actual wants. (7.) Stat. 1 Will. IV. c. 47 (1830), consolidates and amends the law for payment of debts out of real estate one of great importance, and a considerable step in advance, the Legislature having since gone still farther in that direction. (8.) Stat. 1 Will. IV. c. 60 (1830), is another act of great importance, investing courts of equity with ampler powers than they had possessed, with regard to trustees and mortgagees, and enabling them to make a perfect title to whatever they sold. This act Sir Edward undertook at the request of Lord Eldon; and the Legislature have since gone much farther in that direction. (9.) Stat. 1 Will. IV., c. 65, extended to Ireland by (10) 5 and 6 Will. IV., c. 17, arms courts of equity with very useful powers over the property of infants, married women, and lunatics. (11.) Stat. 2 and 3 Vict., c. 11, extended to Ireland by (12.) Stat. 7 and 8 Vict., c. 90, with careful modifications, conferred a vast boon on purchasers, and greatly facilitated the transfer of land-providing as it did a complete registration of various kinds of incumbrances, collected in one office, and allowing them to be searched for a mere nominal sum -a shilling. These acts were (in 1855) followed by (13.) Stat. 18 and 19 Vict., c. 15, conferring on purchasers further important provisions for their protection. (14) Stat. 5 and 6 Vict., c. 123, for the first time required private lunatic asylums to have a licence, and placed them under salutary restraints and supervision. This act had to encounter fierce opposition, but succeeded, followed up, as we have already seen, by the Chancellor's vigilant personal attention, in greatly ameliorating the condition and management of lunatics. (15.) Stat. 8 and 9 Vict., c. 115, appointed a taxing-master for the Irish Court of Chancery, thereby greatly relieving the overburdened Masters of the Court. This has since been carried much farther. (16.) Stat. 15 Vict., c. 24, after a vehement opposition, put an end to an evil utterly intolerable, and has proved one of the greatest blessings to the people, afforded by modern legislation. It puts an end to the incessant defeat of wills by

petty technical objections, embracing every evil conceivable to occur through haste, ignorance, or accident. The editors of the new edition of the Standard Text-Book on Wills (Jarman), omit a long chapter of decisions of this kind, as it is almost impossible that the validity of any will should hereafter turn upon them." (17.) Stat. 15 Vict., c. 48, amends the law relating to the property of lunatics. (18.) Stat. 15 Vict., c. 80, abolishes the Masters' offices, and expedites the business of the Court of Chancery. (19.) Stat. 15 Vict., c. 86, amends the practice and course of proceeding in the Court of Chancery. (20, 21, 22.) Stat. 16 and 17 Vict., c. 70, is for the regulation of proceedings under commissions of lunacy, and consolidating the former acts,and itself constitutes a most important code; c. 96, for regulating the care and treatment of lunatics; c. 97, consolidating and amending the laws relating to lunatic asylums for counties and boroughs, and the maintenance and care of pauper lunatics. When these three acts were passed, Lord St Leonards declared, in his place in the House of Lords, that no other country possessed such excellent provisions for the care of lunatics and of their property- and none more minutely and anxiously careful than those which secure the welfare of pauper lunatics. He might have added, that the preparation of these enactments entailed upon himself protracted and exhausting labour. (24.) Stat. 16 and 17 Vict., c. 98, provides for the further relief of suitors in the Court of Chancery, appropriating its unclaimed funds to the relief of the suitors, to whom they properly belong. This, also, is a very important act. Lastly, (25.) Stat. 17 and 18 Vict., c. 60, has for its humane object to make more effectual provisions for preventing cruelty to animals.-Here ends, as far as we know, the catalogue of Lord St Leonards' contributions to the Statute-Book of his country: twentyfive in number, and those not showy, rash, and slovenly, but deeply-considered and skilfully framed; the result of great forensic and judicial experience, or, in some instances, masterly developments of alterations

and improvements contemplated by others. We are, moreover, inclined to consider Lord St Leonards largely entitled to credit for the original suggestion of that bold enactment which called into existence the Incumbered Estates Court in Ireland. Unless, indeed, we are mistaken, he lately claimed the paternity of that measure, in speaking in the debate for renewing the powers of the Commissioners. It is said that in his original sketch of the proposed Court, transmitted to the late Sir Robert Peel, he observed that the Court ought to exist only until the mischief should have been remedied; that it was, as regarded property, what the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act was with reference to personal liberty. It is, however, undoubtedly possible that the existing scheme may have been devised by the Government before they became possessed of Sir Edward Sugden's communication to Sir Robert Peel; though this has not hitherto been asserted. And these legislative la

