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the extreme of homogeneity and specification in one, and one, and have attained a perfect self-realization."

Even supposing this to be intelligible, it is scarcely consistent with what we are afterwards told. Here the injunction is, "Be specified in yourself, but not specified by anything foreign to yourself." Elsewhere, moral good is said to be "the realization of the good will which is superior to us." The mysterious process of realizing this goodwill is thus explained :

"The good will, then, is the bare form of the will, and this is the end. This is what I have to realize, and realize in myself. But I am not a mere form; I have an empirical' nature, a series of particular states of the 'this me,' a mass of desires, aversions, inclinations, passions, pleasures, and pains, what we may call a sensuous self. It is in this self that all content, all matter, all possible filling of the form must be sought; for all matter must come from experience,' must be given in and through the perception of the outer world or of the series of my own internal states, and is in either case sensuous, and the opposite of the insensible form.

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"The empirical' self, the this me, is, no less than the self which is formal will, an element of the moral subject. These elements are antithetical the one to the other; and hence the realization of the form is possible only through an antagonism, an opposition which has to be overcome. It is this conflict and this victory in which the essence of morality lies. Morality is the activity of the formal self forcing the sensuous self, and here first can we attach a meaning to the words 'ought' and 'duty.'

What constitutes the goodness of "the good will which is superior to ourselves" is not stated. All we are told is, that "the good is the good will," and that a man "is good when he is moral, and he is moral when his actions are conformed to, and embody a good will, or when his will is good;" in other

words, a man is good when he is good. This may appear to a reader not initiated into the mysteries of German transcendental philosophy as rather a lame and impotent conclusion; but Mr. Bradley, who is, of course, a much better judge, regards it with no small complacency.

Though Mr. Bradley's work cannot be said to have settled any great question in moral philosophy, or even to be a very valuable contribution to philosophical discussion, it is full of suggestive thought and racy writing-hence, it is well worth the attention of those who are interested in such inquiries. The author's definitions of pleasure as "self-realizedness," and pain as "the negatedness of self," are curiosities both of literature and philosophy.

Famous Women and Heroes. A poem. Third and cheap edition. The Poetry of Creation. Fourth and cheap edition. By N. Michell. W. Tegg and Co. 1876.-That Mr. Michell has achieved a certain amount of success as a writer of verse, is abundantly proved by the number of editions his "poetical works" have reached. But success in the sense of having produced poetry of a superior order is more than we can honestly concede to him. Such facility in versification as can be acquired by careful study and practice he may be allowed to possess. His verse is generally correct in metre, accent, and rhyme, flowing with a gentle smoothness, if not much sweetness. He is well acquainted with all the usual artifices employed employed for poetical ornament and effect. But the highest art of concealing art he does not possess. His verse is artificial rather than artistic, more rhetorical than poetical, and

deficient in depth of feeling, power of imagination, freshness of thought, and force of expression. We have all the machinery of poetry without its moving power, the body without the soul. Walking on stilts is a poor substitute for flying, and plain honest prose is better than prosy verse. Mediocrity and dulness in professed poetry are unpardonable sins, of which, unless we are very much mistaken, Mr. Michell is by no means guiltless. It is not possible to read many pages of his verse without a sense of weariness and sleepy languor.

"Famous Women and Heroes" is simply a series of passages in history put into verse spun out to a tedious length, and largely diluted with milk-and-water moralising. These pictures of the past are neither vividly conceived nor effectively pourtrayed. The attention is dissipated and wearied by trivial details which are matters of course. Commonplace exaggeration and strained metaphor serve only to reveal poverty of invention and feebleness of expression. These remarks are especially applicable to the account of the battle of Waterloo, which is spread out thin over no less than six pages. In the account of Cæsar, his crossing the Rubicon naturally occupies a prominent place. From this scene we extract two stanzas.

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The apostrophe to the Rubicon in the first stanza is flat and tedious, the descriptive part being just as suitable for any other small river, and the reflective portion feebly expressed. The next stanza is even worse. This is the first time we ever heard of the glowworm twinkling. We always had the idea, both from the report of others and our own observation, that it glowed with a steady, unchanging light. Nothing can be in worse taste than to talk about the wavelets raising their tiny voice in prayer, unless it be the prayer itself they are supposed to utteras if Cæsar needed them to teach him that it is a happier task to make men smile than weep, and that years flow swiftly like a stream. If these talking wavelets could find nothing better than such twaddle as this to say, they might as well have held their tongues.

