strength, or, at least, the best direction of it. Nothing, perhaps, is lost: not even sin much less, sorrow.

ELLESMERE. I am glad you have ended as you have: for, previously, you seemed to make too much of getting rid of all distress of mind. I always liked that passage in "Philip Van Artevelde,” where Father John says,

"He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend.
'Eternity mourns that.”

You have a better memory than I have: how does it go on?

MILVERTON.

""Tis an ill cure

"For life's worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
"Where sorrow's held intrusive and turned out,

"There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
"Nor aught that dignifies humanity."

Still this does not justify despair, which was what I was writing about.

ELLESMERE. Perhaps it was not a just criticism of mine. One part of the subject you have certainly omitted. You do not tell us how much there often is of physical disorder in despair. I dare say you will think it a coarse and unromantic mode of looking at things; but I must confess I agree with what Leigh Hunt has said somewhere, that one can

even remorse, per

walk down distress of mind

haps.

MILVERTON. Yes: I am for the Peripatetics against all other philosophers.

ELLESMERE. By the way, there is a passage in one of Hazlitt's essays, I thought of while you were reading, about remorse and religious melancholy. He speaks of mixing up religion and morality; and then goes on to say, that Calvinistic notions have obscured and prevented self-knowledge.*

Give me the essay· there is a passage I want to look at. This comparison of life to a mountain stream, the rocks brought down by it being the actions, is too much worked out. When we speak of similes not going on four legs, it implies, I think, that a simile is at best but a four-legged animal.

*The passage which must have been alluded to is this, "The "stricter tenets of Calvinism, which allow of no medium between grace "and reprobation, and doom man to eternal punishment for every "breach of the moral law, as an equal offence against infinite truth and "justice, proceed (like the paradoxical doctrine of the Stoics) from "taking a half-view of this subject, and considering man as amenable "only to the dictates of his understanding and his conscience, and not "excusable from the temptations and frailty of human ignorance and "passion. The mixing up of religion and morality together, or the "making us accountable for every word, thought, or action, under no "less a responsibility than one everlasting future welfare or misery, has "also added incalculably to the difficulties of self-knowledge, has super"induced a violent and spurious state of feeling, and made it almost "impossible to distinguish the boundaries between the true and false, "in judging of human conduct and motives. A religious man is afraid "of looking into the state of his soul, lest at the same time he should "reveal it to Heaven; and tries to persuade himself that by shutting "his eyes to his true character and feelings, they will remain a pro"found secret, both here and hereafter."

Now this is almost a centipede of a simile. I think I have had the same thought as yours here, and I have compared the life of an individual to a curve. You both smile. Now I thought that Dunsford at any rate would be pleased with this reminiscence of college days. But to proceed with my curve. You may have numbers of the points, through which it passes, given; and yet know nothing of the nature of the curve itself. See, now, it shall pass through here and here, but how it will go in the interval, what is the law of its being, we know not. But this simile would be too mathematical, I fear.

MILVERTON. I hold to the centipede.

ELLESMERE. Not a word has Dunsford said all this time.

DUNSFORD. I like the essay. I was not criticising as we went along, but thinking that, perhaps, the greatest charm of books is, that we see in them that other men have suffered what we have. Some souls we ever find who could have responded to all our agony, be it what it may. This at least robs misery of its loneliness.

ELLESMERE. On the other hand, the charm of intercourse with our fellows, when we are in sadness, is that they do not reflect it in any way. Each keeps his own trouble to himself, and often pretending to think and care about other things, comes to do so for the time.

DUNSFORD. Well, but you might choose books which would not reflect your troubles.

ELLESMERE. But the fact of having to make a

choice to do this, does away, perhaps, with some part of the benefit: whereas, in intercourse with living men, you take what you find, and you find that neither your trouble, nor any likeness of it, is absorbing other people. But this is not the whole reason: the truth is, the life and impulses of other men are catching: you cannot explain exactly how it is that they take you out of yourself.

MILVERTON. No man is so confidential as when he is addressing the whole world. You find, therefore, more comfort for sorrow in books than in social intercourse. I mean more direct comfort; for I agree with what Ellesmere says about society.

ELLESMERE. In comparing men and books, one must always remember this important distinctionthat one can put the books down at any time. As Macaulay says, "Plato is never sullen. Cervantes "is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long."

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MILVERTON. Besides, one can manage to agree so well, intellectually, with a book; and intellectual differences are the source of half the quarrels in the world.

ELLESMERE. Judicious shelving?

MILVERTON. Judicious skipping will nearly do. Now when one's friend, or one's self, is crotchetty, dogmatic, or disputatious, one cannot turn over to another day.

ELLESMERE. Don't go, Dunsford. Here is a passage in the essay I meant to have said something about-"why should we expect the inner life to be

"one course of unbroken self-improvement," &c.You recollect? Well, it puts me in mind of a conversation between a complacent poplar and a grim old oak, which I overheard the other day. The poplar said, that it grew up quite straight, heavenwards, that all its branches pointed the same way, and always had done so. Turning to the oak, which it had been talking at before for some time, the poplar went on to remark, that it did not wish to say anything unfriendly to a brother of the forest, but those warped and twisted branches seemed to show strange struggles. The tall thing concluded its oration by saying, that it grew up very fast, and that when it had done growing, it did not suffer itself to be made into huge floating engines of destruction. But different trees had different tastes. There was then a sound from the old oak, like an "ah," or a "whew," or, perhaps, it was only the wind among its resisting branches: and the gaunt creature said that it had had ugly winds from without and crossgrained impulses from within; that it knew it had thrown out awkwardly a branch here and a branch there, which would never come quite right again it feared; that men worked it up, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil. but that at any rate it had not lived for nothing. The poplar began again immediately, for this kind of tree can talk for ever, but I patted the old oak approvingly and went on.

MILVERTON. Well, your trees divide their discourse somewhat Ellesmerically: they do not talk with the simplicity La Fontaine's would: but there