These friendships, their duties and their correspondence, were a great solace to her; and there is a recovery of cheerfulness visible in the tone of her diary, though no doubt not half so much as there was in her outward life, since she herself regarded it as the vent of those feelings with which she would not oppress her family. One pleasure which she had was the erection of a plain pyramid, with a white marble cross, put up by her brother's widow, in the cemetery of Gaillac; but, alas! it had to be guarded for several nights-it gave umbrage to the peasantry as contrary to the equality of death. Once,' says Eugénie, they would have adored the cross.' A more real happiness came at Easter, at the sight of Erembert, a communicant. 'One must be a Christian sister to feel what that means, ' and the sort of happiness that springs from the hope of heaven 'for a soul one loves.'

This summer-1840-Maurice's friends made his literary remains known to the world. They were not numerous, the chief being 'Le Centaure,' a poem in prose, supposed to be the autobiography of a centaur, and embodying the longings for the ecstasies of a free wild life in the bosom of nature, of which Maurice had been full in his three unhappy Parisian years. To us it is difficult to enter into the merit of the 'Centaur;' but when it came out in the Revue des Deux Mondes of June, 1840, it was spoken of in the highest terms by Georges Sand, and it was accompanied by some of Maurice's descriptive letters, which placed his poetical powers beyond a doubt, and excited strong enthusiasm, But one section of the literary world, and at the head of them Georges Sand-the first to proclaim his genius-claimed him as among the free-thinkers of the age; and the stain they placed on his brow' was in Eugénie's eyes ill compensated by the honours ascribed to him. Henceforth her chief care was that the world should not admire him without knowing that his belief, if obscured for a time, had returned in full brightness; and to win this recognition of his Christianity was the task of her later life. She wrote letters to his friends, she drew up a short memoir of him to be affixed to an edition of his works, and she remained through all these latter days holding her shield of faith over the remains that the other party would fain have won to themselves. But of herself we know nothing. Her journal was less and less resorted to, and breaks off finally on the last day of 1840, with the characteristic entry, 'How sad time is, whether it goes or comes; and how right was the saint who said, "Let us throw our hearts into eternity!"'

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She lived nine years after her brother, for the last two of which she was sinking under the same complaint; but appa

rently it laid a gentle hand upon her, for she kept up her usual habits almost to the last-attended to her father, to household cares, and to the neighbouring poor; observed her hours for reading and prayer, and in the evening taught the Catechism in the kitchen to any ignorant person who had come to help in the vintage. Of her end we know almost nothing, except that after she had received the last rites of the Church she said to her sister, 'Take this key you will find papers in that drawer, and you 'will burn them. They are nothing but vanity.'

Eugénie de Guérin died on the 31st of May, 1848, and her father only survived her for six months. Erembert followed two years after; and the sole survivors of this honoured house are Mademoiselle Marie de Guérin and a young daughter of Erembert. Caroline, the widow of Maurice, returned to India, married again, and died while still young.

The oft-repeated words of David come before us as we think of Maurice and Eugénie-They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.' Still, there was no knowing or loving Maurice without carrying on the feeling to Eugénie; and the revelations of herself that she had almost unwittingly made, in the endeavour to show her brother as he really was, excited a curiosity and interest about her which was partly gratified, after the deaths of her father and brother, by M. d'Aurevilly, who printed for private circulation a selection of her papers. M. de Sainte Beuve made her the subject of one of his Causeries de Lundi, and finally, at the end of fourteen years, Marie de Guérin placed in the hands of M. Trebutien all the papers and journals in her possession. This is the work that the Académie pronounces 'couronnée,' for its style and for its beneficial tendency. Eugénie, utterly heedless of distinction for herself, has, while seeking it for her brother, received it in double measure.

Maurice, as M. Trebutien truly says, will be far longer remembered as the brother of Eugénie than as the author of the Centaur;' and perhaps he would be content with this subordination, for no brother ever loved sister with a more true and generous love than he bore to

as he says in a little

'Ma sœur Eugénie

Au front pale et doux,'

poem written in Brittany, one stanza of which we cannot forbear quoting, it is so perfect a symbol

of the two lives:

Elle aimait mes rêves,

Et j'aimais les siens,
Divins,

M. de Sainte Beuve has called the remains of Eugénie the book of brothers and sisters. It well deserves the title; but to us it seems that its great lesson is the never-ceasing freshness and charm of doing all to the glory of God.'

