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it without trembling. The time had come; I laced my fingers close together, and I spoke it.

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'Noel, when am I to go?"

He was startled. The twilight was not so deep but I could see that. I saw his sudden glance at me his quick surprise. I had no answer for a moment; and then he spoke, but not gladly-Oh! God be thanked, not gladly!

I had forgotten that you had to go, Ruth."

"Had you forgotten?" I spoke sorrowfully, not in bitterness. "Yes, that was natural; you had other things to think of."

He rose from his place and came to where I sat. He stood near to me, and leant his arm upon my chair.

"Ruth, where are you going?" "Where?" I raised my face to his one moment. "To the place I came from; to the house I left."

"How soon? Not at once?-not this week?"

"It does not matter, this week or next; I will do what you like."

"Then give me one week longer, Ruth."

"Yes."

And I said no more; we were both silent.

But when some moments had gone past, and while I still sat in my dull hopeless resignation, suddenly I was quickened by his touch. It lay on my bent head; for the first time I had ever felt it; I stooped beneath the pressure of his hand.

"Ruth," he said sadly, "I wish I could say to you remain with me. I am not happy now; and when you go you will take the last ray of sunshine with you from the house. It has been a lighter house from the day you entered it. God bless you, little Ruth!"

His hand was gone from me, as he himself would be all gone within one little week. If he had asked me I would have remained with him to be a servant in his house; and I did not stir nor speak. For his kindness I had no thanks; for his blessing no response; but all my heart was fainting in me, shrinking into death before the shadow of its lowliness.

I went away. It was a bright spring day, and the birds were building their nests under the shelter of the old church eaves. I had been very quiet

all the week, going about slowly, strangely, like one in a dream. I was quite still, with even a kind of solemnity in my quietude; for it seemed to me as if all that could be called life in my existence was to end this day.

He was working in his studio. I had not told him the hour I was to go, but when it came I went to him. Once I had thought that I would ask him to let me sit one hour beside him before I went. I had done it once or twice before, but this day I could not. I only went to him when every preparation was completed, and my corded trunks were at the door.

I entered the room then and stood before him.

"I am going, Noel."

He started up at the sight of me, and came to meet me.

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"You did not tell me that you were to go so soon," he said. Why did you not come before?"

"There was no need to disturb you. It did not matter."

"It would not have disturbed me, Ruth."

He took my two hands in his; as he held them he looked at me.

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Ruth, are you really going?" "Yes."

"You are looking pale and ill. Ruth, you are not glad to go." "Noel, I am not strong. Bid me good bye."

"Not yet; not here, Ruth."

"Yes, here; I saw you first in this house. When I think of you I want you to belong to this house first and last."

He was standing before me. We both became silent; what more was there to say? Alas! I had nothing more. But I raised my face; I looked into his eyes. I should see him no more I should never see him more, perhaps, on earth.

Then the end came.
"Let me go now."

He held my hands still; and holding them, he stooped and kissed me. Once he prayed-God bless me! Before he loosed my hands, he repeated twice:

"Little Ruth! little Ruth!"

And that was all. No tears had risen to my eyes; they were all hot and dry: but I went away from him, and closed the door, groping my steps as if the night had fallen.

VI.

I WAS in my own house, and alone; solitary from day to day, from dawn till night. I was not happy. God had given me my lot, and I struggled hard to be contented with it, but I could not see my way in it. I did not know what to do. If I had had one single creature to have lived for, I could have been resigned to it; but I was so utterly lonely.

I knew that in some way I must work, or I could not bear it. With a courage, therefore, that was a kind of despair, I set to work. Not to quiet in-door work, reading, studying, educating myself. I could not do these things at first: my feeble energy needed first to be sustained by something stronger than my own fainting will. I knew that: and so I bound myself to the only work within my reach that did not leave my own will free. There were helpless people and ignorant children in our village: I gave my time to them. Perhaps they did not thank me for it; but they took it, and presently they looked upon it as their right. I served them, and they counted on my service; and their dependence became my wages.

I worked all through the summer: oh! the summer that had been so bright in its last shining on me, and was so bare and desolate now. I worked all through the days, and in the long, still evenings I used to sit alone. I used to sit then, and dream and yearn. It was my day's onetreasured luxury - my light and warmth my meat and drink after my weary toil. And yet even that bread was bitterness, that water was tears. Daily my yearnings ended in one hopeless cry: Oh, if I could but hear of him! if I could but hear of him! if I could but have hope given me to see him once again!

