"Behold, we know not any thing,

I can but trust that good shall fall
At last-far off-at last, to all,
And every winter turn to spring.

"So runs my dream : but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry."

Does, then, all our prying "through life and death, through good and ill," teach nothing beyond this--that "there's something in the world amiss," involved in such hopeless confusion that all we do and all we learn bring us no nearer to any solution of the mystery of why things are so arranged that animals of every grade must live,. suffer, and die? Again, we ponder:

"Are God and nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life.

"So careful of the type? but, no,

From scarpéd cliff and quarried stone
She cries: A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall'
go.

"Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.' And he, shall he,

"Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

"Who trusted God was love indeed,

And love Creation's final lawThough Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriked against his creed"Who loved, who suffered countless ills," Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or sealed within the iron hills?

O life as futile, then, as frail!

Oh! for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer or redress? Behind the vail, behind the vail."

It requires an educated person, well versed in geological theory, thoroughly to realize the meaning of these lines, and

riam. The words must be pondered well before their full inner significance is seen. In plain prose, the mournful music of these half-doubting, half- despairing lines seems to say: Since terror and death have ever been the heritage of created beings, and since species, genera, and whole orders of life have in old times passed away in long succession, leaving only their traces in the rocks-and since man "in intellect so like a god," is yet like other animals subject to all these sorrows and accidents of death for reasons to him unfathomable-what can he expect, but that his doom shall be like theirs? What but that, as with extinct creations, so in the distant epoch to come, the only relics of his past existence shall have no higher fate than to be entombed in sediments drawn from the destruction of those hills that minor poets have fondly termed everlasting-sediments now being "sowed" in existing seas and forming "the dust of continents to be."

"There rolls the deep where grew the tree, O earth! what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

"The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form and nothing stands; They melt like mists, the solid lands, Like clouds they change themselves and go."

No one could have written the foregoing lines who was not deeply impressed and perfectly conversant with the geological theory of denudation, and with those great terrestrial changes so familiar to geologists, which, through ages that to our finite sense look like a large section of eternity, evince the vast alternating mutations of sea and land; but to the unlearned reader they fall dead upon the ear, or seem to be sounding words alone. Compared with the lapse of unknown time since the passage of the older geological periods, the towering Alps, that seem and are so venerable, form but a mountainrange of yesterday, for both the Alps and the Jura rose from the deep after the earlier Tertiary epochs had passed away. If, then, it be true, that man, subject to all terrestrial accidents, is often buried in the "dust" of seas that from all analogy must form the continents of a phase of