volume there are many national themes treated which should be more widely known by Canadians of the present day, and whose hearty, patriotic ring we have much need, in this matter-of-fact-age, to stop and listen to. Would that the national ear was more fain to catch their rhythmic sounds, and to respond to the heart-beats which gave them birth! There is a charming local colour also about many of Mrs. Leprohon's poems, which must endear them to every Canadian, and a sweetness of expression and melodious rhythm which will commend them to every attuned ear. In candour, we must add, that there is not a little in the volume which, from a literary point of view, had better have been left out. But as the collection is a posthumous one, we suppose this defect must be lightly dealt with. Much, however, remains to entitle Mrs. Leprohon to favourable notice, when the history of Canadian poetry comes to be written.

Seneca and Kant; By Rev. W. T. Jackson, Ph. D., Dayton, Ohio. United Brethren Publishing Room, 1881.

It is exactly a hundred years since German Philosophy, led by Emmanuel Kant, invaded and conquered all previous forces of European thought. That philosophy came into the field with wholly new tactics, strange and complicated movements, and arms of precision in the use of metaphysical terms unknown before. Eleven years previous to the publication of Kant's great work, the Critique of Pure Reason,' that sensualist materialism which had been developing itself for two centuries in England and France, had said its last word in the publication of the Système de la Nature of Baron Holbach, of 1770. Belief in God was henceforth to be banished from the horizon of human thought; Consciousness and Ideas were as much products of the brain tissues as bile was of the cells of the liver ! Kant tells us w he was led to see the necessity of a revolution in the methods of Philosophy.iu language whose dignity fits the subject. As Copernicus had seen that the phenomena of astronomy could not be accounted for on the old theory that the sun and stars move round the earth, and thence was led to construct a new theory of the heavens.

So Kant had found that the doctrine of all our knowledge being traceable to experience, does not account for the phenomena of human thought. He was thence led to his Critical Examination of the Reason,' which he considered made three aspects, each determined by the ideas which are its subject matter: The Sense-Faculty (he called it the aesthetic), the

Understanding which takes cognizance of the ideas supplied by the sense faculty, and the Pure Reason, which considers ideas transcending, or going into a higher region than these, as God, Immortality and Duty. In criticising the contents of the Sense Faculty and of the Understanding, he shewed the existence of certain necessary forms, such as space and time, which are supplied by the mind itself, and are not given by experience. These, which he called in his strange and repellant terminology, ‘Synthetic Judgments a priori,' were conceived by man as necessary and universally true, and this Kant proved by the self evident truth of the pure mathematics. Whether or not we are justified in saying that these judgments, true to our reason, are also true to the reason of other possibly existent beings, Kant does not appear to determine: and herein, according to many thinkers, is a weak point in his system. But at least to us, as we reason, and to all our possibilities of thought and science, these Synthetic Judgments' a priori are valid.

6

Another weak point in Kant's Philosophy, according to some recent exponents, notably Dr. Noah Porter, in a lucid and most readable essay on the Kantian Centennial (Princeton Review, Nov. 1881,) is his apparent denial of the possibility of our cognition of the noumenon as a thing in itself.' By phenomenon are meant the transitory, the uncertain, the contingent, the apparent : by noumenon, the permanent, the universal, the true. In its highest form the noumenon is equivalent to the absolute, to the idea of God; and the relation of this thought to mere phenomenon is nobly expressed in a passage in St. Augustine's Confessions, The Unchanging, Thou changest all things; with Thee of all things unstable the stable causes exist, and of all things mutable and transitory, the immutable causes abide.' But Kant was unable to see ground for belief in the noumenon as God in the speculative reason, although he claimed that

we possess such ground in the moral or practical reason.

Noumenon considered as the conscious soul, it seems strange that Kant should have denied our right to predicate existence. Does not his whole system pre-suppose our power to judge of Reason as a reality immediately known to us? The ethical side only of Kant's philosophy was made known in England by Coleridge and Carlyle. Its pure and lofty tone had a great influence with the earlier generations of Liberal and Broad Churchmen whose leaders were Kingsley and Frederic Dennison Maurice. As a philosophical system, the Kantian metaphysics have been evolved in various directions by Schilling, Fichte, and Hegel; and by Mansel and Hamilton in England. At present there seems to be in England and America a tendency to return to and re-interpret Kant, with perhaps a leaning to the development of his system known as Absolute Idealism, as against the denial of the knowability of the Absolute, by Herbert Spencer. Of this school, the work on Kant by Professor Watson, of Kingston, lately reviewed in these columns, is an example which deserves, and has already commanded, attention.

To the earnest student of Metaphysics, the position of Kant among the supreme thinkers of Europe will always furnish a reason for at least attempting to form some idea of his system as set forth, not by commentators, but by himself.