The summer passed away. When it was gone, I was pale and thin; I was worn and weary. Perhaps I had worked too hard: I do not know: but a fainting feebleness had fallen on me, and I began to think that God was about to take my life. Then my passionate desire grew to wild feverishness to look once more on Noel Erickson's face. The longing wasted me away: I could not rest nor sleep morning and night the

VOL. LI. NO. CCCIII.

thought was with me that I could not die till I had seen his face again.

I think there must be a time in very many lives, when grief or misfortune have seemed to reach their utmost limits, that suddenly, without a note of warning, or one sign to tell the coming change, God stays the rushing of the Marah waters, and for darkness there comes light, and for the faithless weakness of the fainting heart comes hope newborn, and strength fresh out from heaven.

It was an autumn morning; and a restless night had left me worn and ill. I could not leave the house. I was so weary (I had often grown forced of late to change day into night) that at last I laid me down in the broad noon sunshine, and tried to sleep. And I did sleep presently: gently and peacefully, the calmest slumber came to me that I had known for weeks.

I do not know how long it lasted. I dreamt a happy dream that I was talking to Noel, standing with him in the half gloom, half sunshine of the old familiar room. I wakened at the gentle sound of something stirring near me. My dream was over: I lifted up my eyes, and saw

There was some one at my side, sitting beside me, leaning towards me. I looked upon him; I looked into his face; I uttered his name!

I made no movement, and gave no cry: I did not ask him how he came: I asked him nothing. Quite hushed and calm, I only lay with my eyes upon his face, in the deep stillness of unutterable joy.

"Ruth!" he called.

His voice brought back my dream. I had thought there that he spoke to me in that same tone. A smile came to my lips: it was to me as if all pain, and sickness, and sorrow had passed away.

'I thought I was at home: I was dreaming of being in the old room again." I looked up into his face as he stooped over me. "Noel, it was not quite a dream."

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Ruth," he cried, suddenly, "is this all my welcome?"

We were face to face, his eyes looking into mine, mine into his; till, as still water trembles and is stirred before the wind, all my strange stillness was broken before

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that gaze. No, it was not all! for he knew my secret: he had read my heart and before his look, and before the close clasp of his hand, I trembled, and I broke down like a child. I lifted up my empty hands to him:

"I have been so desolate! oh, I have been so desolate!" I cried; and I burst into a passion of tears.

He took me, and he laid me in his arms: my helpless passion he hushed upon his heart: over my low, wild weeping he spoke these words:

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"Little Ruth," he cried, come home to me! I came to seek you. I cannot rest without you. My little Ruth, my little Ruth, come back!"

The year was wasted; we were standing on the verge of winter; but in that winter there dawned for me a new glad spring. He took me home. Önce more in my joy I saw the old town's solemn streets, and the shadow of the ancient church: once more I stood within the old familiar house and I was Noel's wife.

THE WORSHIPPERS OF MERCURY; OR, PARACELSUS AND HIS BROTHER

ALCHYMISTS.

No author of three hundred volumes, which have survived the changes of several centuries-volumes written at a time when book-making had not yet become a mechanical art can deserve to be forgotten; nor could we be content to dismiss such a one with even the exulting exclamation of his old commentator-O fecunditas ingenii!

But when I find that this same genius has not merely the merit of fecundity, but was one who overthrew many old errors, and was, indeed, a strong-limbed pioneer of modern science, I feel still more willing to lend a hand to drag him from the mud of oblivion. We select him as the arch-professor of certain scientific beliefs which, right or wrong, engaged the human mind centuries after centuries. We select him as the type of medical science at the end of the sixteenth century, and as an example of the bounds of human knowledge at that epoch.

If alchymy has any thing in it; if the Cabala is a book of mysteries and not of gibberish; if the elixir of life means any thing, and is not rank folly; if, in a word, the labours, the pains, the throes, the breast-sorrow and the brain-anguish of five centuries of learned men were not wasted, as much as an idiot's labour who builds card houses; all that is valuable in those creeds, theories, sciences (call them what you will), is to be found in the writings of Paracelsus.

