to know its extent. No doubt it is "frightful," whether it be small or great. But we cannot help hoping and believing that, both in her estimate of the extent to which the general principle is accepted, that everything may be sacrificed to bodily health, and of this last and most revolting application of it, Miss Cobbe is, in some respects, predisposed to believe the worst; and that she may be underestimating the effect of those restraining influences which so often prevent an immoral theory from producing its logical consequences. But it is impossible to speak too seriously or too emphatically on such a subject; and once more we have to thank Miss Cobbe, as we have had to thank others of her sex, for speaking with such noble, womanly courage and “godly sincerity" the word of warning and counsel. Under the heading 'Zoophily,' the duties of man towards the lower animals are discussed, the object of the paper being to define the feeling with which they ought to be regarded, and which most naturally determine our treatment of them. We need hardly say that the argument is yet another plea to save our humbler fellow-creatures from the hands of the tormentors. In the amusing paper on 'Sacrificial Medicine,' we are presented with a selection (accompanied with characteristic reflections) from the senseless and disgusting prescriptions of the doctors of former days, “distinguished by one or other of the grand characteristics, roughly definable as Costliness or Nastiness." The point, or, shall we say, the sting of the article is to be found, not in the recognition of the great advances made in the direction of science and common sense in the practice of medicine, but in the suggestion that "to our grandsons, half cur modern nostrums . . . may possibly appear scarcely a degree less ridiculous than the Arcanum of Toads or the Mummiall Quintessence." Passing to the next essay, we should be glad to believe that the question of the 'Fitness of Women for the Ministry of Religion' is one which "is likely soon to acquire importance." We fear that it is affected by deeply-rooted prejudices, which, while they are peculiarly unreasonable, may, perhaps, on that very account, be all the more difficult to get rid of. The good sense and sobriety of judgment with which the whole subject is discussed by Miss Cobbe ought to make its impression, and do something towards removing the hindrances which have prevented women from entering on a work for which, in many respects, they are especially qualified. 'The House on the Shore of Eternity' is a brief allegory, the interpretation of which is, perhaps, a little too immediately obvious. At the same time the analogy seems an imperfect one between the soul of man in this earthly life and a ship in the stocks, which the spectater takes to be a house most skilfully and ingeniously constructed, and yet perversely unsuited for a residence on terra firma. Its true nature and destination are, of course, discovered when the tide flows in and floats it away. The life of man, however, in its earthly stage, hardly corresponds to the ship which has as yet no function to fulfil. The idea of the voyage of life is as beautiful and touching as it is old; but it is the voyage begun in this life which carries us into the haven, or into unknown seas-an idea which has more of the truth of poetry and spiritual fact in it than has the newer allegory. 99.66 The paper from which the volume is named comes last, the title referring, of course, to the well-known lines which conclude one of Keats' finest sonnets. We do not feel inclined to discuss or analyse these closing pages, suggestive as they are of many reflections. They are full of tender and comforting thoughts about the great Transition, connected chiefly with the touching incidents which have been recorded as accompanying the last moments of earthly life, when the dying person has seemed to see something with "a sudden lighting up of the countenance, and a word or gesture of recognition,' a rapture of surprise or delight." Repudiating the idea of founding any argument for a future life on such occurrences our faith in that life resting on independent grounds-Miss Cobbe regards them as suggesting, at least, the possibility that consciousness is not always lost, but is continuous through the passage from one life to another. Perhaps she draws the line a little arbitrarily, when she separates from all other classes of spiritual manifestations the cases in which those just dying have seen visions of the departed; and there are many equally well authenticated accounts of the appearance, in visible form, of far absent friends, with no suggestion of any permanent separation of the soul from the body of either seer or seen. Whether such visions may be the creation of the brain under certain exceptional conditions, or whether they are due to a real spiritual presence which is not hindered by the material conditions of space, is a question the solution of which is at present in a very rudimentary state. Certainly there are no stories of these visions which we are more willing to believe than in those, the special and pathetic interest of which is here so touchingly and sympathetically shown, and which are on the side of the deepest longings and the brightest hopes which we approach the moment of crossing the borders of the Silent Land. PROFESSOR KNIGHT'S EDITION OF WORDSWORTH'S POEMS.