bours have been continued during a long series of years, while Lord St Leonards was either burthened with enormous practice at the bar, or absorbed with judicial cares as twice Chancellor of Ireland, and afterwards of England (his is the only instance on record of such promotion;) or as a law-lord sitting on Appeals; or engaged from time to time writing profound and universally accepted treatises on the law, or carefully adapting them to successive variations in that law. The patience, the self-denial, the indomitable industry and resolution with which his great endowments and acquirements have been and continue to be devoted to the service of his profession and of his country, will enshrine his name in the memory of his countrymen, long after he shall have passed away from the scene of his untiring exertions. As author, advocate, judge, and legislator, he appears to exhibit a combination of claims to our respect and gratitude, that is unique.

POWER in Nature, the correlative power of Genius, and the combination of these two powers into the joint result of power in Art, are the topics of which we here propose to treat. The Alps we shall take as the emblem of power in Nature. Some lands, as the south of Italy, seem specially given up to beauty; Nature gay and sportive joins hands with the Graces and the Muses in dance and festivity. Other regions are merely strange and anomalous-as the sterility of desert Africa, where Nature, instead of celebrating a feast, has imposed a fast; where no exuberance of gladness, under the shade of trees near refreshing fountains, breaks forth into song and dance, but, in keeping with the silence, solitude, and famine around, the Arab pitches a tent, and the hermit builds a cell. Other territories, again, such as the Alps, are not merely beautiful - not exclusively strange and anomalous : Nature here does not wholly surrender herself to the pleasing, peaceful lassitude of beauty, nor lie in prostrate sterility, as if she had nothing to accomplish; on the contrary, here, among the Alps, she nerves herself for actionis not the gentle lover of the south, but the hero armed for battle. She

VOL. LXXXI.-NO. CCCCXCVII.

builds up defiant fortifications-intrenches herself in deep fosses-and earthquake and storm serve as artillery. Creative nature seems, in special districts of the earth, to have set herself the task of completing and carrying out in exclusive supremacy some one idea. In the Alps, as it appears to us, that idea is power. The handwriting on the mountainside, the natural language, the hieroglyphics, all speak of power.

Now, it is this power which makes mountains akin to genius-themselves, as it were, works of geniusaspiring, proud, ambitious, conscious of, and self-sustained in, strength. Power of genius, we have said, is correlative to power in nature genius being, by its supremacy in the realms of mind, a kind of antitype of mountains in the world of matter. Now, we place these two great powers in juxtaposition, not for contrast or conflict, but for co-operation. We ask whether, from their conjoint action, a like power may not arise in Art? We want something more than a bare, literal, cold transcript of nature. Nature herself in life, actuality, and all but infinitude of scale, we already have in reality before us. A literal, servile art-echo is scarcely needed, especially when art-patrons

S

have now ready access to the great originals, and when stereoscopic transcripts have become in soirees and mere evening parties a common peep-show. To the Alpine powers of nature, we require the application of the Alpine power of mind; and then may perchance arise a third and equal power-the power of Art, an art which shall mould mountains into a satisfying expression of man's aspirations and yearning towards the boundless; not a bare record, or spelt-out manuscript, but a renewed revelation-an intermediate creation lying between the actual world in which we tread, and the dreamland of the imagination wherein we love to revel-an art which shall transmute an agricultural utility, primarily subserving man's bodily sustenance, into poetic food for his inner and higher nature. Then might Art constitute herself a power-the power of interpreting and transmuting nature, and of teaching man-ennobling the humble circle of domestic life by the visions of genius. Thus, when the closing shutters separate from the noise of city life, and the inmates, in the quiet of evening, seek repose from the world's warfare, that picture on the walls, with those mountain-summits shadowy yet sublime, belonging rather to heaven than earth-those fields of snow so pure and cool-those gentle reflections like dreams in sleeping waters, steal on the mind with a power and spell which is perhaps felt the most when most needed.

Forces active or quiescent constitute power. Vast masses of matter piled into mountains, as they meet the mere bodily eye of the uneducated and unreflecting, can have little or no significance. It is only as the mental eye of causation pene trates into the active and operative forces which have built up the fabric-only in proportion as it discovers creative or destructive agencies akin to life and thought and pas sion, that the eye can so gaze on the Alps as to feel their power, and with that power a purpose and intent. Then the world's theatre becomes nature's studio, wherein the plastic clay is moulded into mountains, the snowy sculpture of their summits

standing out in the azure pediment of heaven. It is through a kind of imaginative reasoning that the artist mind must contemplate nature;Reason pushing her researches among what is seen, known, understood, walking the earth in contemplation, or mounting by successive and prescribed steps to commanding summits. When reason can go no further, the mind takes to the wings of imagination, soars at once into midair, rushes in wild flight, and steals fire from heaven. Imagination to the artist is what faith is to the divine. It is the figuring forth of things unseen; it anticipates and calls into being the mind's desires; it realises truths and beauties, of which outward forms are but the type; it makes Nature the threshold to the Supernatural; it draws aside the veil which Providence has thrown over her workings, looks into hidden and mysterious analogies and meanings, and along the vista of the past and of the future beholds the beginning and the end.