His life expresses the age; his ideal was that of all students in his own times. He was the greatest philoso

pher, chemist, doctor, and surgeon of his own days; the furthest traveller; the most voluminous and widest read writer. His books contain the efforts at the possible and the impossible of the fifteenth century, as much as Bacon's show the foundation of natural philosophy in the sixteenth. The very wildness and absurdity of the weary folios of Paracelsus interest us in the struggles of a mind drifted in an unknown sea without a pilot.

It is as a character, as a mental phenomenon, that I seek to revive the colours of this faded picture. I do it with delight and reverence. I see a great heart broken in a struggle with the Sphynx of science, and I feel my own heart beat quicker. I see the climber's arm relax, and hear him splash into the abyss. I honour him as the aspirer, and I mourn for him as the vanquished. With a reverent hand, and with no vulgar curiosity, as of the ghouls of literature, I would remove the cerements from the dead king's limbs, and probe the old wound for my own instruction and that, perhaps, of others. In Paracelsus I behold one who died in the race; one of vast intellect, but strange weaknesses; almost a god to-day, a pied zany on the morrow; a mixture of gold and clay; an awful lesson to the student of every age; an instance of the folly and punishment of intellectual pride!

It is not because Paracelsus filled ten thousand folio pages, or because he healed twelve lepers publicly at Nuremberg, that I have undertaken

to be his biographer. It is not as the discoverer of potable gold and the mystery of antimony, that I hold him worthy of honour. It is as the introducer of mineral remedies, as a practiser and recorder of philosophical experiments, and as a great chemical worker, that I regard him with interest. I wish to prove him, beyond all reach of argument, to be the father of modern chemistry and the founder of modern medicine.

It is true that the correspondent and physician of Erasmus, the contemporary of Luther, the Basle professor, the fellow-citizen of Holbein, might even in a historical point of view be worthy of attention, used simply as an illustration of social manners; but it is because he was a great destroyer, and, what is rarer, a great reformer, that I have constituted myself heir to this unclaimed estate, which, as if in Chancery, lies dirty, weedy, and forgotten.

The works of this extraordinary man embrace almost every truth and every error that the world then knew. He wrote on surgery, theology, mineralogy, chiroscopy, physiognomy, astrology, the Cabala, chemistry, and medicine. He declares himself the possessor of every alchymic secret, and a master of all known sciences. He embodies all that is valuable, not merely in the books of the Arab physicians, but of his predecessors, Roger Bacon, Valentinus the monk, and Tully. He avowed himself the discoverer of an elixir that would not make a man immortal but long-lived. He filled earth, sea, and air, with new spirits that were at once acknowledged, and are still, as poetical creations of great individuality. Alone he defied the power of the dead Greek writers, and of all living opponents. A schismatic in science, an innovator in medicine, and an incessant controversialist, he yet escaped both prison and the stake; yet, after associating with princes and swaying nations, he died poor and in an hospital. He was a public lecturer, and the founder of a school of medicine. He anticipated Lavater in physiognomy, and wrote a commentary on the Psalms.

It is difficult to extract a fair opinion of Paracelsus, so great is the ignorance of his biographers. He is called by some an ignorant quack; an impudent, fraudulent impostor; a drunkard, pre

tending to divine illumination to deceive the vulgar; unacquainted with even his own language, and unversed in the medical writers whom he attacks with such unwearied violence.

These strictures it is almost unnecessary to say are all either lies or mis-statements.

Superficial encyclopedists-too hurried to be exact, too indifferent to an unloved task to be accurate-describe Paracelsus as a blatant atheist. I find his works full of a vivid and rapturous religion. They call him ignorant. I find him the most learned man of his age, deeply read in cabalistic, neoPlatonic, and classical learning. They brand him as a grasping quack, and I find him an enthusiast and an almsgiver, who dies poor. They depict him as a scientific Jack-pudding. I find him generally, and in all essentials, beyond his age; one who anticipated and indicated great discoveries; a profound mystic philosopher; an excellent anatomist; in some things childishly credulous; at other times the only sceptic of his day, a doubter of chiromancy, a limiter of astrology, a cautious and laborious inductive chemist. There are some earths which, though not very valuable themselves, make the miner's eyes sparkle, because they are indications of a richer ore below. There are stars which, though small and feebly lit, are precursors of the fuller glory of the moon. divining rod was already shaken by prophetic trembling, but it was not till Bacon griped it that it was pointed full to the bright metal that lay below.

