High-ribbed vault of stone, or cell, And where no flower hath leave to dwell. "The presence of this wandering Doe Sheds on the flowers that round her grow Can she be grieved for quire or shrine, For what survives of House where God Sinks, when the summer breeze hath died, You will observe, I hope, that I have tried to keep steadily in view the object with which I began; to show the use of Wordsworth, his practical value to us, the practical advantage we may derive from him, the gratitude we owe him. I have kept therefore, almost entirely, to some points only in his literary and moral character such as were most germane to the subject, and most relevant to my purpose. One only I will farther deal with here. has been said (I must think by those who have not read him, and who do not know It what they are talking about) that he is a cold and heartless writer. I do not know, on the contrary, a writer more full of love —not passion—or more exquisitely tender. If a man can read "Michael," and "The Brothers," and "Margaret," and "Ellen," and many others, with unfaltering voice. and unmoistened eyes, he must either have great self-command or little feeling. And to me the pathos of Wordsworth is like the sweetness of Michael Angelo. As the sweetness of Michael Angelo is sweeter than that of other men, because of his strength, so the pathos of Wordsworth is the more moving because of the calmness and reserve and self-restraint with which it is always clothed. Of his tenderness, all the poems to "Lucy" are surely unanswerable examples: but on personal subjects he is always tender; and I do not know more tender poems than those addressed to a friend whose manner had changed to him, and those to his wife's picture, written, too, when he was a very old man. They are short, and they are the last which I will read: "There is a change-and I am poor; Your love hath been, not long ago, "What happy moments did I count! Blest was I then all bliss above! Of murmuring, sparkling, living love, "A well of love-it may be deep- Let me end my extracts with the poems upon his wife's picture, the poems of a man old in years indeed, for he was seventythree when he wrote them, but young in heart and genius. They are entitled "To a Painter " "All praise the likeness by thy skill portrayed; shall flee Into the land where ghosts and phantoms be; And, seeing this, own nothing in its stead. Couldst thou go back into far distant years, Or share with me, fond thought! that inward eye, Then, and then only, Painter ! could thy art The visual powers of nature satisfy, Which hold, whate'er to common sight appears, Their sovereign empire in a faithful heart. "Though I beheld at first with blank surprise This work, I now have gazed on it so long I see its truth with unreluctant eyes; O, my beloved! I have done thee wrong! Conscious of blessedness, but, whence it sprung Ever too heedless, as I now perceive: Morn into noon did pass, noon into eve, And the old day was welcome as the young, As welcome, and as beautiful-in sooth More beautiful, as being a thing more holy. Thanks to thy virtues, to the eternal youth Of all thy goodness, never melancholy; To thy large heart and humble mind, that cast Into one vision, future, present, past." Now I will assume that you think I have made out some case for the power, the beauty, the genius of Wordsworth's poems. What is the value of them? They seem to me, at the least and at the lowest, to give an intellectual pleasure which is at once innocent and ennobling. They will create in those who master them a sympathy with loftiness of character and purity of soul; and they will teach high and independent principles of judgment to be applied in life to all things and all people. Is this kind of thing worth study? Is fine art, is great literature, is intellectual cultivation of the value, have they each and all the merit which their advocates maintain they have? We have lived to hear this disputed, and it is worth while for a moment to see if we can, what in this matter the truth really is. A great statesman, the other day, said that the violin and all that proceeded from it was as great an effort of the mere intellect as the steam-engine. "What," it was immediately replied by a man of very high rank," what have all the men who have scraped for 300 years on squeaking strings done for mankind compared to one steam-engine?" That depends on what is meant by the words "done for mankind." I can hardly suppose that it was meant to be implied that there is no good in music, that mankind would have been just as well off if Mozart and Beethoven had never lived, that Handel is nonsense, and Haydn stuff: "Sinte nought so stockish hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature; The man that hath no music in himself, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils ; And his affections dark as ErebusLet no such man be trusted." So says Shakspere; but, to be sure, he was a mere poet. "To many men," says another great man," the very names which the science of music employs are utterly incomprehensible. To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be fanciful or trifling, and of the views which it opens upon us to be childish extravagance; yet is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound which is gone and perishes? Can it be that those mysterious strivings of the heart and keen emotions and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes and begins and ends in itself? It is not so. It cannot be. No. They have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our home; they are the voices of Angels, or the Magnificat of Saints, or the living laws of Divine governance or the Divine attributes. Something are they besides themselves which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter, though mortal man-and he, perhaps, not otherwise distinguished above his fellows-has the power of eliciting them." This eloquent passage of Dr. Newman may appear to some men extravagant, but not a whit more so than the passage about the squeaking strings appears to others. The truth is, that there is no use in these attempts to compare as to results things which in their nature do not admit of comparison. It is no doubt quite true that you can learn a great deal of a certain kind, from studying a collection of well-drawn engineering specifications, which you would never learn from reading Wordsworth; but it is also true that you can learn a great deal of a certain other kind from reading