* WE E are at last to have, in fitting beauty of form, the complete and standard edition of Wordsworth's poems. In undertaking the duty of preparing it, Professor Knight has earned the gratitude of all true Wordsworthians. His task, though it could not but be a congenial one, was one which involved no little labour of a kind which might easily degenerate into drudgery, for one of its chief features is the collation of all the various editions published during the poet's life-time, from *The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by WILLIAM KNIGHT LL.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy, St. Andrews. Vols. I. and II Edinburgh: William Paterson. 1882. the Evening Walk, of 1793, to the sixth collective edition of 1845, involving the labour of going through the earlier poems a dozen times, and the Excursion half a dozen times, with a single eye to the changes in the text, from the important and significant alterations, which have a real literary interest, down to the constantly recurring slight verbal amendments. The results of this collation are given at the foot of the page, on a simple and perspicuous plan, which enables the reader to see at a glance how the text originally stood, what was the date at which it was finally settled, and what intermediate changes, if any, may have been made in it. Thus to the opening line of the Sonnet Composed on the Beach near Calais—“It is a beanteous evening, calm and free," the note gives the date of 1807, with the following readings: Air sleeps,-from strife or stir the clouds are free, 1836. It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, 1842. 1846. Those of us who are lucky enough to possess the original editions, say, of the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and 1800, or the two volumes published in 1807, will not give up the pleasure of reading the poems in the form, both inward and outward, in which they originally appeared, and noting mentally, as they read, the passages which the author afterwards altered or rejected. But these precious little volumes are now among the prizes to be picked up on rare occasions, and at extravagant prices; and even those who have them will not the less, but rather the more, appreciate the value of the complete collation, the varied interest of which they have ascertained for themselves at first-hand, within a narrower range. It is probable that the majority of readers will be surprised to find how frequently Wordsworth revised his poems, and how many alterations he made in them. Some of the pages of the new edition are pretty equally divided between the text and the various readings; and though this naturally happens oftenest in the Evening Walk and the Descriptive Sketches-those early and more conventional productions which the author might just as well have left as they were written, instead of laboriously endeavouring to assimilate them to his later style-it will also be found in the case of some of the Lyrical Ballads, and other early poems; and, at a later date, amongst other instances, Peter Bell was subjected to a careful, and, on the whole, an advantageous revision. We feel tempted to give some specimens in evidence of the interest and value of this part of Professor Knight's work, but we have not room for them here; and we shall probably return to the subject, when the future volumes have enabled us to take a more comprehensive view. One thing will certainly be made clear, that, contrary perhaps to the general impression, in the large majority of cases Wordsworth improved when he altered. There are instances, it is true, sometimes quoted as if they were representative ones, in which the poet in his critical mood has done harm in retouching his first fresh work. But no reader of any critical discernment who would go through the twelve or thirteen hundred variations which are recorded in these two volumes alone, could hesitate to approve, on the whole, of the results of the poet's selfcriticism, as embodied in his final readings. There is no doubt that Professor Knight has done wisely in taking his text from the latest editions, and giving the previous readings in the footnotes, rather than adopting the earliest form of the text, which would have been the only other admissible alternative. We should have thought that the third course, which he speaks of, as having required consideration, viz.: the production of an eclectic text, in which each poem should be given in the form which approved itself as the best to the editor's judgment, was out of court altogether. The special purpose of the collation, is to give the reader the means of judging for himself whether the poet's original work, or his afterthought, is the happier; and it would have greatly complicated matters to have had the editor's opinion always intervening. With regard to the choice between the text of the earliest and the latest editions, it seems to us only