such a delicate but profound appreciation of the arch sweetness of girlhood, of the vagrant royalty of the boy. True children they are as ever gathered the violet, or plaited the daisy; but at the same time spiritual and suggestive as the child of Wordsworth's noble ode-and perhaps their peculiar felicitousness consists in the unobtrusive way in which the latent meaning is conveyed, so that you need not concern yourself about it unless you choose. True children they are; and though with the wonderful insight of the children of the poets, yet not by any means the children of modern scientific nurseries, where Jack has never mounted his memorable bean-stalk, and Cinderella never dropt before the enamoured prince her marvellous slipper, and Beauty never encountered the great, ugly, love-lorn Beast in the shady solitudes around that mysterious palace. On the contrary, the artist, knowing, as she tells us from Schiller, " that deep meaning lieth oft in childish play," has attached each of her illustrations to a verse from some childish song; and her most happy and suggestive sketches are often evolved out of the very simplest and most unpretending of these nursery rhymes. So that her book embraces almost all the most salient incidents in our early poetical culture. Willie Winkie, gorgeously arrayed in his night gown-a most graceful little urchin-taps at the doors and windows to assure himself that the babies are in bed; the vagrant Peep-Peep, whose unhappy predilection for roaming none of us have forgotten, wades demurely among the water lilies; and little Boy Blue, with the breezy evening

stirring among his curls, blows his shrill horn across the meadow land, over which the rooks are cawing noisily, and on which the autumn sun is setting. The old delightful fable of picking up gold and silver on Tom Tiddler's enchanted ground, suggests a charming picture—a group of thoughtful, large-eyed girls chasing butterflies and plucking buttercups with such a glimpse through brake and woodland into the blue distant valleys! Others with the swallow, pipe in the May, and follow the cuckoo among the fruity branches of the cherry. Towards the close the sketches acquire a more thoughtful and imaginative tone. There is the palace on the waterside, and the glory of the sunset on the main, and the fair pale lady with her travelling robe floating upon the water, as though, like Undine, she had come direct from its heart and many more beside. But perhaps the crowning mercy of the book is the last sketch but one- —a young girl who leans her head upon her hand, as the old dog beside her leans his upon her lap, and looks out so pensively, inquiringly, yearningly, into the moonlight, that it does not need these somewhat quaint lines to tell us the mood of her maiden meditation :

Oh, that I were where I would be,
Then should I be where I am not.
But where I am, there I must be ;
And where I would be, I cannot.

In nearly every sketch the mere drawing is very perfect-nothing, for instance, can be more artistic than the rich, lavish, trailing folds of the drapery; and there is continually manifest a subtle, exquisite

sense of natural beauty—of the autumn fields—— the moonlight water-the forest glade-the water lilies upon the slumbering stream!

You tell me that Child's Play is not this lady's only publication; but you do not send me the others. This one, however, is really so great. a treat in itself—revealing, as it does, such a clear, frank, joyous insight, such a thoroughly English and womanly experience that I cannot feel very deeply aggrieved by your neglect. Still you must find them a nook in the Christmas box, which I shall be looking for towards the close of the year. Finally, much pondering among my vines and olives, I cannot help fancying, my dear Juniper, how deliciously "E. V. B." could illustrate certain of the Laureate's lyrics. Here is The Day Dream, for instance, a ballad, like her own book, moulded by the true artistic sense out of a nursery story. Or what say you to the Morte d'Arthur? What a delight to trace in those grave, nervous, unaffected lines, so instinct with rough, rapid, poetic power, a series of pictures from the Homeric descriptions in that unrivalled fragment-the place of tombs— the cold, eerie twilight-the mere with its knotted water-flags the black-stoled weeping queensthe dying king of knighthood—and then, away on the mystic main, the "Island Valley of Avilion"

Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly-but it lies

Deep meadow'd, happy, fair, with orchard lawns,
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea,
Where I will cure me of my grievous wound.

There is a repose, lavishness, and poetic languor,

in her lines, which would sort well with the composure, refinement, and classic deliberateness of Tennyson's verse.

And now, as the moon grows dim behind the troubled mountain, Good Night, or rather, Good Morrow atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. There is no post-office beyond the cata

I felt the wind soft from the land of souls;
The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,
One straining past another along the shore,
The way of grand dull Odyssean ghosts
Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas
And stare on voyagers.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

DIES IRAE! what discreditable weather! Will it ever cease raining, I wonder? "There is surely a piece of divinity in us," says Sir Thomas Browne, "something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun"-which is well, seeing that the sun has permanently absented himself, "and all the air is emptied of his hoary majesty." Day after day this bad world appears to grow worse; and the present afternoon is unutterably wretched. The drifting clouds, like wandering birds, looking, with outstretched necks, for their nests, beyond the horizon, are rent into shreds, and driven away by the blast. The north wind howls among the turrets, and, sweeping along the wintry shore, blackens the sea and the floating sea