appearance of an insecure quagmire, the depth of which we dare not attempt to sound.

It is only in trusting to an unavoidable superficiality that we can try to decide the possibility of thinking well and writing ill; and to ask ourselves whether it is possible to clothe a noble thought in such a way as to hide its beauty, or if in the opposite case of thinking ill and writing well, a meagre or deformed thought may be hidden by the richness of its dress? Though it is hard to give an absolute answer, our first impulse is to answer negatively, for reasoning by comparison, how can melody exist which is not founded on harmony? The key-note of the simplest, as of the grandest strains of true poetry, must be sounded in the heart or intellect of the poet, while harsh, wild chords are sometimes struck from the heart strings, as it were, of true deep thinkers, which can bear no extraneous expression, but are complete and grand in their loneliness. To use another metaphor (one which is somehow suggested by the second volume of Modern Painters), can an erring, vague, thought which seems to rise no higher than the damp fog which sometimes hangs over the fields, be elevated by the power of words to the free glory of a cloud which floats in the blue firmament? Undoubtedly, good writing must be the result of good thinking, for words are the divine expression of thought; but in our weakness and imperfection, the bright rays which illumine our spirit, are apt to be almost instantly obscured by a cloud of misty, earthborn fancies, and hard as it is to analyse the working of

our own minds, it is surely harder to discern exactly what is misty, and what is false, in the thoughts of other men. We may not be able to penetrate to the idea itself; but we cannot but feel that the words in which it is enshrouded, at least reflect the brightness which filled the author's mind.

:

This feeling is specially aroused by the author who has been cited as a flagrant example of "fine writing," and it is certainly not pleasant to analyse pages, where we constantly meet with such sentences as these "the safest spirit for immature minds is reverence, the safest place, obscurity;" "one of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable, is the disease of thinking;" (1) "the moment we reduce enjoyment to ingenuity, and volition to leverage, that instant all sense of beauty disappears." Our only encouragement lies in what may be considered Ruskin's definition of true criticism, "the spirit of right taste clasps all that it loves so tight that it crushes it if it be hollow."

This dislike to being misunderstood is accounted for in a man who felt very much in earnest, and whose craving (if we may apply his own expression to himself) was for "sympathy, not admiration." Though this dislike may have produced a sort of irritable nervousness, as when he writes: "Now, whatever faults there may be in my modes of expression, I

(1) Ruskin dit quelque part: "Unless you are a very singular person, you cannot be said to have any thoughts at all."

P. S.

;

know that the words I use will always be found in Johnson's dictionary to bear first of all the sense I use them in, and that the sentences, whether awkwardly turned or not, will, by the ordinary rules of grammar bear no other interpretation than I mean them to bear ; so that the misunderstanding of them must result, ultimately, from the mere fact that their matter sometimes requires a little patience;" (1) still in his earlier writings he himself combats the accusations to which his later works have subjected him. These two passages from the second volume of Modern Painters seem to embody the idea, the phantom of which we have been vainly trying to grasp. First defining imagination as the "penetrating, possession-taking faculty," Ruskin writes: "there is in every word set down by the imaginative mind, an awful under-current of meaning, and evidence, and shadow upon it, of the deep places from whence it has come. It is often obscure, often half told, for he who wrote it in his clear seeing of the things beneath, may have been impatient of detailed interpretation; but if we choose to dwell upon it and trace it, it will lead us always securely back to that metropolis of the soul's dominion, from which we may follow out the ways and tracks to its farthest coasts." "And that virtue of originality which men so strain after is not newness, as they vainly think (there is nothing new), it is only genuineness; it all depends on this single glorious faculty of getting to the

(1) "Be sure," dit encore Ruskin, "if the author is worth anything, that you will not get at his meaning all at once ;-nay, that at his whole meaning you will not for a long time arrive in any wise."

P. S.

Spring of things, and working out from that; it is the coolness, and clearness, and deliciousness of the water fresh from the fountain-head, opposed to the thick, hot, unrefreshing drainage of other men's meadows."

S. DE P.

ONZIEME CAUSERIE.

Grandeur de Lord Byron.-Anecdote sur le Rhin.---Anecdote sur le lac de Genève.—Polidori et Shelley.-Courage de Byron enfant.— Byron et Robert Peel à l'école.-Générosité de Byron.-Le cordonnier de Venise.-Conduite courageuse de Byron à Céphalonie.Une tempête en mer.—Attitude de Byron.-Sa part dans la révolution italienne.—Son admiration pour Napoléon.-Etonnement et indignation que lui cause l'abdication de l'empereur.-Blücher.Mort de Lord Byron.-Les enragés.-La jeunesse d'aujourd'hui.Prévost-Paradol et M. Guizot.-L'absence de passions, le manque de caractère, n'est pas un bien chez le philosophe.-C'est un grand mal chez l'artiste.-Alfred de Musset.-Théophile Gautier. Victor Hugo, le 2 Décembre, et l'exil.-La poésie et la politique.—Alliance du bien et du beau.-Une erreur des critiques superficiels.-Paroles profondes de Goëthe.-Belle citation de Plotin.-Le Satan de Milton. -Le Méphistophélès de Goëthe.-Macbeth.-Caliban.--Byron, Satan

et Lamartine.

MESDEMOISElles,

AVANT de quitter Lord Byron, j'ai une réparation à faire à ce grand homme. Dans nos deux dernières causeries, nous nous sommes un peu égayés à ses dépens: cela est bien, pourvu qu'aujourd'hui nous nous inclinions devant sa gloire. Ce n'est pas de sa poésie que je veux vous entretenir; vous la connaissez mieux que moi; la seule manière de faire admirer un poëte, c'est de lire ou de réciter ses vers; mais, pour Byron, cela