Wordsworth which you could never learn from all the specifications in the world. Rhetorical antitheses of this kind are really very misleading, and sometimes very mischievous. We have heard, for example, a distinguished man say that he would rather see England free than sober. Well, but where is the natural oppugnancy between freedom and sobriety? Is it impossible to be at once temperate and free? Is drunkenness necessary to avoid slavery? If not, such phrases as suggest the contrary do infinite mischief. So, again, it is often said, it is better to be religious than orthodox. Well, but is it impossible to be both? Is acquiescence in authority in matters of opinion consistent only with coldness of devotion or laxity of life? So, again, you may hear it said, that an acquaintance with natural science is of far more value than a knowledge of history, or than the cultivation of the imagination; and that a great many things are much better than a great many other things. What then? All this is surely very narrow. There is room enough in the world, and in the infinite variety of mankind, for all pursuits, and all kinds of study and education. When I or anyone else of common sense insist on the importance of any particular subject, of course it is not meant that there is nothing else important in the world. All things have their place; and it is the narrow and weak mind only which denies its place to a subject because the particular mind happens not to care for it or understand it. Those, for example, if any such there really be, who can see nothing, and who deny that there is anything at all in music, are to be sincerely pitied, either as men of narrow and half-educated minds, or because it has pleased God to deny them a sense which has been granted to their more richly-gifted fellows. Those, too, who can see nothing at all, and who therefore deny that there is anything at all, in poetry and other works of imagination, and who can derive therefrom no profit and no instruction whatever, are no doubt entitled to their opinions; but they must bear to be told that they are no judges of what they have been denied the faculties for understanding, and that to us they seem very poor and imperfect creatures, and objects not certainly of scorn, but of wonder and of compassion. It is said that Wolfe, when just about to scale the Heights of Abraham and win the battle which has immortalized his name, quoted, with deep feeling and glowing eulogy, some of the stanzas of Gray's Elegy. Stories implying the same sort of mind are told of that noble soldier, Sir John Moore. In such minds as theirs the practical and the imaginative could both find room, and they were none the worse, perhaps they were the better soldiers, because they were men of cultivated intellects. And this is really what I maintain; that in sense and reason each study has its place and its function. I do not underrate science, nor decry invention, because I advocate the study of a great and high-minded writer, any more than because I insist upon the study of Wordsworth I forget that Homer and Virgil, and Dante and Shakspere, and Milton, are yet greater than he, and yet more worthy study. All I say is, that I have found Wordsworth do me good; and I have tried to explain why, and to suggest that other men might find him do them good also. A book is a friend, and ought to be so regarded. Those are to be pitied who have bad friends, and who pass their lives in bad company. Those are to be envied who have good friends, and who can value them according to the measure of their desert, and use them as they ought. And what is true of living friends is true in yet higher measure of those dead and silent friends, our books. I am very sure that you will find Wordsworth a good friend, if you try him; that the more you know him, the better you will love him; the longer you live, the stronger will be the ties which bind you to his side. He is like one of his own mountains, in whose shadow you may sit, and whose heights you may scale, sure that you will always return therefrom strengthened in mind and purified in heart. -Macmillan's Magazine. NEWS FROM THE MOON. THE Earl of Rosse, to whose father the world owes the telescope which turns its giant eye skyward from its underground home at Parsonstown, has recently published, in the Bakerian Lecture of the Royal Society, the results of his successful efforts to measure the moon's heat. It is not our purpose to consider specially Lord Rosse's NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVIII., No. 4 researches, which are indeed of such a nature as to be little suited for these pages. We propose rather to avail ourselves of the tention just now directed to our satellite, in order to discuss some of the most remarkable and interesting facts which have been learned respecting the moon, and especially of those which are least likely to 31 Imagined lands and regions in her orb. She remains in many respects a mystery to us. We see little in her structure or aspect that is intelligible. Nevertheless, what has been learned is full of interest, even in its very strangeness, and in the perplexing problems which it suggests for our consideration. Every one probably knows that the moon is nearly 240,000 miles from the earth; that she is about 2,100 miles in diameter, (which is less than the earth's diameter, about as 100 is less than 367); that the earth's surface exceeds hers about 13% times, while the earth's volume exceeds the moon's about 491⁄2 times. If to this we add that the moon is made of somewhat lighter material, or, to speak more exactly, that her mean density is somewhat less than the earth's, so that the earth exceeds her 81 times in mass or quantity of matter, we have indicated the principal circumstances which characterize the moon's globe as compared with the earth's. We shall have a word or two to add presently, however, about her probable shape. ror. We commonly regard the moon as a satellite of the earth, and we are taught at school and in our text-books, that while the earth travels round the sun, the moon travels round the earth. But in reality this is erroneous, or is at least suggestive of erThe moon ought to be regarded as a companion planet, travelling with the earth around the sun. The distinction is not at all a fanciful one. The earth is not the body whose force the moon chiefly obeys. On the contrary, she is attracted more than twice as strongly by the sun. If the motions of the earth and moon could