She had indeed interrogated her son-in-law, though to little purpose.

Whewell he appeared to stand in some awe of, and to know very little about; while regarding Challoner he had but one idea,-"It struck me that he was a suitable person," he said.

"A suitable person?" quoth Matilda, in reply. "A suitable person. Oh, I think,” drily, “I think, Robert, I understand;" for by this time Robert's predilection for "suitable people" was no secret to her.

"So now, Teddy, we shall see what we shall see," nodded she thereafter—namely, on the afternoon when the two gentlemen were due at Endhill, and when the brother and sister, bearing ostensibly Overton's invitation to shoot and dine, but in reality gratifying their own curiosity, hurried over to inspect. "We shall see what we shall see,” said Matilda, speaking for both as was her wont, though the desire to see was perhaps only her own.

She it was who alone cared for a novelty at Overton Hall, and it was only now and then that she did so care. Why she did at all it is not, however, difficult to imagine, when it is remembered that she was a woman, and a woman who, while happy in seclusion, could nevertheless shine in society. She liked-could she help it?— being admired and applauded. She had felt now and then the fascination, the thrill of being first with some one- -the loadstar of one pair of eyes, the magnet for one pair of feet the ear for one speaker, the thought of one thinker. Yes, she knew what it felt like to be that. It felt nice. Even when nothing came of it, and nothing as we know ever had come of it-since the late Mr Wilmot's courtship had been conducted on the least romantic principles, and could not

therefore be considered in the running,--even when nothing came of it, there still remained a recollection of something different from the ordinary everyday comfort of matter in-fact life. The glamour had been cast on her path once and again, and she had dreamed, and she had suffered. People had predicted that Lady Matilda Wilmot would infallibly be caught again some day, and it had been whispered that a deadly mischief had been done to the heart of this one and that one; that poor Lord George had left the Hall with a longer face than the one he brought there, and that Colonel Jack had changed his regiment and gone abroad soon after his long wintry visit at Overton. He had said he could not stand another English winter, and perhaps that was why he had never reappeared in the neighbourhood. Every one blamed

the lovely widow; but perhaps, after all, mistakes are made sometimes.

Those days, however, are past and gone, and if wounds have been made or received, they are healed by time's blessed hand. Lord George is wedded, the Colonel toasts "the ladies" without a tremor, and the lady in particular, the lady to whom his thoughts refer, thinks of him with equal ease and tenderness.

and tenderness. He is become a pleasant memory, and even the painful spot is sunlit in the past.

Yes, a heart-whole woman lives at the Hall, a woman with all a woman's hopes and fears-fain to look forward, yet neither ashamed nor reluctant to look back,-able to do without lovers, but not unwilling, not altogether loath-oh, Teddy, beware! Oh, Teddy, as you gallop along the soft wet sward, under the dropping leaves, beneath the murky sky, beware, beware,-by fits and starts Matilda longs to taste the doubtful cup again.

OUR age is not without illustrious names that show a notably high tide-mark of thought, and a rareness and intensity of intellectual divination and sympathetic intuition, that the previous centuries have but dimly attained. The philosophic spirit has explored the interior experiences of humanity; the secrets of nature and evolution have been hunted to their fastnesses; and criticism has lifted itself above the level of mere methods into associations of thought, feeling, and spiritual exposition of motive and intention. But perhaps the supreme soul of our time has best embodied itself in the higher life of poetry and art. The cry of passion, and the subtle searchings of contemplative introversion, have found a hitherto unreached utterance in the elaborate word-painting, the rhythmic exquisiteness of verse, and the musical tone-language of our younger poets; while art has soared into an emotional sphere of lovely ideas and infinite longings, where unfettered by the actual and didactic, it freely moves in imaginative realms of existence and sublimed realism. Precious indeed are these interpretations of outer and inner Life-which, transcending the literal and natural, strike the high note of intuitive sensibility, and utter the pure lyrical cry for the unattainable. Colour has found its true mission, and, passing beyond the limits of mere representation and objective similitude, has caught from music its soul, and expressed itself by tone-harmonies and chromatic arrangements; while music has elaborated its utterance by assuming

the pictured investment of colour, and added the hues of humanity

to its divine revelations of sound. The boundaries of each of the special arts has thus been transcended by the others, so that they form, as it were, one soul, and beat with the passionate pulse of one æsthetic desire. Words, too, have found their true significance, as colours; and the masterful and refined vocables of our language have been discovered to have a value in themselves as tones and tints, quite independent of any mere literal meaning. Employed as they are by some of our new poets, they have ceased to be the mere drudges of thought; and by melodious juxtaposition, by artful alliteration, by vowelled breathings and consonantal crashes of harmony, have justified their claim to be considered as stops in the great organ of inspiration, through which a divine tone is expressed. They are the wings on which the poet soars to loftier empyreans. Hitherto words in themselves have had They have been chained to the low and creeping car of use and commodity. Their divine origin as natural out-breathings of the soul has been misunderstood, and they for the most part have clogged inspiration, while their power as suggestion beyond mere literal definition has been sadly overlooked. But our younger poets of the present day have taught us their true value. As well might we insist that musical tones should have a strict relation to defined thoughts, as that words should be made subservient to a similar end. Let us clearly under

little scope.

stand that words have a higher mission than this, that the poet is by no means to be fettered by their mere sense,—and at once a field is open to him as vast and vague as that which is accorded to music, in which his free imagination may lift itself "to purer ether, to diviner air," and, by mere association of forms of thought and hues of feeling with harmonies of sound, transport the reader beyond the dull world of reality. The highest is ever the unintelligible. It refuses to be bounded by the understanding. Nothing can be truly explained, nothing wholly understood. It is when the intelligible ends that music begins. The sympathies then take the place of the understanding. Where reason cannot follow, imagination easily takes wing. The touch, blind as it is, has magnetic forces superior to the eye, and reports refinements of feeling and sympathetic relations of being beyond explanation or reason, yet not the less powerful and real. Odours are dimly allied to memories by inexplicable relations. We feel what we cannot explain. And in like manner, words in themselves are powers, independent of grammar, independent of thought,-vague articulations of the infinite, often impregnate of desire, of pathos, of tenderness, of emotion. Who, for instance, can say that the "Eastern nation" carries to his imagination the same influence as the "orient clime"? Yet do they not mean the same to the understanding? Smile as we will, there is none the less a deep truth hidden in the consolation which the pious lady found in the mere name of Mesopotamia.