Reason, or perhaps we should rather say the understanding, measures the cubic contents of glacier or mountain, estimates the tonnage, analyses the component materials, and determines cleavage, angles, and elevations. Did the artist know nothing more than these, however important even to him, it were better at once to throw aside portfolio and pencil, and take to the geologist's hammer, or to the theodolite of the engineer. A sketch is not a surveyor's map, a picture not a geologist's chart, or the hortus siccus of the botanist. Unless the student's eye be coloured by the poet's ardour, it were better to turn to those more positive callings in which the compass and the rule supply the want of enthusiastic genius. It is through the imagination-or, as Coleridge would perhaps have said, by the "pure reason"-that the poet must, out of the bricks and mortar of the understanding, build the spirit's shrine. Accordingly, in the remarks which follow on the ele ment of power, we desire the guidance of imagination rather than of the senses; we shall speak of intuitions of the mind as it feels, rather than as it perceives of Nature as she

affects the emotions, rather than as she chronicles her facts in the registry of the intellect.

We have already said that the forces of Nature essentially constitute her power. Force is causation, causation is creation, and creation implies mind, will, purpose. Hence, by a few steps, we ascend from a mere material nature of the senses, to a landscape which bears the mark and fashion of a spirit origin, actuated by an inward moving energy. Thus material nature is traced back to spirit, and spirit again projects itself forward, and by the act of creation becomes clothed in the body of material form; and hence, be tween matter and spirit, nature and soul, are sustained a reciprocity and interchange of existence-knowing but one beginning and ending, and that in God. Thus Coleridge in this sense bursts forth

"O the one life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,

A light in sound, a sound like power in light,

Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where ;

Methinks it should have been impossible

Not to love all things in a world so filled;

Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air

Is music slumbering on her instrument."

Herein is the common brotherhood of creation, not a brotherhood of bodily materialism, but a consanguinity of forces. We are persuaded that it is this fraternity-this unity running through creation, unconsciously felt, if not actually acknowledged, which rouses the sympathetic ardour of all sensitive minds. There is, so to say, a going out of ourselves to meet nature half-way, and a rush ing out on the part of nature herself to receive our love. Thus, in the rapt contemplation of distant hills, the mind seems to quit for the moment its bodily confines, that it may meet the spirit of the mountain which comes forth to claim a sister's greeting. We imagine there are few minds, indeed, which, having thus taken nature into intimate communion, have not been thus absorbed in reverie, receiving, as it were, an influx of thoughts, emotions, har

monies, being taught through sympathy, and led on to joy.

We take the Alps as emblems of power, because they specially are the centres round and within which nature's forces manifest themselves in utmost energy. They are themselves a force product-forced into space by the fire-demon. They are emphatically a power, not only by virtue of their origin in force, but by their stern resistance to force. They rise, as it were, in proud ambitious strength, to assert an everlasting dominion, and to govern upon earth by a right divine. They arise from the empire of fire, and about and around them rage the ice-power, the torrent-power, and the storm-power; and yet they are not only monuments of strength, but emblems of tranquillity. The glacier, again, lying in the mountain- ravine life in death, a motion in stagnation, tearing down rocks and bearing away boulders, marking its course with havoc, and carrying destruction over fertility-is, as it were, a congealed power, energy arrested and restrained, sufficiently active to be known by the understanding, sufficiently latent to be wondered at by the imagination. Then, again, if these motionless cataracts are power in repose, the maddened torrent is power in action.

"O sovran Blanc ! The Arve and Arveiron at thy base

Rave ceaselessly.
And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely
glad!

Who gave you your invulnerable life,
Your strength, your speed, your fury, and
Unceasing thunder and eternal foam ?"

your joy,

Lastly, the storm-demon is power goaded into madness. Winds, tempests, warring, bewailing, uttering a forlorn hope or muttering despair

"Far along From peak to peak the rattling - crags among Leaps the live thunder."

There is war in heaven: every mountain is trumpet-tongued; the artillery of the elements threatens vengeance; the furies have broken loose from their mountain prisons, and are greedy to devour with the