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Scarcely a single extant slander against the memory of this dead man is true. He was an alchymist, indeed. The age that learns to make gold, and manufacture diamonds will know whether to laugh at this or not. He sought not for gold, but medicines to heal mankind and alleviate the burden of human care and suffering, and slighted the stone of the philosophers. He believed in the elixir of life, and hoped to increase its durability, and not to render it indestructible. He believed, in fine, in a common element which is the basis of all things, and modern analysis seems to incline in the same direction. We can no more complain of the shortcomings of such a man, than we can of a great discovery commencing in a guess.

Believing in the chemist's power of making gold, he held an opinion, which Bacon and Boyle, and even Newton, were not ashamed to hold. If he believed in his power of hatching a basilisk, he laughed at the divining rod, ridiculed palmistry, denounced ghosts, and forbad incantations. He anticipated homoeopathy, by asserting the great maxim, "like by like," and not Galen's "contraries by contraries."

Above all things, he reformed medicine, and prepared the path for those who were to come. He first introduced mineral remedies. He was the Luther of a new faith, not wholly rejecting, but modifying and re-making. The herbalists were to him what the monks were to the rough-handed miner's son. Galen was the embalmed pope, whom he determined, at all hazards to dis-shrine. He was the most original man of his day-the widest thinker, and the greatest discoverer. His style, it is true, is abominably dull, slovenly, obscure, inverted, and dry, and yet, still, seldom wearisome, because frequently vivacious, and always strong and thoroughly in earnest.

As hard a worker as Aristotle, his works are scarcely less varied or voluminous; a Pliny in research, his style is that of an arrogant, pedantic professor. It is not for us, with our hand-books of science and frivolous lectures, to laugh at such a man.

It

is true he had the misfortune to be born before us; true that he knew far less than any London chemist, and that he was frightened by his own shadow in a way which our shallow and impudent scepticism may easily despise; but as before Bacon came Aristotle, so necessarily, before Davy came Paracelsus. It is a question whether without the result of his labours, we should be now wise enough to be able to mock and gibber at his follies.

On a bright morning in 1493--that is to say, the latter end of the reign of Henry VII., King of England, the wife of a physician, in the small town of Enisedeln, in the beautiful canton of Schwytz-then, as it is now, remarkable as a resort of pilgrims-was delivered of a child.

Bombast, the Swiss physician, as he kissed the forehead of his firstborn, though a student of astrology, was unaware that he held in his arms

one who was to be the leader of the philosophy of the sixteenth century, arch-alchymist of Europe, and the founder of the sciences of chemistry and medicine.

In spite of the accusations of his apostate disciples and malignant enemies, who considered humble extraction as a crime of the first magnitude, there can be no doubt that Philippe Auréole Theophrastus Bombast de Hohenheim, alias Paracelsus, was not sprung from "la lie du peuple," a phrase which, after all, means nothing; but connected by the paternal line with George Bombast de Hohenheim, Grand Prior of the Order of Malta, whose stal worth white-crossed knights then held that arid island, as a bulwark against the dreaded Mussulman, whose armies were hurled against its defences, as fierce and intermittent as Atlantic storms.

The father of the great enthusiast whose biography we write, we must imagine one of those grave students, with hood and cloak, dagger and square pouch, who appear in the earlier pictures of Holbein ; a gold band round his hat, from which depends a streamer of cloth which wraps round the neck or flutters loose, an ornamented girdle. He is not a Swiss by birth, but comes from Villach, in Carinthia, a dependency of Austria, a mountainous and woody country, and famous for its iron mines.

Every one who has left London, with its dreary miles of endless terraces, to clamber through upward leagues of rhododendron flowers, and emerald chasms of the glacier, far above the marmot's burrow, and even the eagle's home, to snows untrod before but by the angels and the spirits of the wind, will remember Zurich, with its green transparent lake and shores, spotted white with houses, while, beyond, joining earth and heaven, rise the Alps of Glarus, Uri, and Schwytz, grey at twilight, silver under the moon, and red at sunset.

Enisedeln, the birth-place of Paracelsus (Monasterium Gremitarum), is a small cluster of houses round an abbey, built on a naked, undulating plain, sheltered by hills, and situated far up among the mountains. This rude spot has been sacred ever since the days of the great Charlemagne. In the troubled times of that Gothic Napoleon, an anchorite of noble fa

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