It has been reserved for our own age to appreciate this wonderful power of words-to feel truly that language in itself is colour, music, poetry. There were not indeed wanting in some of the early Eng

lish writers a certain appreciation of this potentiality. John Lily and Sir Philip Sidney may, among others, be referred to as having glimpses of this great truth, but their influence was temporary and ineffectual; and though Shakespeare at times seems with a higher intellectuality and imaginative force to have followed this leading, yet the crass ignorance and literalness of the subsequent century obliterated as in a cloud this euphuistic light-that now emerges again in clearer and more perfect radiance.

We have been led to these considerations by a little volume which has fallen accidentally into our hands, and which apparently has, in the overgrowth of contemporary literature, been so overshadowed as to escape observation. It has not been heralded by the trumpet of praise. The mind of the world has not been prepared for it by the anticipatory laudations of a privileged few of friends; and it has seemingly escaped the notice of those fine observers whose critical eye so keenly scans the horizon of literature. It was, we believe, only privately printed; its circulation has been slight, and unfortunately limited to a few friends, who scarcely seem to have valued it at its real worth; and the name of the author has been concealed from us under apparently mystical initials. For ourselves, we have been so impressed by its refinement of feeling, its symmetry of accordances, its delicacy of tonelanguage, its harmonies of construction, and adumbrations of imagination, that we venture to call attention to it as a noble illustration of our latest and perhaps supreme and most precious school of poetry. The more deeply we ponder these utterances the more surely we must be persuaded that our latest theory of poetic expression is the

true one. Many undoubtedly there will be who are so embedded in the rut of prejudice and early education that they will not willingly accept at first these rare and seemingly exotic growths of a refined imagination, and will rather insist upon more exactness of literal statement, and demand a more distinct purpose and a more didactic style. But a new writer, and especially a new poet, must create the public by which he is to be judged. What we claim for this poet is an intense and subtle feeling for the indefinite, a power of tone-colour in words, and at times a rhythmic pulsation of phrases, which is eminently suggestive rather than realising, and cannot but appeal to every sensitive organisation. as must be conceded, the drawing is not always sharp and accurate, the fusions of hues and melodies compensate for such deficiencies.

If,

But it is time to give a few specimens of this book. First, let us premise that its title indicates peculiarly its purpose. It is called "Suspensions on the Dominant." We could indeed find fault with a title which to the unmusically trained would be scarcely intelligible, but it perfectly explains to those who are conversant with that

science the indefiniteness of the author's intention. These "suspensions" are never resolved. Tending ever to the resolution of the tonic of completion, they express desire and longing after the absolute, which hovers beyond and before, and is only included in necessity, but not in fact. This incompletion and suggestion are the essence of the poet's aim and art. These poems

are therefore not chords of resolution, but discords of desire. They are often mere dreams of colour, or musical combinations of tonal phrases, adumbrating ideas, and touching us more by musical cadence and sympathetic sugges

tion than by strictness of logic, or material definiteness of drawing. They reach out, as does music in its higher moods, into unrealised and, as it were, disembodied conditions of thought, to which feeling is the only key. This is, however, merely their ideal side. As far as materialism goes, we confidently claim that words in the hands of this poet become colours and tones, which are used with a masterly knowledge of effects,-assonances, alliterations, cadences, and modulations, uniting the freedoms of the palette and the orchestra. Specially, we would point out his employment of the sourdine and pizzicato.

The first poem which we shall cite is entitled

The picture is perhaps too definite, but the tone is right and the keeping exquisite. Theseus is afar on the horizon's rim, when Bacchus, the god, regenerates the desolate soul of Ariadne with a breath and a bloom. Here there is no over-insistence of facts-the pure Grecian atmosphere is there, undeformed by literal description. It is not the material Naxos, it is the ideal Grecian clime, that only lives in the imagination. We doubt if anything more refined in touch has been ever reached by words. To those who cannot feel it we have nothing to say. There are many who are born colour-blind, and many who are deaf, and to discourse of colours or sounds to them is as useless as to talk of Plato to idiots.

We will now quote two sonnets, which to us have the same charm of tone. The first is entitled

of itself entitles the poet to the highest rank. Note especially the marvellous juxtaposition and alliteration of sounds to express the musical chiming of the trinkets at Guenevere's girdle, and the delicate tinting of twilight, with its cloud-gold on a trance of silvery grey. How happily this word trance expresses the solemn serenity of evening! We cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of adding one other sonnet, entitled

PATIENCE.

"What power can please a patient Fantasy

Like the wan waiting of the dying rose That fades and fails and sadly silent

strews

Its grave with all its lost felicity.
No such serenity the towering tree
In mildest moods of breathless being
knows,

Where windy whispers torture its repose With murmurous memories of a dreamedof sea.

Tumultuous trouble vainly may assail The inward silence of the settled soul. Joy may assume sad sorrow's sober stole If over Hope pale Patience draws her veil. Earth takes its own, and on the pensive air

Death chants no palinodia of despair."

But to turn to something lighter. Here is a song which sings itself to its own music, and needs no interpretation.