an' left th' black-hearted rascal behind, sittin' i' th' very room t' little un deed in. His cradle stood theer i' th' corner. We went out into th' moonlight 'thout speakin', an' we didna say a word until we come to this very place, Mester.

"We stood here for a minute silent, an' then I sees her begin to shake, an' she throws hersen down on th' grass wi' her arms flung o'er th' grave, an' she cries out as ef her death-wound had been give to her.

"Little lad,' she says, 'little lad, dost ta see thee mother? Canst na tha hear her callin' thee! Little lad, get nigh to th' Throne an' plead !'

"I fell down beside o' th' poor crushed wench an' sobbed wi' her. I couldna comfoit her, fur wheer wur there any comfort for us? Theer wur none left-theer wur no hope. We was shamed an' broke downour lives was lost. Th' past wur nowt-th' future wur worse. Oh, my poor lass, how hard she tried to pray-fur me, Mester-yes, fur me, as she lay theer wi' her arms round her dead babby's grave, an' her cheek on th' grass as grew o'er his breast. 'Lord Goda'-moighty,' she says, 'help us-dunnot gi' us up-dunnot, dunnot. We canna do 'thowt thee now, if th' time ever wur when we could. Th' little chap mun be wi' Thee, I moind th' bit o' comfort about getherin' th' lambs i' His bosom. An', Lord, if Tha could spare him a minnit, send him down to us wi' a bit o' leet. Oh, Feyther! help th' poor lad here-help him. Let th' weight fa' on me, not on him. Just help th' poor lad to bear it. If ever I did owt as wur worthy i' Thy sight, let that be my reward. Dear Lord-a'moighty, I'd be willin' to gi' up a bit o' my own heavenly glory fur th' dear lad's sake.'

"Well, Mester, she lay theer on t grass prayin' an cryin', wild but gentle, fur nigh haaf an hour, an' then it seemed 'at she got quoite loike, an' she got up. Happen th' Lord had hearkened an' sent th' child-happen He had, fur when she getten up her face looked to me aw white an' shinin' i' th' clear moonlight.

"Sit down by me, dear lad,' she said, 'an' hold my hand a minnit.' I set down an' took hold of her hand, as she bid me.

"Tim,' she said, 'this wur why th' little chap deed. Dost na tha see now 'at th' Lord knew best?'

"Yes, lass,' I answers humble, an' lays my face on her hand, breakin' down again. "Hush, dear lad,' she whispers, 'we hannot time fur that. I want to talk to thee. Wilta listen?'

VOL. IV.-15

"Yes, wife,' I says, an' I heerd her sob when I said it, but she catches hersen up again.

"I want thee to mak' me a promise,' said she. I want thee to promise never to forget what peace we ha' had. I want thee to remember it allus, an' to moind him 'at's dead, an' let his little hand howd thee back fro' sin an' hard thowts. I'll pray fur thee neet an' day, Tim, an' tha shalt pray fur me, an' happen theer'll come a leet. But ef theer dunnot, dear lad-an' I dunnot see how theer could-if theer dunnot, an' we never see each other agen, I want thee to mak' me a promise that if tha sees th' little chap first tha'it moind him o' me, and watch out wi' him nigh th' gate, and I'll promise thee that if I see him first, I'll moind him o' thee an' watch out true an' constant.'

"I promised her, Mester, as yo' can guess, an' we kneeled down an' kissed th' grass, an' she took a bit o' th' sod to put i' her bosom. An' then we stood up an' looked at each other, an' at last she put her dear face on my breast an' kissed me, as she had done every neet sin' we were mon an' wife.

"Good-bye, dear lad,' she whispers-her voice aw broken. 'Doant come back to th' house till I'm gone. Good-bye, dear, dear lad, an' God bless thee.' An' she slipped out o' my arms an' wur gone in a moment awmost before I could cry out.

