has thrown every charm of style and vivid coloring. Maud is a thing of light and loveliness. We admire her for her sweetness and beauty; we love her for her gentleness and purity; we sorrow for her unhappy fate. But she stands out on the canvass, marked by no great peculiarities of mind and heart, and manifests only in a higher degree those qualities which belong to all true women. But the hero of the poem is something far different. He is the representative of a class of individuals, of which every age has seen some, and our own age many; individuals possessing intellects strong, but one-sided, sensibilities deep, but acting in a diseased manner;— individuals, whose conceptions of human nature are lofty, but whose lives are rendered in consequence so much the gloomier, because of the failure of men to attain unto the hight which they themselves have reached or pointed out.

Of this class the hero of the poem is a peculiar, but by no means unnatural specimen. A man of strong powers and acute sensibilities, his solitary education has developed to a disproportionate degree his reflective faculties, while it has likewise had the effect of embittering his views of life. It has also done more to bring out than to repress that lingering trace of insanity in his nature, which partially reveals itself at the very beginning of the poem, but is manifested in a manner not to be mistaken towards the conclusion. In the following verse he himself gives the clue to the full understanding of his character, and points out the circumstances of his early years which have cast upon his life so dark a shadow. He says, "For am I not, am I not, here alone,

So many a summer since she died,

My mother, who was so gentle and good?

Living alone in an empty house,

Here half-hid in the gleaming wood,

Where I hear the dead at midday moon,

And the shrieking rush of the wainscot mouse,

And my own sad name in corners cried,
When the shiver of dancing leaves is thrown

About its echoing chambers wide,

Till a morbid hate and horror have grown
Of a world in which I have hardly mixt,
And a morbid eating lichen fixt

On a heart half-turned to stone."

In the last four lines the man is drawn in striking colors. Seclusion from the world has brought on a diseased state of the mind. His powers, instead of having become strong and healthy by ever

error.

lasting contact with struggling men, have degenerated into a morbid activity, hurtful to himself and useless to mankind. That sensitive dislike of mingling under any circumstances in the tumult and contests of every-day life—a fault too common with literary men—has been constantly gathering strength. His mind, continually brooding upon itself, has at length taken a sombre coloring from the sad feelings which oppress him, and he begins to view everything outside of himself with jaundiced eyes. The world, so far as he has known it, has been full of nothing but corruption and crime. Virtue and honor have been no safeguard against ruin and shame, while villainy and vice are respected and respectable. The natural effect of such a training is marked throughout the whole poem. The sentiments, to which he gives utterance, are the sentiments of a man who has been an observer of only one side-and that the darker side of human nature, and therefore looks with distrust upon the actions of his fellow-men and the entire working of the social state. Along with some truth, there is consequently much He sees that a war would be a safe outlet for a great part of the wickedness and crime he views ahout him, but that is all he sees plainly. He has not gained, by perpetual association with the world without, that breadth of mind and varied experience, which would enable him to discern in the jarring and conflict of human passions a constant advance, a constant struggle to reach a higher level. Men, with such a character as this, though not numerous, are still not uncommon. They are more frequently to be met with in our own than in other times, and the very gloominess of their minds is nothing but a natural effect of that sudden revulsion of feeling which takes hold of them, when, instead of their former false views of life and human perfectibility, they behold the naked truth. It is the reaction of that first chivalric spirit,in which they sympathized so deeply with the passion of the age, and dreamed of its unlimited progress; in which they shared with it in its movements, its mighty conflicts, its blind but earnest strivings for the right, and felt with it in all their intensity, its brilliant aspirations, its bitter disappointments, its sadness and its hope. Still less are the despairing feelings manifested throughout by the hero of the poem uncommon. They form a part of the history of every enthusiastic man, of every ardent lover of ideal good, and darken at times the faith of the most hopeful. They saddened the whole life of Shelley, and turned to deeper gloom the melancholy in which almost from his cradle the spirit of Cowper was

shrouded. They hung with the weight of inexpressible sorrow over the last hours of Pitt, when sick at heart as he saw the ruin of cherished plans, he rolled up the map of Europe, and lay down to die.

