"Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade !
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade;
Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove,
And winds shall waft it to the powers above.
But would you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain,
The wondering forests soon should dance again;
The moving mountain hear the powerful call,

And headlong streams hang, listening, in their fall."

This is not, nor could it for a moment be mistaken for, the language of passion. It is simple falsehood, uttered by hypocrisy; definite absurdity, rooted in affectation, and coldly asserted in the teeth of nature and fact. Passion will indeed go far in deceiving itself; but it must be a strong passion, not the simple wish of a lover to tempt his mistress to sing. Compare a very closely parallel passage in Wordsworth, in which the lover has lost his mistress :

"Three years had Barbara in her grave been laid,
When thus his moan he made:

'Oh, move, thou cottage, from behind yon oak,

Or let the ancient tree uprooted lie,

That in some other way yon smoke
May mount into the sky.

"If still behind yon pine-tree's ragged bough,
Headlong, the water-fall must come,

Oh, let it, then, be dumb

Be anything, sweet stream, but that which thou art now.'

Here is a cottage to be moved, if not a mountain, and a water-fall to be silent, if it is not to hang listening; but with what different relation to the mind that contemplates them! Here, in the extremity of its agony, the soul cries out wildly for relief, which at

the same moment it partly knows to be impossible, but partly believes possible, in a vague impression that a miracle might be wrought to give relief even to a less sore distress,-that nature is kind, and God is kind, and that grief is strong; it knows not well what is possible to such grief. To silence a stream, to move a cottage wall,-one might think it could do as much as that!

RICHARD HOLT HUTTON.
1826-

[Mr. Hutton is the author of some of the most thoughtful and appreciative literary essays of the generation. He writes with fine artistic as well as intellectual judgment, and is especially marked by his sympathetic interpretation of the ethical and spiritual values of literature. The passage that follows is from the essay on Cardinal Newman, in his Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith." This volume, and that entitled "Literary Essays," contain his more important critical studies.]

From the Essay on Cardinal Newman, in "Modern Guides to English Thought in Matters of Faith."

MOST of us know, by bust, photograph, or picture, the wonderful face of the great Cardinal; '--that wide forehead, ploughed deep with parallel horizontal furrows which seem to express his careworn grasp of the double aspect of human nature, its aspect in the intellectual and its aspect in the spiritual world, the pale cheek down which

"long lines of shadow slope

Which years, and curious thought, and suffering give," -the pathetic eye, which speaks compassion from afar, and yet gazes wonderingly into the impassable gulf which separates man from man,—and the strange

[' John Henry, Cardinal Newman.]

mixture of asceticism and tenderness in all the lines of that mobile and reticent mouth, where humor, playfulness, and sympathy are intricately blended with those severer moods that “refuse and restrain.” On the whole, it is a face full, in the first place, of spiritual passion of the highest order, and in the next, of that subtle and intimate knowledge of details of human limitation and weakness which makes all spiritual passion look utterly ambitious and hopeless unless indeed it be guided amongst the stakes and dikes and pitfalls of the human battlefield by the direct providence of God.

And not a little of what I say of Cardinal Newman's countenance may be said also of his style. A great French critic has declared that "style is the man." But surely that cannot be asserted without qualification. There are some styles which are much better than the man, through failing to reflect the least admirable parts of him; and many that are much worse--for example, styles affected by the artificial influence of conventional ideas like those which prevailed in the last century. Again, there are styles which are thoroughly characteristic of the man in one sense, and yet are characteristic in part because they show his delight in viewing both himself and the universe through colored media, which, while they brilliantly represent some aspects of it, greatly misrepresent or completely disguise all others. Such a style was Carlyle's, who may be said to have seen the universe with wonderful vividness as it was when in earthquake and hurricane, but not to have appre

hended at all that solid crust of earth symbolizing the conventional phlegmatic nature which most of us know only too well. Gibbon, again, sees everything—even himself—as if it were a striking pageant. How characteristically he describes his father's disapprobation of his youthful passion for Mademoiselle Curchod (afterwards Madame Necker): "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son!" It was evidently the moral pageant of that very mild ardor, and that not too reluctant submission, of which he was thinking, not of the emotion itself. And Macaulay, again, has a style like a coat of mail with the visor down. It is burnished, brilliant, imposing; but it presents the world and human life in pictorial antitheses far more vivid and brilliant than real. It is a style which effectually conceals all the more homely domestic aspects of Macaulay's own nature, and represents mainly his hunger for incisive contrast. But if ever it were true that the style is the man, it is true, I think, of Newman-nay, of both Newman and Matthew Arnold. And therefore I may venture without impropriety to dwell somewhat longer on the style of both, and especially of the former, than would be ordinarily justifiable. Both styles are luminous, both are marked by that curious "distinction" which only genius, and in general only poetic genius, can command. Both show a great delight in irony, and use it with great effect. Both writers can, when they choose, indulge even in extravagance, and give the rein to ridicule without rousing that displeasure which any such excess in men of high intel