“Theer isna much more to tell, Mester— th' eend's comin' now, an' happen it'll shorten off th' story, so 'at it seems suddent to thee. But it were na suddent to me. I lived alone here, an' worked, an' moinded my own business an' answered no questions fur nigh about a year, hearin' nowt, an' seein' nowt, an' hopin' nowt, till one toime when th' daisies were blowin' on th' little grave here, theer come to me a letter fro' Manchester fro' one o' th' medical chaps i' th' hospital. It wur a short letter wi' prent on it, an' the moment I seed it I knowed summat wur up, an' I opened it tremblin'. Mester, theer wur a woman lyin' i' one o' th' wards dyin' o' some long-named heartdisease, an' she'd prayed 'em to send fur me, an' one o' th' young soft-hearted ones had writ me a line to let me know.

"I started aw'most afore I'd finished readin' th' letter, an' when I getten to th' place I fun just what I knowed I should. I fun Her -my wife-th' blessed lass, an' if I'd been an hour later I would na ha' seen her alive, fur she were nigh past knowin' me then.

"But I knelt down by th' bedside an' I

"Dear lad,' she whispered, 'th' path was na so long after aw. Th' Lord knew-he trod it hissen' onct, yo' know. I knowed tha'd come-I prayed so. I've reached th' very eend now, Tim, an' I shall see th' little lad first. But I wuńnot forget my promise-no. I'll look out for thee-for thee-at th' gate.' "An' her eyes shut slow an' quiet, an' I knowed she was dead.

"Theer, Mester Doncaster, theer it aw is, for theer she lies under th' daisies cloost by her child, fur I browt her here an' buried her. Th' fellow as come betwixt us had tortured her fur a while an' then left her again, I fun out-an' she were so afeard of doin' me some harm that she wouldna come nigh me. It wur heart disease as killed her, th' medical chaps said, but I knowed better-it wur heart-break. That's aw. Sometimes I think o'er it till I canna stand it any longer, an' I'm fain to come here an' lay my hand on th' grass, an' sometimes I ha' queer dreams about her. I had one last neet. I thowt 'at she comn to me aw at onct just as she used to look, ony, wi' her white face shinin' loike a star, an' she says, 'Tim, th' path isna so long after aw-tha's come nigh to th' eend, an' me an' th' little chap is waitin'. He knows thee, dear lad, fur I've towt him.'

"That's why I comn here to neet, Mester; an' I believe that's why I've talked so free to thee. If I'm near th' eend I'd loike some one to know. I ha' meant no hurt when I seemed grum an surly. It wurna ill-will, but a heavy heart."

watched his heavy drooping figure threading its way among the dark mounds and white marble, and under the shadowy trees, and well that night. The strained, heavy tones. of the man's voice were in my ears, and the homely yet tragic story seemed to weave itself into all my thoughts, and keep me from rest. I could not get it out of my mind.

In consequence of this sleeplessness I was later than usual in going down to the factory, and when I arrived at the gates I found an unusual bustle there. Something out of the ordinary routine had plainly occurred, for the whole place was in confusion. There was a crowd of hands grouped about one corner of the yard, and as I came in a man ran against me, and showed me a terribly pale face.

"I ax pardon, Mester Doncaster," he said in a wild hurry, "but theer's an accident happened. One o' th' weavers is hurt bad, an' I'm goin' fur th' doctor. Th' loom caught an' crushed him afore we could stop it."

For some reason or other my heart misgave me that very moment. I pushed forward to the group in the yard-corner, and made my way through it.

A man was lying on a pile of coats in the middle of the bystanders,-a poor fellow crushed and torn and bruised, but lying quite quiet now, only for an occasional little moan that was scarcely more than a quick gasp for breath. It was Surly Tim!

"He's nigh th' eend o' it now!" said one of the hands pityingly. "He's nigh th' last now, poor chap! What's that he's sayin', lads ?"

For all at once some flickering sense seemed to have caught at one of the speaker's words, and the wounded man stirred, murmuring faintly--but not to the watch

ers.

Ah, no! to something far, far beyond their feeble human sight-to something in the broad Without.

"Th' eend!" he said; "aye, this is th' eend, dear lass, an' th' path's aw shinin' or summat an!-Why, lass, I can see thee plain, an' th' little chap too!"