In discussing the character of the hero of the poem, we have spoken of the morbid action of his feelings, which shows itself in whatever he says or does: but in nothing is this peculiarity more marked than in the suspiciousness of his disposition. Everything he sees about him is colored by that dark distrust of others, which existing in him by nature, has been developed out of all proportion by the circumstances under which he has been brought up. On all occasions he endeavors-even against the evidence of his senses-to attribute actions springing from the purest of feelings to the worst of motives. In the very midst of happiness, he is in misery; he anticipates in his own case too truly-the fall of some impending ruin, the sweep of some "undercurrent woe." Connected with this suspicious disposition, in fact partially arising from it, is that tendency to casuistry in which he so often indulges. It is the necessary consequence of looking into his motives, of brooding upon the nature of every action, of carefully considering both sides of every question that presents itself before the mind. Throughout the poem instances are so common, that he who runs may read. When Maud meets him the second time, and gives him her hand, the interpretation he at first puts upon her conduct, the obvious, and in truth the only interpretation, is soon driven out of his mind by the diseased action of his feelings. He imagines, as motives for her treating him with cordiality, every other reason besides the natural one, and attributes her deportment by turns to a desire of numbering him among her admirers, or of gaining his vote for her brother, or even to a feeling of pity for his unhappy fate. There is no more singular instance of this refining quality of mind than in the following lines, in which when about to proffer his suit for the hand of Maud, and almost certain of her love, he is in doubt whether she is affianced to his wouldbe rival,-lines which, while they show the high tone and delicacy of his nature, manifest no less the peculiar qualities of his character, "What if she be fasten'd to this fool lord,

Dare I bid her abide by her word?

Should I love her so well if she

Had given her word to a thing so low?

Shall I love her as well if she

Can break her word were it even for me?

I trust that it is not so."

And in this connection it is impossible to overlook the naturalness of the recovery from insanity and of the close of the poem. It reads us that old lesson, which is preached by the events of common life, and the observation, if not the experience, of every person. For it is not by the gentle influences of repose and peace that the sorrow and tumult of spirits, fearfully wrought up, are to be quieted; but by the excitement of conflicts, civil or military, by sympathy with and participation in great and earnest exertion. In the history of every man whose life has been rendered gloomy by some deep sorrow, there is a time when he feels the truth of the sentiment of the hero of Locksley Hall,

"I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair."

In action it is that the latent energies of the soul are called into being; by action it is that foul thoughts, the offspring of a diseased working of the mind, are driven away. And the poet manifests his truth to nature in the portrayal of character, when, from the gloom and misery of madness, he causes his hero to awake to the consciousness of the dignity of his being, and of the purposes for which he was created, by the inspiring thought of mingling in a great war in defense of the right.

We have confined ourselves to only one light in which Maud is to be viewed, and that by no means the one most interesting. Paying no attention to the beauty of form and expression, we have endeavored to lay bare the skeleton of the poem, to point out the one great design running through it, and the intimate relation of the parts to one another. We have attempted to show that it is not simply a collection of pearls, strung together without order, but a work of art consistent in its unity, perfect in the naturalness of its characters and the developement of its plan. Of the far higher task of execution, of the poetry as poetry, we have not spoken at all. Yet there are in it lines which will become as familiar as household words, passages which will live when the English is a silent tongue, vows and scenes of affection which will dwell forever in the soul of man. We have not spoken of the apostrophe to the voice of Maud, so sweet in its sorrow, so stirring in its hopelessness,-of the lines at the garden-gate, in which the dawning light of day, the odor of flowers and the passion of music, all combine to lend to the verse its movement and voluptuous charm,-or, of that after-hour of memory and remorse, in which the bitterness of despair is conveyed in

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words that leave their impress upon the heart forever. These are things which may be felt, but cannot be told; but they are also things which, even were the poem devoid of all design in the plan and coherence in the construction, would be sufficient to insure it an immortality as lasting as it would be deserved.

T. R. L.

Where Shall my Grave be?

Yet may my last abode

Be where a loving hand

May deck with flowers my burial sod,
And make the spot a pleasant land,
For souls to rest in when they hold
Communion as in days of old.

Where shall my grave be? Where?
And can one heart be found
That doth a human impress bear,

And treads this being's narrow bound,
That hath not looked on earth's wide face,
And sought to find its resting-place?

The grave can yield no breath

To make its secrets known,

Yet with the mystery of Death,

There comes a soft, clear undertone-
Low whispering that a presence dwells
Unknown to us in those dark cells!

Student Life.

There is a rare old Eastern fable of a magic cup, the interior of which was marked off by seven rings, and when filled with wine, as you gazed into its sparkling depths, you could see in each division all that was transpiring in that one of the seven worlds to which it corresponded. This fable of the seven worlds is not all fiction: each