In "The Poetry of Creation" Mr. Michell ventures on a higher theme, and shrinks not from treading on the same ground as Milton.

and provoking comparison with him. The subject is so completely beyond the range of human knowledge, that common sense, to say nothing of higher considerations, would seem to dictate silence as the only proper course. Certain it is, that even Milton, with all his true, poetical insight, was betrayed into abundant absurdity and impiety through going beyond what is written. And what right has Mr. Michell to suppose he can succeed where Milton failed? The confident coolness with which he presumes to describe the deliberations and reveal the purposes of the Divine mind is revolting to a rightly disposed, thoughtful person. Of the various objects in creation which Mr. Michell undertakes to describe we will select the moon, which he thus apostrophises :

"Thou moon, sweet Ministress of
good!

Soothing, while hallowing solitude,
Now rising with new radiance crowned,
To walk for ever yon profound,
What unborn millions will on thee
Look from the waste, the pathless sea,
To guide them on their darkening
way,

Blessing thy calm, benignant ray!
Yet, gentle lady of the skies!

With whitest flowers around thy
brow,

And tenderest dreams in mildest eyes,
Sorrow to thee will love to bow.
Thy step so still along the blue,
Thy beams, if smiles, seem tear-drops
too,

Shed softly down but coldly bright,
Making more mournful mourning
Night;

Yes, in white vestments thou art clad,
To show thy stricken heart is sad,
Like grieving vestals, who below,
When death lays some young sister
low,

Steal on and weep in weeds of snow.-
O Moon! thy tale thou wilt not tell,
But in thy heart there seems to dwell
A sorrow that makes pale thy cheek,
And yet thou look'st so blandly meek,

We love thee, and would scarce desire
To see thy languid, placid eye
More brightly lit with golden fire;

Some memory in thy breast doth lie,
Silently, slowly, feeding there;
And thou must move sedate and fair,
And ofttimes pine and fade away,
With shrinking orb and lessening ray,
Through the long cycle of thy years,
A thing of beauty, love, and tears."

Mr. Michell's idea of the moon's being clad in white vestments to show its stricken heart is decidedly original, so far as we know. But that it has any poetic truth or beauty in it, is more than we will undertake to say.. Why the moon should be represented as a palefaced young lady, wasting away with grief at heart, and a long tale upon her mind which she refuses to tell anybody, is more than we can understand. Mr. Michell goes much too far in personifying and apostrophising all sorts of objects and abstract ideas on all sorts of occasions. His similes and metaphors are often egregiously unnatural and jumbled together, and his exaggeration is beyond all reason. The following few lines describing the nightingale's singing in Eden will suffice for illustration :

"Now sinking low, the feeble trill
Breathes like the gushings of a rill,
A thin-drawn thread of silvery sound,
That pulses soft, and faints around,
Unutterably sweet the lay,

Each leaf upon the aspen spray

Ceases its trembling, as to listen; Gemm'd Night her finger lifteth up, And, as she drinks the nectar'd cup Of low rich sounds, her pale eyes glisten."

If poetry consisted of nothing more than metaphor, however overstrained and confused, and exaggeration, however irrational, this passage might fairly be considered highly poetical; but if good sense

and good taste are essentials of poetry, it must be denied the title of anything more than rhetorical if not nonsensical verse.

London Lyrics. By F. Locker. A new edition, enlarged and finally revised. H. S. King and Co.-It was by his "London Lyrics," if we are not mistaken, that Mr. Buchanan, the plaintiff in the recent literary libel case, won his first laurels as an author. Had he always written with the discretion and moderation, as well as poetic insight, he there displayed, society might have been spared the sorry exhibition which reflected so little honour on all persons concerned in it. Mr. Locker's "London Lyrics" are of a lighter cast, being for the most part in a jocular vein, and written in a free and easy manner, partaking more of the character of occasional jeux d'esprit than the higher class of lyrics; they are, in fact, rather epigrams than lyrics. Though many of them relate to London life, there are quite as many, if not more, which were neither written in London nor have any obvious connection with London. Most of them are merely playful effusions, with a sparkle of wit and a pleasant flavour of humour. There is no pretension to recondite or original thought; but if the sentiment be familiar and bordering on commonplace, it is at least always healthy and agreeable. Good sense and good feeling are everywhere present, while there is not the slightest trace of sickly sentimentalism. The writer takes a cheerful and kindly view of men and things, and is altogether a merry but no less wise companion.