Another flutter of the breath, one slight movement of the mangled hand, and I bent down closer to the poor fellow,-closer, because my eyes were so dimmed that I could not see.

"Lads," I said aloud a few seconds later, "you can do no more for him. His pain is over!"

For with the sudden glow of light which shone upon the shortened path and the waiting figures of his child and its mother, Surly Tim's earthly trouble had ended.

We suspended our discussion of Mr. Lowell's Prose last month with the promise to present some further illustration of that enthusiasm of momentary sympathy to which his intellectual temperament disposes him, and by which he is often betrayed into broaching quite irreconcilably contrary critical opinions. We attribute this fault of inconsistency in him to an excess that he is apt to indulge of present sympathy in some particular direction-and yet at times Mr. Lowell appears rather to us almost, as it were, pure faculty of intelligence joined to pure capacity of expression apart from any power of judgment, either to embarrass or to guide. We exaggerate, of course, the defect, though scarcely the merit, in choosing our statement. His mind is an incomparable instrument of apprehension for all possible forms of human thought. Nothing is so high, nothing so large, nothing so deep, nothing so strange, nothing so subtle, nothing so near, and nothing so far, but once propose it to that "keen seraphic flame" of intelligence, and it will instantly yield its ultimate secret up to the importunate and imperious quest. His gift of language, too, is adequate to all the hard demands for expression that thus arise. Given a sense, or the shade of a sense, a flavor, or the suspicion of a flavor in his author, and Mr. Lowell will not only seize it for you in an instant. In the same instant he will improvise a form of words for it that shall possess every degree of felicity except that last degree, the grace not of nature but of art, which, in a charming paradox, that would seem to have been, though it probably was not,* itself an illustration, long ago received the name of "curious felicity"—we English transfer rather than translate the happy Latin phrase, curiosa felicitas -"careful good-luck." If, therefore, our search were solely for an intellect to apprehend, commanding language to express, every conception that could possibly be submitted to its operation, there would be little left to desire beyond the qualifications that meet in Mr. Lowell. In fact the mere delight of understanding and of putting into speech too often seems to satisfy his aspiration. There

We say "probably was not "-for the phrase is attributed to Petronius Arbiter (Beau Brummel to Nero), who used it in speaking of Horace. Petronius was still more a dissolute man of fashion than he was an accomplished man of letters-whence little likely to have bestowed much curious pains upon his work.

is no insatiable need incorporated into his mental constitution to seek a ground of unity or of harmony for his various impressions. It is enough for him that he has the present impression, and that he is able to give it a suitable language. To adjust it with another previous impression is no part of his concern. Let both take their chance together. There is no paramount claim. Neither owns any right that can exclude the other. As there was no seizin, there can be no disseizin. The second comer is as good as the first-and no better.

If we compare the closing paragraph of the essay on Shakespeare with a sentence or two occurring incidentally in the course of an essay on "Rousseau and the Sentimentalists," we shall meet with a very good illustration. Mr. Lowell's title, "Shakespeare Once More," implies his own sense of the difficulty of attracting public literary attention by saying anything new on so hackneyed a theme, and the whole essay seems to betray that uneasy effort to overtop predecessors in far-sought hyperbole of adulation, which such a consciousness was likely to beget in a mind not disposed to break in any degree with the prevalent best-bred traditions of criticism on the subject. Accordingly the entire paper has too much the air of seeking its reason of existence in assuming what has already anywhere been said in eulogy of the lucky dramatist, and advancing upon it a degree or two farther in the direction of the conventional extravagance. Having therefore exhausted the resources of his intense and brilliant rhetoric in praising the genius of Shakespeare, what had the critic left for crowning his climax but to set the character of Shakespeare still higher than his genius? It seems that Shakespeare is not only the greatest genius, but the most admirable character, in human history! And this is the style in which the thing is done :

"But higher even than the genius we rate the character of this unique man, and the grand impersonality of what he wrote. What has he told us of himself? In our self-exploiting nineteenth century, with its melancholy liver-complaint, how serene and high he seems! If he had sorrows, he has made them the woof of everlasting consolation to his kind; and if, as poets are wont to whine, the outward world was cold to him, its biting air did but trace itself in loveliest frost-work of fancy on the many windows of that self

centred and cheerful soul." - Among my Books, p. 227.

