FROM "VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE."-"PAN'S PIPES."

There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied with evolution, and demands a ruddier presentation of the sum of man's experience. Sometimes the mood is brought about by laughter at the humorous side of life, as when, abstracting ourselves from earth, we imagine people plodding on foot, or seated in ships and speedy trains, with the planet all the while whirling in the opposite direction, so that, for all their hurry, they travel back-foremost through the universe of space. Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and sometimes by the spirit of terror. At least, there will always be hours when we refuse to be put off by the feint of explanation, nicknamed science; and demand instead some palpitating image of our estate, that shall represent the troubled and unsettled element in which we dwell, and satisfy reason by the means of art. Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality

night, for it was

mir, and they had made on great price of

noch

you can chanter

chrise in the port of London, and have it gerne buck to

you entirely loaded with these hello; when you.

Letter from R. L. Stevenson to "Tomarcher.

In the possession of William Archer, Esq.

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mind as to thin character, and give them away where done to

and aunts. But what I really wanted to tell

(Mhska ly, toy stope on the tree top!) I me sen some real made tous, the

yellow flims, legs and fat face; in the past seat me auch
proud of yours; under one feat platy of finch and things; and
fun in bilen Takeition.

macred we have changed names; and he is now called Riin, the nearest thy campeone to Louis, for thy have hand not in the kam gange. Run is sin funt there in his storthing, and a magnificent man. We all have stron the tie is sting. We disri batin the same act disri betion the scratch this a great war; and the mutans; the wond is out though a farest muntly of funt trees, the very creepers, which take the plane of our iny, heavy with a great and delicious finit, ligger than your head canch for mice called Barbeding's Risently we came to a house in a pretty gundenin ach quite by itself, key mail Hept. but the ones and winches of my eng Tale, and is listed littera base in a fing ahut, and in mine but this after sea mant back a wres and then wes the intradifa To ne it

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of which it discourses? where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance herself has made her dwelling among men? So we come back to the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself the charm and terror of things; and when a glen invites our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or when our hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.

We are, however, in danger of entangling our impressions with one another if we pursue too low down the threads which we have attempted to hold through more than five centuries from Langland and Chaucer to Huxley and Stevenson. We must drop them here, leaving them loose, for they are parts of a living organism, and we cannot presume to say in what direction their natural growth will lead them next, nor what relative value

Desiderata

I good Health

II 2 to 3 hundred a gear.
III. O du licher Gott, friends!
AMEN

Robertsonès Stevensem

A note found among Stevenson's papers after his death

their parts may take in fuller perspective. We have spoken of nothing which was not revealed in its general aspect and direction at least five and twenty years ago. In periods of very rapid literary development this would be a time long enough to bring about the most startling changes. Within the boundaries of one quarter of a century the English drama did not exist, and Hamlet was complete. In 1773 Dr. Johnson accompanied Boswell to the Hebrides, and in 1798 the Lyrical Ballads were published. But there is no evidence to show that the twentyfive years through which we have just passed have been years of a very experimental tendency. Fifteen or twenty of them were overshadowed, and their production stunted, by the permanence of great, authoritative personages, still in full activity. The age was the age of Tennyson, and

he held his kingship, an absolute monarch, against all comers, until his death in 1892. We may anticipate that future historians may make that date the starting-point for a new era, but this is for us scarcely matter even for speculation.

Up to the close of the nineteenth century certainly, we can

affirm the maintenance, without radical change of any kind, of the original romantic system, then just one hundred years old. With a myriad minor variations and adaptations, poetry in England, and therefore prose, still were, at the close of Queen Victoria's reign, what they became when Wordsworth and Coleridge remodelled our literature in 1797 in the coombes of the Quantocks.