melody fills her ears, the room, the people, the wax lights vanish; she is in the Place Duguesclin again. How dark it is! The lights from the hotel shew small and red; the sabots clump past. How close to our faces the green lime flowers swing!

She is roused by an eager voice at her ear.

"One turn-only one! I have danced with everything that has any pretensions to age, weight, or ugliness. Pay me for it!—only one turn!"

Scrope stands by her, panting a little. His broad chest heaves, and his wide blue eyes glitter with a passionate excitement. She shrugs her shoulders, but, as though it were too much trouble to argue the point, complies. Jemima takes her place and they set off. After flying silently round for a few minutes they stop. Scrope, even in stopping, unwilling to release her from his arms, gazes into her face with a passionate rapture, to see whether the delight he feels is at all shared.

"I hate it!" she says irritably. "It tears my dress; it loosens my hair; it takes away my breath. Let us go to some cool place."

They saunter away to the conservatory. The Chinese lanterns swing aloft, their flames spiring up in dangerous proximity to the pink and green walls of their frail prisons. The daphnes and narcissi and lilies of the valley are uniting their various odours in one divinest harmony of scent, like a concert of noblest voices. Lenore throws herself wearily into a garden chair and begins to fan herself.

"Let me fan you," says her lover tenderly, taking the fan out of her hand and leaning over her, "it will save you trouble. My darling, you look pale to-night."

My darling, you look red to-night," retorts she, with a mockery more bitter than playful, glancing up at the flushed beauty of his face. "For Heaven's sake, don't let us register the variations in each other's complexions."

An arrow shoots through the young man's bounding heart. Is she going to change her mind? Now that the prize is almost within his hand, must he lose it at this last moment?

"Have I done anything to vex you?" he asks anxiously, kneeling down on the stone pavement at her feet. "You know how idiotically fond I am of you; for Heaven's sake, do not take advantage of it to play tricks with me! What is the matter with you to-night? You are out of spirits."

"What do you mean?" she cries angrily. "I never was in better spirits in my life; everybody remarks it-everybody says how lively I am. I talk all day, and I laugh more than I ever did in my life before. Would you have one always grinning like a Cheshire cat ?"

"You talk and laugh, it is true," he answers, with a grave air of

anxiety, "but you are much thinner than you were.

Look at this

arm" (touching the round white limb, as it lies listlessly across her lap); "it is not half the size it was three weeks ago.”

"So much the better," she answers with a laugh; "my arms were much too big before. Sylvia was always abusing them; it is much more refined to have smaller arms."

"You will be all right when we get to Italy," he says fondly; "you will like that, will not you? Oh! sweet!" (leaning over her, with a passion of irrepressible exultation); "can I believe that I am waking, when I think that long before this time to-morrow you will be my wife?-that at last-at last-we shall belong to one another, for always?"

She shivers a little. "To-day is to-day, and to-morrow is tomorrow," she says, sententiously; "to-day, let us talk of to-day; we may both be dead by to-morrow."

"Both!" (smiling a little); "that is hardly likely."

"One of us, then; only the other day I read in the Times of a bride who was found dead in her bed on her wedding morning. Oh, my God!" (flinging out her arms, and then throwing her head down on her knees,) "if I had but the very slightest chance of going to heaven, how I wish I could be found dead in my bed!"

"What are you talking about?" cries Scrope, shocked and astonished at this unlooked-for outburst. "Lenore! look me in the face and say you did not mean it. I know you have a random way of talking, sometimes-Jemima says so; but, do you know, when you say such things you break my heart?"

"Do I?" she says, lifting her wild white face, unsoftened by any tears. "I am glad. Why should not I break it? I have broken my own-you know that well enough-why should not you suffer too? As for me, I suffer-I suffer always-all day and all night. I am glad to hear of any one else being miserable too. What have I done, that I should have a monopoly of it?" He stares at her, in a stony silence. "There," she says, after a pause, with a sickly smile, pushing her hair off her forehead, "I am all right now! I was only-onlyjoking! Pay no attention to anything I said; I was only ranting. I think I have been overdoing myself a little the last few days. Suppose you go? I shall get well quicker if I am by myself."

So he goes, slowly and heavily. She has taken all the lightness out of his feet and out of his heart; it feels like a pound of lead. He makes his way up to the piano. "Jemima," he says, in a low voice, "my sister will play for you; I want you to go to Lenore; she is not very well, I think-rather hysterical; she is in the conservatory, she would not let me stay with her."

So Jemima goes.

Wordsworth Impartially Weighed.

THE reputation of Wordsworth as a poet has already passed through two preparatory stages. During the first he was the subject alternately of neglect and of ridicule; during the second he has stood for the theme of extravagant laudation and undiscriminating worship. We have reason to think that the time has come when real critical justice may be done to his honoured name, and something like an exact value affixed to his truly admirable but too often unequal works. Collected in the most thrifty form, they fill a ponderous and appalling tome. Stripped of all the poems and passages which, save as proceeding from the hand which penned the rest, would be all but worthless, they could easily be compressed into a small and elegant volume. But the lover of literature would rank that golden residuum with his most revered and precious possessions.