be watched from some far-distant standpoint, the observed movements would by no means suggest the idea that the moon was circling round the earth; and in fact, if the earth were concealed from view while her satellite was thus watched, the moon would appear to circuit around the sun in an orbit which could not be distinguished from that which the earth herself pursues. It is only from our earth as a standpoint that the moon seems to have the earth as the centre round which she travels; and to show how readily we may be deceived when so viewing any celestial body, we need only remember that, as seen from the earth, even the sun seems to have her as the centre of his motion. It is well to know the true nature of the moon in this respect; because when, instead of regarding her as merely a satellite or attendant upon the earth, we regard her as a companion planet-the least of the sun's inner family of planets-we perceive that in studying her we are making a first step towards the knowledge of other worlds than ours. The most striking feature in the moon's telescopic aspect is the wonderfully disturbed condition of her surface. Her face is scarred and pitted all over: nay, this but faintly expresses her condition, since no one can examine the moon carefully with suitable telescopic power, without being impressed by the conviction that she has, so to speak, passed many times through the fire. There are great seams, as if at some early stage of her existence her whole globe had been rent apart by internal forces; and the duration of this early stage would appear to have been considerable, since there are several systems of these seams crossing and intercrossing. Then would seem to have come an age during which large regions sank as the moon cooled and contracted, leaving other regions elevated, as in the case of the great ocean valleys and continent elevations of our own earth. With further contraction came the formation of great corrugations, the lunar Alps and Apennines and other mountain ranges. But last of all, it may be presumed (if the recent results of Mallet's researches into vulcanology are to be accepted), came the most wonderful of all the stages of disturbances, the great era of crater formation. One would say that the surface of enormous lunar tracts had bub bled over like some seething terrestrial substance, were it not that no materials known to us could form coherent bubbles spanning circular spaces many miles in diameter. Yet no other description gives so just an idea of the actual appearance of extensive tracts of the moon's surface, except one, equally or even perhaps more fanciful-If the whole of one of these regions, while still plastic from intensity of heat, had been rained upon by liquid meteoric masses many tons or even many hundreds of tons in weight, then something like the observed appearance would probably have resulted. Indeed, it is rather a strange circumstance that a fragment of a slab of green shale, pictured in Lyell's Geology, with casts of rain-prints left by a shower which fell ages on ages since, presents as true a picture of certain lunar tracts, as a model cast expressly to illustrate what is seen in an actual photograph (moon-painted) of one of those regions. Whatever opinion may be formed as to the significance of this fact, it is certain that the present aspect of the crater-covered regions is quite inconsistent with the idea that there was a single continuous era of crater formation. It is manifest that the contour of the whole surface has been changed over and over again by the forces which produced these craters. Although we find little in the moon't aspect which reminds us of features as present presented by the surface of the earth, we must not too confidently assume that the two globes have been exposed to quite dissimilar processes of change. It is very difficult, indeed, to form clear ideas as to the real conformation of the earth's crust underneath those layers which have been formed, directly or indirectly, by the action of air and water. It requires but a slight study of geology to recognise how importantly such action has affected our earth. Indeed, there is not a square foot of the earth's surface which does not owe its present configuration either directly to weather changes and the action of water in the form of rain or snow or stream or flood, or else to processes such as vegetation or the succession of various forms of animal life. In the moon, so far as can be judged, we see the natural skeleton, as it were, of a planet, the rock surface precisely as it was left when the internal forces ceased to act with energy. There has been no "weathering;" no wearing down of the surface by the action of water; no forests have formed carboniferous layers; no strata like our chalk formations have been deposited; vegetation does not hide any part of the surface; no snows have fallen, and therefore no glaciers grind down the rugged surface of the lunar valleys. With one exception, there is not, so far as can be judged, any process which is at work to disintegrate or modify the sterile face of the moon. The exception is the process of alternate expansion and contraction of the moon's crust, as the lunar day and night pass on in slow succession. Unquestionably, the change from a heat of some five hundred degrees at midday, to a cold far more intense than any with which we are acquainted on earth, must cause a gradual change in portions of the moon's surface. But we are thus led to a most interest Yet ing question respecting the moon. It is manifest that now, at any rate, there is no water and very little air (if any) on the half of the moon turned towards us. it is argued that those volcanic disturbances which are indicated so strikingly by the moon's aspect, imply the former existence both of water and of air. On our earth water appears absolutely necessary to the occurrence of volcanic eruptions. Our leading seismologist, Mallet, lays down the rule, "without water there can be no eruption," and it was long since pointed out by Humboldt that all the active volcanoes of the earth are close to the sea. Of course the chief evidence in favor of this view consists in the nature of the substances emitted during eruptions; and, in point of fact, the view may be regarded as a demonstrated terrestrial relation. Then it is quite impossible to conceive that so many and such violent eruptions as the lunar volcanoes indicate, can have taken place without the emission of |