The first requisite of a good work of art is that the artist should

have a high ideal in his own mind at which to aim. This requisite Mr. Locker seems to possess, if we may judge from what he says as to the kind of verse he has attempted in this volume:—

"Light lyrical verse should be short, elegant, refined, and fanciful, not seldom distinguished by chastened sentiment, and often playful, and it should have one uniform and simple design. The tone should not be pitched high, and the language should be idiomatic, the rhythm crisp and sparkling, the rhyme frequent and never forced, while the entire poem should be marked by tasteful moderation, high finish, and completeness; for however trivial the subject matter may be, indeed rather in proportion to its triviality, subordination to the rules of composition, and perfection of execution, should be strictly enforced. Each piece cannot be expected to exhibit all these characteristics, but the qualities of brevity and buoyancy are essential. It should also have the air of being spontaneous; indeed, to write it well is a difficult accomplishment, and no one has fully succeeded in it without possessing a certain gift of irony, which is not only a rarer quality than humour, or even wit, but is altogether less commonly met with than is sometimes imagined. The poem may be tinctured with a well-bred philosophy, it may be gay and gallant, it may be playfully malicious or tenderly ironical, it may display lively banter, and it may be satirically facetious, it may even, considering it as a mere work of art, be pagan in its philosophy or trifling in its tone, but it must never be ponderous or commonplace. It is needless to say that good sense will be found to underlie all the best poetry of whatever kind."

Of course there is all the differ ence in the world between knowing how a thing should be done, and being able to do it. Probably Mr. Locker himself would hardly maintain that he has in every case come up to his own standard. But it

may safely be said he has never fallen very far below it, and sometimes approached it pretty nearly. Mr. Locker can be pensive and sometimes grave as well as gay. Some readers may prefer his occasional touches of pathos and tender family affection to his brightest flashes of merry wit. The beauty of his sentiment is its truth. the whole Mr. Locker is to be congratulated on having produced a volume which, though bristling with point, wounds no one, and when once taken up is reluctantly laid aside.

On

Transcendentalism in New England. A history. By O. B. Frothingham. London: Trübner & Co. 1876. From the above title it may be gathered that the present work is more suited for American than English readers. It is a question whether it will attract or interest even American readers to any great extent. Transcendentalism is a long, high-sounding word, not very easy to bring within the range of popular comprehension. To most minds it is either utterly unintelligible, or suggestive of cloudy mysticism and unpractical dreaming, than which nothing could be more at variance with the sort of character ascribed to the cute Yankee. It is hard to imagine that many of that pre-eminently practical, hard, matter-of-fact people will feel curiosity enough even to look into a book on such a subject, much less spend any length of time over its pages.

There is the less reason for them to do this, that the subject, besides being uninviting in itself, is now obsolete. The transcendentalism here described is a thing of the past, according to the author's own confession. Mr. Frothingham's use of the term is vague and vari

able. Sometimes he employs it to denote a particular school of philosophy, and speaks of Kant as the first transcendentalist. At other times he makes it synonymous with idealism, and ascribes it to Plato.

Then, again, he makes it equivalent to mysticism in religion, as exhibited by Swedenborg, George Fox-the founder of the Society of Friends-and others. But the special signification of the term as the subject of his present work is of a local and personal character. Transcendentalism here denotes rather a mood than a system of thought, an intellectual movement derived from Germany and France some forty years ago, and shared by a small clique of thoughtful persons, mostly Unitarians, at Boston and in the neighbourhood, among whom Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller occupied prominent positions.

"New England furnished the only plot of ground on the planet, where the transcendental philosophy had a chance to show what it was and what it proposed. The forms of life there were, in a measure, plastic. There were no immovable prejudices, no fixed and unalterable traditions. Laws and usages were fluent, malleable at all events. The sentiment of individual freedom was active; the truth was practically acknowledged, that it takes all sorts of people to make a world, and the many minds of the many men were respected. No orders of men, no aristocracies of intellect, no privileged classes of thought were established. The old world supplied such literature as there was in science, law, philosophy, ethics, theology; but an astonishing intellectual activity seized upon it. dealt with it in genuine democratic fashion, classified it, accepted it, dismissed it, paying no undue regard to its foreign reputation. Experiments in thought and life, of even audacious description, were made, not in defiance of precedent-for precedent was hardly respected enough to be defied-but in innocent unconsciousness of precedent.

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