Before analyzing this paragraph to determine the quality of what it contains in itself, let us set alongside of it a few sentences which we find in the essay entitled "Rousseau and the Sentimentalists:".

"There is nothing so true, so sincere, so downright and forthright, as genius. It is always truer than the man himself is, greater than he. If Shakespeare the man had been as marvelous a creature as the genius that wrote his plays, that genius so comprehensive in its intelligence, so wise even in its play, that its clowns are moralists and philosophers, so penetrative that a single one of its phrases reveals to us the secret of our own character, would his contemporaries have left us so wholly without record of him as they have done, distinguishing him in no wise from his fellow-players?"-Among my Books, p. 359.

The collation of these two passages offers to the pleased student of truth the following important results :

On the one hand, in the same individual the genius is always greater than the charac

ter.

On the other hand, the character is sometimes greater than the genius in the same individual.

In Shakespeare notably the genius was greater than the character.

But in turn the character was greater than the genius in Shakespeare.

If now it could also appear that perhaps, in addition to being sometimes both mutually superior and mutually inferior to each other, genius and character were likewise never either superior or inferior to each other, but were, on the contrary, always exactly equal, or, better still, essentially identical, the satisfaction of the inquiring and ingenuous mind would be complete. Nothing is to be despaired of to the reader of Mr. Lowell. We shuffle the pages and we have: "Nay, may we not say that great character is as rare a thing as great genius, if it be not even a nobler form of it?"-Among my Books, p. 298. All the stimulating antinomies necessary to constitute a many-sided, in fact, a completely spherical criticism are realized here.

In close connection with the sentence just cited from the essay on Lessing we find this: "Since Luther, Germany has given birth to no such intellectual athlete [as Lessing]-to no son so German to the core. [The anti-climax is a favorite figure of Mr.

Lowell's.] Greater poets she has had, but no greater writer." Poets and writers are not generally understood to be antithetical classes. What Mr. Lowell means by the discrimination we have honestly studied to find out, but in vain. Whether he means that take Lessing's poetry, indifferent as it is, and his prose together, they make him a greater author than any other German poet or prose writer, greater even than Goethe (posthabita Samo): or whether he means that Lessing, though surpassed in poetry, has never been surpassed in prose by any German; or whether he means that, considering Lessing the man along with Lessing the author, we must rank him as Germany's greatest,--whether one of these three things, or some fourth thing, far wiser, that we have not had the luck to hit upon at all, Mr. Lowell himself would have to be invoked to decide. He ends the passage by acknowledging Goethe to be "rightfully pre-eminent," and then putting Lessing above him, both in the same sentence. On the whole, Mr. Lowell in this instance has chosen not to offer us Lessing's famous hypothetical alternative. His right hand,

with the truth of his meaning in it, he keeps back. But in his left hand he certainly holds out to us the most liberal opportunity of eternally seeking the truth.

It were an idle inquiry which one of the two somewhat inconsistent judgments of Shakespeare above quoted is Mr. Lowell's more intimate conviction. The one incidentally suggested by way of illustration in the course of a discussion not directly related to Shakespeare is perhaps more likely to reflect Mr. Lowell's habitual thought, and it has, beyand that, the advantage of common sense on its side. But attentive reading of nearly the entire body of criticism comprised in these volumes strongly tends to persuade us that both the judgments of Shakespeare which we have thus brought together for mutual acquaintance from quarters so widely separated, were neither more nor less, in their several places, than mere rhetorical expedients. They were improvised for different occasions. It was but natural that they should differ from each other.