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ART. II.-The Song of Songs. A revised Translation, with Introduction and Commentary. By JOSEPH FRANCIS THRUPP, M.A. Vicar of Barrington; late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; Author of An Introduction to the Study and Use of the Psalms,' &c. Macmillan and Co. 1862. pp. 284. A GREAT English author and teacher of our generation, conceived the idea, as he tells us, of arranging his poems in order, so that they should form one beautiful symmetrical whole; while, at the same time, the several parts in detail should illustrate and interpret one another. His main works were to have the same relation to one another, as the antechapel has to the body of a Gothic church, while the minor compositions 'might be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral 'recesses ordinarily included in those edifices.' It is granted to few authors to excogitate a system; and those who have been enabled to perfect the conception, have almost invariably left the execution uncompleted. It is no discredit to Wordsworth, or to his metaphysical fellow-poet Coleridge, that they failed where Bacon and the mirror of human wisdom failed before them. Those to whom we owe the present arrangement of the plays of Shakspeare, seem, quite inadvertently, to have adopted an order which presents in a striking unity the diverse productions of that multitudinous mind. Disregarding the order of construction, the chronological order of actual authorship, they seem to have fixed, without knowing why, upon the order which corresponds to the several periods of the human life in which the several classes of compositions would have been most suitably produced. Passing by The Tempest,' that pathetic poem, in which the great poet, after prophesying of the sure perishing and vanishing away of the great globe itself,' declares that

'When I have required

Some heavenly music

I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I'll drown my book.'

Passing by, we say, The Tempest,' we have the thirteen comedics, which so fully exhibit the redundant imagination and matchless fancy of the writer: works that exhibit the restless humour and inexhaustible buoyancy of youth. The nineteen

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historical dramas represent the period of active political manhood. In none of his writings does Shakspeare exhibit more moral grandeur, more depth, more piety, more compass, more consistency of thought. In the four last poems, King Lear,' Romeo and Juliet,' 'Hamlet,' and 'Othello,' we have the solemn lessons of reflective age; the agony of a broken heart; the evils of inordinate affection; the impotency of the unregenerate will; and the perils of temptation. In an age when everything is labelled a philosophy,' we may speak without cant or affectation of the philosophy of Shakspeare, whether he would or would not have himself so classified and ordered his writings. The connexion of these remarks with the subject we have in hand is really not hard to find. We are approaching holy ground, and we would put the sandals off our feet. This only would we urge; that-as the human mind longs to create, or imagines it has found, a unity in the works of man-we may well expect to find the writings of God forming one organic whole, and possessed of an all-pervading unity of design. And considering how the Lord Jesus, by His Spirit, has conceived, inspired, ordered, and providentially preserved the divine Scriptures, we think we may lay down the twofold axiom that the order of the books of Scripture is divine-it is evidently not chronological-and that the order of the contents of the books of Scripture is also divine. There are many apparent breaks in our Lord's discourses, for instance; many sentences are put in succession, as spoken by Him connectedly, which bear about them all the marks of being fragments of other lengthened discourses. It seems to us a matter of faith to believe that all that could have been learned from what has been withheld, is conveyed to us in what is preserved; that what seem to be mere repetitions, are not in fact such; that the same recurrent words recur under circumstances, and in a connexion, which invests them with a wholly distinct and novel significance.1

The Jews themselves seem to have compared the Scriptures entrusted to them, in their unity, order, and arrangement, to that great cathedral whose plan was due to Deity. They delighted to compare the Song of Solomon to the Holy of Holies, ranking it, with the first chapter of Genesis, and the

1 It seems to us very unworthy of the inspired style of Scripture to say, as Mr. Thrupp does in his work on the Psalms, vol. i. p. 260, Ps. xlv.: 'From v. 3 of this psalm Isaiah borrowed the epithet which appears in the title "The mighty God," by which he prophesied of Christ.' How has Mr. Thrupp learned this? The statement is a mere assumption-to be regretted for itself; to be regretted as indicating an inadequate conception of the 00s of the inspired writers. Their method of quotation justifies us in affirming, that when they quote, they apprise us of the fact; and that there is no quotation or transcription-still less any plagiarism-where there is no statement to that effect.