just to an author to give his works, in a standard edition, in the form which he himself finally settled, even if it were not, as in this case, so evidently the one to be on the whole preferred on its own merits. The arrangement of the poems in chronological order (as they were written, of course, not as published) adds a new feature of interest, and was required in an edition designed especially for the study of the poet's art and the development of his genius. A complete list of the poems, with the dates of composition and of publication, is given; and it is interesting to learn from it, among other things, how much of Wordsworth's best known and finest work belongs to nearly the earliest period, written between his 28th and 37th years, and published in the Lyrical Ballads, which include the 'Lines written in 1798, a few miles above Tintern Abbey,' and in the Poems of 1807, amongst which are the 'Ode to Duty' (1805), and the 'Intimations of Immortality' (begun in 1803, and completed in 1806). The edition will contain, of course, all the author's own printed notes and prefaces, and also the indispensable personal memoranda which he dictated, late in life, to his old friend Miss Isabella Fenwick. A selection only of these was given in the edition published by the poet's executors; and although they were printed in extenso in Dr. Grosart's edition of the Prose Works, they now appear for the first time in their proper place, in connection with the poems to which they severally refer. A new and very interesting source of information as to the circumstances under which many of the poems were written, extending often to minute detail, has happily been available in the form of the journals kept by Miss Wordsworth, at Grasmere, from 1800 to 1803. Professor Knight, in speaking of these journals at the Wordsworth Society's last meeting, said that they were "a singularly interesting record of 'plain living and high thinking,'-of very plain living, and of very lofty thought, imagination, and feeling. They were the best possible commentary on the poems belonging to that period; because they showed the manner of life of the brother and the sister, the character of their daily work, the influences of Nature to which they were subjected, the homeliness of their ways, and the materials on which the poems were based, as well as the sources of their inspiration. . . . Miss Wordsworth's delineations of Nature in these daily jottings were quite as subtle and minute, quite as delicate and ethereal, as anything in her brother's poems. Above all, there was in these records a most interesting disclosure of Dorothy Wordsworth's friendship with Coleridge; and a very remarkable friendship it was." The editor has been allowed to use such portions only of these journals as serve the same general purposes of illustration as do the Fenwick notes; from a line or two indicating a date or locality, to a page of exquisite description of some scene, the essence of which was fixed on the spot or afterwards by the poet's art. It is to be hoped that these extracts, like those which were given in the Memoirs from Miss Wordsworth's Recollections of the Tour in Scotland, are only the precursors of the appearance of the complete record. We are glad to have many descriptive passages from these Scotch journals, also reprinted here, in connection with the poems which they illustrate; and Professor Knight, who is himself a chief authority on topographical matters connected with Wordsworth, has embodied in additional notes much of the information contained in his delightful book, The Lake District as Interpreted in the Poems of Wordsworth.' Certainly nothing more could well be asked for in the way of illustration than has been provided in these volumes. They give us the opportunity of studying the poet's mind and work in a way which he himself approved and encouraged; and if it should seem to us at first that poetry which deals, as Wordsworth's does, so simply and directly with the heart of nature and the inner life of human thought and affections, needs no such elaborate apparatus for its interpretation and enjoyment, we shall still find that there is scarcely a poem which has not been enriched by having some fresh and interesting association connected with it, and some more personal significance imparted to it. We are promised, in the preface, "several poems or fragments of poems, hitherto unpublished." It is not mentioned what these are to be, and we can only hope that now at last we are to have that book of The Recluse, from which a quotation was made thirty-one years ago in the Memoirs, but which has been hitherto so unaccountably withheld from publication. It is not to be supposed that anything else of importance is still in manuscript; and among the pieces which had been dropped out of the later editions, or had been printed elsewhere and never included in them, perhaps the only ones of any real interest are the quaintly characteristic picture of 'Andrew Jones,' the pest of the village, which we may smile at, but be rather glad to recover; and the stanzas on the Glowworm, which, though less perfect than the others of the group of |