A shallow and mischievous style of criticism-indeed nearly all English criticism, unfortunately, is shallow and mischievous-has accustomed us, on approaching any great writer, and more especially any great poet, in a judicial attitude, to commence with the inquiry to what school he belongs, and whom he may be said to have imitated. This melancholy misdirection of intelligence arises from the blunder of confounding an unvarying phenomenon with the ever-varying substance to which it belongs. The first efforts of genius are necessarily imitative, just as much as the first pranks of childhood; and whom its blessed possessor shall begin by imitating will depend upon whose work it is which, not altogether out of harmony with his natural bent, falls under his observation at the critical period. Men of very decided genius will shake themselves more or less free from this early thraldom, but it is certain that a something of it will linger entire with them to the very last, and crop up occasionally when least expected. Even, however, where the genius is less decided, and the traces of kinship with some former singer are more frequently and more visibly discernible, the writer, if he really be a man of genius, will have brought so much of his own to the task that the ordinary reader, unless misled by the perverse guidance we have alluded to, will be as unconscious of the inherited influence as the poet himself, and the judicious critic will never care to hunt it out save for the purpose of some special and curious inquiry-never with the malign object of airing his penetration or prompting his readers. Ordinarily it will be some contemporaneous or recent writer whose influence is first felt by the new

comer; and that not only, and indeed not so much, because writings of the day are more likely to find their way to him than those of remoter authors, as for the reason that the tone, drift, and style of the former are aided and abetted by all the other synchronous influences, social, artistic, religious, and conversational, which surround him, whilst the former are left to affect him merely by their own antiquated and somewhat perfunctory force, and without any assistance, probably in the teeth of opposition, from concurrent events and impetus. How few, if any, either consciously or unconsciously, ever attempt to imitate Shakespeare; and this can certainly not be attributed either to want of appreciation or to want of courage. Genius is proverbially bold; and that unfortunate quality which is not genius, but fancies it is, is still bolder. But the particular mighty forces and influences which went to make Shakespeare are exhausted, or, to speak more strictly, transmuted, and have been so for a long time. They are to be seen abundantly at work in his contemporaries, and are not invisible in one or two of his forerunners, and in more than one or two of his successors. Occasionally, however, there will be strange cases of reversion in literature; and a writer, passing over the apparent influences nearest at hand, will be inoculated with influences anterior and more distant. But it will be to his bane, unless the age in which he lives has likewise reverted to a remote ancestor, and he can borrow from his time the co-operation every man of high genius requires, and which the help of no dead epoch can by any possibility supply.

Such, and so narrow, are the limits within which poets who are really poets can be said to imitate at all and to be indebted to anybody, and all the current prattle about schools of poetry is just so much nonsense, arising from precisely that same sort of ignorance which governed the classification of the animal world prior to the time of Cuvier, or the classification of the Races of Man previously to the rise of the science of language. Our schools or classifications of poetry, as we see them trotted out on occasions by our erudite critics, are the most superficial and empirical inductions ever made. For not only is the classification a mistaken one, but no classification, in any sound sense of the word, is in this case possible. How could we have such a thing as a genuine zoological classification if no two individual animals could be found in the world having similar fundamental features; and how could ethnology become a science at all if every person in every race differed from his neighbour in body, brain, and speech, far more than he resembled him? Yet this is precisely what happens with poets of the smallest consequence. The most unlike show some points of resemblance; but if we were to select the two who displayed the most marked signs of relationship, we should infallibly find that what was most striking in them was by no means their similarity but their difference, and even their contrast. Quick

perception of obscure analogies is one of the marks of a superior intelligence; but then the analogies must be obscure, not conspicuous. And in dealing with poets true penetration and appreciation consist in noting not what is common to two, to half a dozen, or to all, but what is peculiar and idiosyncratic in each.

It will be plain to any one who gives himself the pains to reflect upon the matter ever so little, that what, over and above a vulgar mania for easy classifications and for convenient pigeon-holes, has misled our sapient instructors, is what is called "style." Upon a hasty comparison of poetic styles has been constructed all the written folly about schools of poetry. Now about nothing need we so little concern ourselves in dealing with poets of eminence as about their style. A set style is the sure mark of a second-rate writer. Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Byron, Shelley, have as many styles as themes, the style being in each case the ready, cheerful, and unconscious bondservant of the theme. Steady, unbroken, jog-trot, is all very well for the nag that takes Hodge's tax-cart to market, but coursers of the sun vary their divine paces according to their divine moods. Canalized rivers move with an even current, but the mountain stream has fits of fast fury, of gliding calm, of perfect rest. The chimneyhaunting sparrow flies from perch to perch with a monotonous fluency; the real birds of the air now sink, now soar, fly down the wind, fly up it, anon flap lazy wings, poise themselves in etherial stillness, and then rush off with a clamour of pinions to salute the clouds. We are quite aware that many will be surprised to find Pope figuring in the above category, and to see him denied a oneness of style. His works it is which have lent themselves most readily to the encouragement of the profound mistake upon which we are insisting. Pope has written invariably in one metre; hence our wiseacres have conceded to him one style. Where are their ears and their eyes, to say nothing of their souls? Can anything well be more different than the styles of Windsor Forest,' the 'Prologue to the Satires,' the Rape of the Lock,' 'Heloisa to Abelard,' the 'Essay on Man,' and the Dunciad'? Yet because they are all written in rhymed heroics, they are all muddled together, and made a school of. Hence-just as though Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dryden, had never employed them before-any one writing afterwards in that metre has had to run the chance, indeed to face the certainty, of being classed as belonging to the school of Pope, and being a follower of that great author; and if he happened to write a satire he has invariably been set down as an absolute imitator. Yet what more similarity is there between Churchill's Prophecy of Famine,' and Pope's Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot,' than between Andreas del Sarto's 'Disputation on the Trinity' in the Pitti Palace and Raphael's 'Disputa' on the Doctrine of Transubstantiation in the Vatican; which it never yet