behind us for a few moments. We were, of course, glad of the shelter afforded by the ruin. What we should have done at last, but for you, I cannot imagine." "Oh! the darkness would not have ate you; and a night in the old church' in such weather would have been a foretaste of a kind of dim and bleak ghostland, much like, I suppose, to that which we shall all one day visit. As it is, no doubt the ringing of the bell will be attributed to an evil spirit by half the county. I myself was rather in hopes of finding some huge skeleton, or demon, hard at work pulling the rope, and was rather disappointed at seeing only you." "Ay," said Walsingham, "it would make no bad tale. Suppose we spread the rumour :-A nameless fiend amused himself with ringing the bell till his burning hands set the rope on fire, which communicated with the "No; I suppose not. And, in fact, my surpise and disappointment were as foolish as that of a farmer, some miles from this, who received an anonymous letter, telling him that in the middle of a certain wood, on such a day, he would find something far more strange and precious than the crown jewels-a specimen, indeed, of the most wonderful thing on earth. He went, expecting a bushel of diamonds, or Fortunatus's purse, or something equally unlike turnips and clover, and was much astonished and puzzled at seeing only a poor little chubby baby. Yet the letter-writer said true enough. I do not know that even I have much right to complain on the present occasion." "Then I am sure we have not," said Maria; "but I am afraid you are very wet-and she glanced at his hat, which lay on the floor beside him." "Oh! my old hat is soaked a little. So many queer mists and vapours must rise up in it from one's brains, especially when one has happened to look into a newspaper or a fashionable novel, that it need not flinch from a few aerial clouds descending on it. It is a sort of temporary firmament between the storms and clatter of one's head below, and the other capricious meteorology up above. And so Metaphysics are only the Moore's Almanac of our brain-weather. Many a system, indeed, in the Almanac of a past year is falsified by the event, and reprinted with a fresh date, as if it would be valid for the next twelvemonth." He laughed a short sardonic laugh, and then fixed his eyes upon the fire, as if he had uttered his oracle and was content. Walsingham smiled, and said "It would be amusing to have a complete history of coverings for the head writ ten on that principle. Their picturesque varieties and diverse uses have often been noticed by travellers, artists, and so forth. But the relation of the head-garment to the thoughts would give a new point of view." "Well," said Collins, with a tone between defiance and jesting, "there are many odd facts to be noted on that matter. As the land-shells of Madeira are altogether different from those of the neighbouring island of Porto Santo, so the Portuguese population of the one place wear a small funnel-shaped, or unicorn cap, and the same race in the other adorn themselves with a flat bonnet." "Ah!" said Walsingham, with bland seriousness, "remarks of that depth and originality recall the famous Pythian verses of Nathaniel Lee, the Trophonian prophet: Methinks I'see a hieroglyphic bat Both Collins and Maria now laughed loud and merrily; and the Recluse said, "Well, no one can deny that the whole of man is included between his hat and shoes. In these mysterious integuments are concealed the extreme boundaries of his Being, which, though certainly finite, philosophers aver to be all but infinite." we "Or,” said Walsingham, “as may express it in Orphic song :— Oh! wondrous powers, ye shoes and hat, That bound our human span, How idly sages puzzle at The limits set to man! Thus does the conversation of poets and moralists, when they have not the fear of a pompous public before them, often become mere doggrel and absur dity, and yet suits for the time both the men and the occasion. Such talk helped on the hour till Maria bade them good-night, and thanking them both, and especially Colins, for his kindness, left them to themselves. She retired to think, to remember Arthur, to shudder at the image of the lost vessel, to pray, and then to sleep. In the mean-time, Collins made more tea for himself, Walsingham having had enough, and drank it by bowlsful, without milk, and sweetened with his own honey. CHAPTER XI. "That," said Walsingham to Collins, "was a striking event of which we have been witnesses at the church. But I should like to have observed, unseen, the demeanour of the people when they reached the burning edifice, as I suppose a crowd of them soon did. There is much to attract and awaken one in the thought of a living world startled by the conflagration of a neighbouring world of graves and, ghosts. But it ought to be painted on both sides. I mean both from the point of view of the actual beings regarding this convulsion in the realm of the past, and from that of the ruin and its graves impersonated and spiritualized, and brought face to face with bodily mortals. One might round the whole into a little Grecian tragedy, the action consisting of the efforts of the men to save the buildings, and their lamentations over memorials of their ancestors, and the Chorus being a band of spectres, with the grey old founder of the church, clothed in his pall of lead and years, leading the grisly troop, and wailing and admon ishing through