tianity may be true. She is too noble a nature. She loves her kind too well. She would rather not lead than run the risk of misleading.

But unintentionally she does mislead when she emphasizes the obstinate persistency of human character in a way to leave the impression that there is not a friendly power of help at hand stronger still than the strength of native depravity. She does mislead when she represents the world of natural condition around us, steeled itself, as it is, against human entreaty, to be also void of benignant supernatural invasion ready to reinforce and to rescue the failing better will of men and women with effectual succor. She does mislead when she describes the malignant capacity of development which belongs to the nature of sin, as if there were nowhere a corresponding capacity of arrest and reversal provided, abundantly able to destroy both sin and its consequences. She does mislead when she nobly inculcates self-denial and self-sacrifice without mention of the only motive that historically ever enabled living men and women long to practice self-denial and self-sacrifice. She does mislead when she writes as if the doctrine of atonement, of vicarious suffering, of "altruism," to use the term of a school, were but a doctrine, a hopeless doctrine, and not also, and much rather, a fact, a hope-inspiring fact. If George Eliot had forborne to "handle spiritual strife" at all, it might not have been incumbent on her to introduce so necessary a condition of any fruitful solution of the problem of sin as that condition which Jesus entered inseparably into human history eighteen luminous Christian centuries ago. Again I say, I make no accusation of purposed infidelity to Jesus or to the souls that Jesus came to save, on the part of this great writer. But it is the truth, nevertheless, however conscience-clear she may

have been in doing so, that she has left out of her scheme of human conditions the master-condition of all. Christ indeed, though obscurely under an anonym, is present here in almost everything, except only that which is chief in his character, his power to save. His life of devotion is accepted, without express acknowledgment it is true, as the ideal of human conduct. But the miracles of supernatural intervention attending his life, that revealed an invisible sphere of spiritual power environing us round in sympathy and alliance with struggling goodness-there is no effect admitted from these. Gethsemane with its agony, Calvary with its passion, Joseph's tomb with its shrouded deadthese are here in effect. But the empty tomb, the resurrection, the ascension, captivity led captive,, the thanks be to God which giveth us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ, these are nowhere present in any helpful influence in George Eliot's books.

I feel, as I have said, that George Eliot desires to be morally helpful to her fellow-creatures. Her best characters she makes to be sources of exalting inspiration to all the susceptible souls that come within their reach. Goodness in her descriptions possesses a kind of magnetic virtue to communicate itself. There is a natural flow of the element from soul to soul. Janet receives it from Mr. Tryan-Romola receives it from Savonarola; Dorothea-she possesses it, but hardly, in her ill-matching conditions, finds to whom she may impart it. George Eliot does thus teach us that goodness is not alone in the world. She shows us how it stands always in a never-broken circuit of mutual electric sympathy and help. But the heavenly magnetism has, in her representations, no certain, unfailing, abiding source. It is natural only. Now it is not enough for us that we have help. We must have suf

ficient help. Janet, if the representation be carefully noticed, depends on Mr. Tryan. Mr. Tryan does not succeed in transferring her dependence from himself to a supernatural power. Janet's repentance is really human love for a human object, converted into another form of its correlated existence, the form of renovated character. You are subtly made to feel that it is only a chance mould, that into which Mr. Tryan's own experience has fallen, the mould of evangelical religion. Mr. Tryan's language is strictly orthodox, and it is used by him with absolute sincerity. But the author somehow causes you to perceive that according to her own conviction the orthodox phrase in which Mr. Tryan speaks is really nothing more than unconsciously provincial dialect, to express an experience that is purely natural, and therefore perfectly capable of expression in the natural language of morals and philosophy. In Savonarola George Eliot makes her nearest approach to representing a character that truly receives himself from an invisible supernatural source the magnetic virtue of spiritual invigoration and help which he imparts to others. But Romola, having been braced by his influence to her highest heroic tone of character and conduct, yet finds her faith in him left to her at last but the ghost of a loyalty that desired, and was denied, the boon of being perfect. Precisely where the natural ceases, and the supernatural would begin, George Eliot halts. Oh, George Eliot, I know as well as you that natural men have their limitations-their moral limitations. Savonarola was weak, perhaps was wicked. But was Jesus? Had Jesus any moral limitations? Was Jesus then a natural man? Did not the supernatural become historical in Jesus? Is there not a Saviour for us? If not, we pray you cease tormenting us with the awakened consciousness of our help

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lessness under sentence of death by sin. If there is a Saviour, then at the moment of that sorest extremity to which you reduce us, pray whisper, as surely you might know how so well, the gospel of his name. gospel of some sort, be sure, more than all things else, we need. And many of us, during eighteen hundred years at least, have found our most effectual help against sin in believing the gospel that sin shall not have dominion over us, that we are not under law, but under grace.

I set out with saying that George Eliot makes no distinctive impression for herself of sex, either in her intellectual or in her moral quality. This, when I consider her, as I undertook to do, in her books alone, still seems to me to be true. But as often as I permit myself to consider her likewise in her reputed relation to that school in philosophy which teaches the ancient doctrine of necessity, under the modern name of development, I tend somehow to experience an almost contrary feeling. There is apparently a contrast here between George Eliot and her brethren in philosophical faith. Her attitude is not altogether the same as theirs toward the creed which they unite in confessing. Her brethren believe with the head, and, so far as appears, do not doubt with the heart. George Eliot assents, perhaps unquestioningly, with her head. But her heart demurs and rebels. It is a woman's voice after all that one hears crying that monotonous passionate cry throughout George Eliot's works—a cry of helpless grief, of outraged, implacable sense of wrong, against this great, deaf, impassible universe. Not that her mind is therefore less. It is only that therefore her heart is more. And our George Eliot is still by so much greater than we found her, by how much she proves after all to be a woman.

MR. LOWELL'S POETRY.

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T is hard to say how much it is virtue and how much felicity that runs in the blood of some families, to distinguish them with an honorable fame, through various branches and during successive generations. The Lowells, of Massachusetts, enjoy a good civic, and social, and literary renown, which is coeval with the date of the republic, and which constitutes one of the truest, and one of the least alienable, of the treasures of its history. The commonwealth of Massachusetts is rich in the heraldry of such illustrious names; but the commonwealth of Massachusetts has no gentler blood than that which has descended, without taint, from John Lowell, of the days of Washington, to James Russell Lowell, the laureate of Abraham Lincoln. As long as the archives of the Supreme Court of the United States continue to be consulted; as long as cotton is woven in the looms of Lowell, on the banks of the Merrimac; as long as the Lowell Institute, of Boston, instructs the American community in religion, science, literature, and the arts, the fame of the Lowells is secure. If these anchors should hereafter drag in the urgent drift of time, then there is that in the volumes now under review, which will still hold against the stress of whatever storm does not overwhelm the language itself in which they are written.