It was not necessary to bring together sentences from separate essays in order to illustrate Mr. Lowell's cheerful independence of himself. Within the brief compass of the essay on Pope these various expressions occur-harmonize them who can: "In Pope's next poem, the Essay on Criticism,' the wit and poet become apparent."-My Study

Windows, 'pp. 409-410. "I come now to what in itself would be enough to have immortalized him as a poet, the 'Rape of the Lock,' in which, indeed, he appears more purely as poet than in any other of his productions."-Ib., p. 410. "I think he has here touched exactly the point of Pope's merit, and, in doing so, tacitly excludes him from the position of poet, in the highest sense."-Ib., p. 423-4. "However great his merit in expression, I think it impossible that a true poet could have written such a satire as the Dunciad."—Ib., p. 425. "Even in the Rape of the Lock,' the fancy is that of a wit rather than of a poet."-Ib., p. 425. "The abiding presence of fancy in his best work [the Rape of the Lock'] forbids his exclusion from the rank of poet."-Ib., p. 432. "Where Pope, as in the 'Rape of the Lock,' found a subject exactly level with his genius, he was able to make what, taken for all in all, is the most perfect poem in the language."—Ib., p. 432.* These citations we have given in the order in which they occur in the text with the exception of the last two, which we could not resist the temptatation to transpose for the sake of securing, as we thought, a little happier climax.

But let us return to look again at the paragraph with which Mr. Lowell concludes the most important, and in many respects the best, of his essays. Mr. Lowell says that he honors the character still more than he honors the genius of Shakespeare. "Higher even than the genius we rate the character of this unique man," are his words. Thus far the sentence is simple and the sense is easy to the understanding, however hard it may be to the judgment. But after a manner of Mr. Lowell's he adds an unexpected clause. The purpose apparently is to make the sense easier to the judgment. The principal effect, however, is to make the sense harder to the understanding. The whole sentence is: "Higher even than the genius we rate the character of this unique man, and the grand impersonality of what he wrote." As if suddenly conscious, with that swift, not seldom too swift, synthesis of thought for which Mr. Lowell is justly remarkable, as if thus suddenly conscious of the bald absurdity involved in such an avowal of preference with respect to a man of whose personal history we know little, and of whose personal history his wisest admirers

* "Thet is, I mean, it seems to me so,
But, ef the public think I'm wrong,
I wunt deny but wut I be so,-"

-The Biglow Papers.

would wish we knew less, Mr. Lowell attaches a kind of rider to his principal clause, in the words "and the grand impersonality of what he wrote," by way of an interpretative enfeeblement of the meaning, as willing so to reduce it within rational bounds. Mr. Lowell, then, unable to ground his preference of Shakespeare's character to Shakespeare's genius on knowledge, grounds it on ignorance, of the man. Shakespeare the man is more admirable than Shakespeare the genius, because Shakespeare the genius is impersonal in his work! But Shakespeare was far from impersonal certainly in his sonnets -poems full of a luscious sweetness in passages, and with hints here and there of the Shakespearean insight, but of a prevailing quality such that the gentle-spoken and judicious Hallam is well warranted in his regret that they ever were written. Mr. Lowell therefore must refer to the impersonal quality of Shakespeare in his dramas. But the inexorable condition of success in dramatic composition is that the writer shall forego the pleasure of obtruding his own personality in his work. To be willing to forego this pleasure is one thing-to be able to forego it is another. To be willing to forego it may be manly. That perhaps is matter of character. To be able to forego it is a higher achievement. But that is a matter of genius. To use a homely figure, emboldened by the plentiful example of Mr. Lowell himself, we may say that the sentence has neatly, like a cat, caught its tail in its mouth. For, saying that Shakespeare's character is more wonderful than his genius, because his genius is impersonal in its work, is only saying that Shakespeare's genius is more wonderful than his genius. A lame and impotent conclusion, to be sure, but worthier than to have let the unqualified absurdity of the first declaration stand.

The few sentences that follow the one on which we have now particularly remarked at the close of the essay on Shakespeare, are characterized by a peculiarity of Mr. Lowell's manner which often offends in him against purity and homogeneity of tone. We quote again: "What has he told us of himself? In our self-exploiting nineteenth century, with its melancholy liver-complaint, how serene and high he seems! If he had sorrows, he has made them the woof of everlasting consolation to his kind; and if, as poets are wont to whine, the outward world was cold to him, its biting air did but trace itself in loveliest frost-work of fancy on the | many windows of that self-centred and cheer