the tempestuous and fiery air." 66 Why," answered Collins, "do It might be any thing of the kind? worth while to know what really happened. But what we should gain by taking the mere name of the real event and appending a fiction to it, I do not see. When I am not in a very ferocious humour I do not mind seeing a soldier, for I know what he and his But some lord dress are, and mean. or linendraper coxcomb, in the masquerade dress of a soldier, is a thing to be drifted, as soon as possible, down the great sewer of perdition. The uniform, on such shoulders, is but a red rag thrown into the kennel; and the biped is but the fleshy effigy of a man a good deal more offensive than a wax one at a puppet-show. Now so I hold it to be with your supposed poem. By all means give us as much truth as possible, even though the dose is ever so bitter. But lies, whether in verse or prose, are an abomination under the sun, and above it too, if such pests are known there, which for the sake of the super-solars, I hope is not the case. Truth, man? truth is the only true poetry, if the business of poetry is to move the feelings, which, for ought I see, might as well be left unmoved. But bread and meat, which we do want daily, are facts. Ambrosia is doubtless a fact too-for the gods. But for me, a man, it is a fiction. Bread and truth are all man wants; and a loaf is only an eatable lump of truth fitted for the body, as truth is the invisible, but no less substantial, bread of the spirit. Tea, too, is truth in its way, and very good for a thirsty throat. Talk to me of nectar by the hour, but my mouth would still be dry, and I should wish you drinking it at Olympus, or any where away from me. "What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not wait for an answer. But I stand in his shoes, and wait instead of him." "Truth is every thing that is. Every thing is truth; and every nothing is lie. Destiny for ever spins things-realities. But man is the only beast I know of that spins nothingsfictions-poems. So he tries to swindle destiny and his own fellowbeasts. But destiny spins on unswindled, and leaves him to die like a starved spider in his own cobweb. Honesty is the only true religion; all else is mere superstition, mose or less poetic-that is, more or less false." "A compendious creed, and that sounds as if it would have saved Aristotle, Quintilian, Strada, and the Schlegels a good deal of trouble. But look closer. All that I, too, want is Truth, but Truth made intelligible and effectual for man. In order to this, what is essential and characteristic in an image or feeling must be separated from what is accidental or futile-I mean, from what must seem so to usfor doubtless, nothing really is so,— must be divided from the endless, unmanageable All, which would only bewilder us. That is, it must be marked out as a distinct Whole by itself, with its own beginning, progress, and conclusion. Now, if this be rightly done, we shall have the essential. Thought filling its own circle, excluding all that is extraneous to itself, and taking in and embodying from without whatever is necessary to its own completeness and evidence. All this, however, is quite as true of a history, or a theory, or a speech, as of a poem, VOL XLIV. 65 But herein is the difference, that the poem is not meant to convey knowledge or produce conviction, but to excite a state of feeling at once lively and harmonious. That the feelings may be lively, the poem must have energy, distinctness, glow; that they may be harmonious, it must have consistency and completeness, and must lead to the apprehension of a peaceful order supreme over all confusion. But it may have all these requisites, and therefore be a good poem, and yet be far from a literal representation of the fact, event, thought, or emblem, which supplies the pretext for it. If you rightly weigh all these conditions of a poem's existence, you will see, I think, that it may and often must admit free and marvellous displays of fancy, legend, superstition, and symbolic necromancy. In a word, it must boldly sayTo produce an impression equivalent to that which this actual, but superabundant, overwhelming world would produce in a mind capable of embracing it as a whole. I will shape a world of my own, no less vivid and coherent, but rounded in a smaller circle, readily intelligible to man, and delightful to him, as free from the baffling, confounding immensity of that in which he lives. Every thing, therefore, which we borrow from the actual for the uses of poetry, must be translated, not transferred, its form and colouring modified, from that consistent with and dependent on the appearances of the actual world, to those required by the unity of the imaginary creation. Such seem to me the laws required by the slightest song; and yet adequate to explain the Odyssey, Hamlet, and Herman and Dorothea." "Well, a very pretty scheme. But in my notion a mere jugglery. The moment you separate a part of human existence from the great All it be longs to, and seek to shape it into a minor, dependent, and analogous, but distinct world, which, as I understand, is your notion, that moment you lose all law and measure of truth and falsehood. A feeling, an image, an event is true that is real, genuine, not when detached, but only when connected with its original circumstances and atmosphere. Suppose, while the clay of nature is yet soft and plastic, I break off a finger or an ear from |