The translation in Bohn's library gives some help in the notes, but it may be safely maintained to be impossible for any student to understand the text unaided by an expert or by ample notes. The difficulty of understanding Kant is no doubt in part due to the inherent difficulty of the subject. But all recent commentators seem agreed that it is still more owing to the strange terminology which Kant borrowed from Wolf and his predecessors, who derived it from the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages. And to this terminology Kant assigned new meanings of his own, which was gradually adopted during the twenty years in which this Sphinx of Metaphysics meditated over the riddles given to the world in 1781. Again, it is fully admitted that Kant himself got at times confused and involved. Also, the German language of a century ago

was in a chaotic state as regards clearness of style, which put Kant at a great disadvantage. He was at times a forcible, clear, and even eloquent writer; witness his account alluded to above, of the origin of his Critique of Pure Reason;' also his marvellous anticipation of modern evolution in his Theory of the Heavenly Bodies, which, by the way, has been erroneously ascribed to Laplace. But the 'Critique' needs not so much to be commented on by commentators who have generally pet theories of their own, as to be re-written before it can be understood by the English reader. With the exception of Locke, modern philosophical writers in our language have enjoyed the advantage of a clear and intelligible style, and this is eminently true of Mill and Spencer, whose speculations, treating as they do of the most recondite questions of Thought, and involving complex detail of illustration, have a terminology that explains itself, and can be readily understood by any educated reader, even if untrained in Metaphysics. Kant's work should be not simply rendered into boldly literal English, but translated in the same spirit of free yet faithful rendering by which the French version of Dumont made Jeremy Bentham intelligible.

Kant is pre-eminently a writer whom modern Thought cannot afford to neglect. It is very remarkable to what an extent he anticipated, a century ago, several of the leading ideas of our own age. In his book on The Philosophy of the Heavens,' Kant promulgates the theory as to the genesis of the stellar universe, which, fifty years afterwards, was preposed in a modified form by Laplace. In the same work Kant gave the explanation more currently received, of the rings of Saturn. He also distinctly anticipated the Darwinian theory. Mr. Jackson's little book takes too arbitrary a title when it professes to give an account of the 'Philosophy of Kant.' Mr. Jackson only treats of Kant's System of Ethics-the simplest and easiest part of Kant's system. Of the more difficult and more important metaphysical investigations in the Kantian Metaphysics, Mr. Jackson tells us nothing whatever. But on the merely ethical question his brochure is well put together, and deserves a good word.

TO KATE SEYMOUR MACLEAN.*

BY MRS. A. MAC GILLIS, WINNIPEG, MANITOBA.
Sweet Singer, would I had the power
To write but one verse worthy thee;
To thy bright garland add one flower,
To thank thee for thy minstrelsy.

Thy songs are music in the night,

Ör earnest thoughts for solemn hours;
Or, when our hearts are gay and light,
Thy graceful verses seem like flowers

Of the bright Spring, or sunny June,
When Nature all an anthem sings;
So fresh and pure, so sweet the tune,
No chiming bell more softly rings.

Like murmur of a summer brook

Melodious winding through the glen, The rhythmic pages of thy book

Flow in sweet numbers from thy pen.

We cannot choose but weep with thee,
With thee rejoice when thou art glad,
Our hearts go out in sympathy,

One moment gay, the next one sad.

God bless thee, Singer, give thee grace
To warble till He calls thee home,
Then, may the shining of His face,
Light the dark valley's gathering gloom;

And, when earth's sounds grow faint and
dim,

Angelic voices greet thine ear,
And bear a sister seraphim

To sing in Heaven from singing here.

Some visitors were going through a great house recently, and at length paused before a fine painting representing a handsome, black-bearded man One of them clad in gorgeous attire. inquired of their guide whose portrait it might be. Well, sir,' replied the housekeeper, 'I don't rightly know; but I believe it is the Dowager Venus !' 'But,' said the visitor, 'I scarcely think that the Dowager Venus would be represented with a beard. Perhaps you will be good enough to look in the catalogue?' She did so, and the Dowager Venus proved to be the Doge of Venice.

Author of 'The Coming of the Princess, and other Poems.' Toronto: Hunter, Rose & Co.

People without tact do a great deal of mischief. They seem actually merciless at times. They never know what is best to say or do. They tread upon people's toes, and open the closet where family skeletons are kept so often that they earn the reputation of being spiteful. They ask over and over again questions which are obviously unpleasant to answer, and make remarks that are seen at once by all save themselves to be offensive.

An English judge used to say that, in his opinion, the very best thing ever said by a witness to a counsel was the reply given to Missing, the barrister, at that time leader of his circuit. He was defending a prisoner charged with stealing a donkey. The prosecutor had left the animal tied up to a gate, and when he returned it was gone. Missing was very severe in his examination of the witness. 'Do you mean to say, witness, the donkey was stolen from the gate?' 'I mean to say, sir,' giving the judge and then the jury a sly look, 'the ass was Missing."

6

A parish in the county of Fife had for a minister a good man, remarkable for his benevolent disposition. Meeting one of his parishioners one day, he said, Jeanie, what way do I never see you in the kirk?' Weel, sir,' replied Jeanie, 'to be plain wi' ye, I haena a pair o' shoon to gang wi.' 'A pair o' shoon, Jeanie Jeanie, I'll no let ye stap at hame for that; what would a pair cost?' 'About four shillings, sir.' Putting his hand into his pocket, he gave Jeanie the Some time money, and went his way.

after, meeting her again, he said, ‘Dear me, Jeanie, I've never seen ye in the kirk yet. What way is that?' 'Weel, sir,' replied Jeanie, 'to be plain wi' ye, when the weather is guid, and I hae time, I prefer gaun to Dumfarlin' to hear Mr. Gillespie.' Oh, indeed, Jeanie, lass, that's the way o't, is't? Ye might hae gi'en me the first day o' the shoon, ony way, d'ye no think?'

6

FOR SOME ONE.

BY CECIL GWYNNE, MONCTON, NEW BRUNSWICK,

OH heart that is bruised and wounded,
And aching with hopes and fears;
Oh hands that are empty and helpless,
Through the barren and dreary years.

The years that have brought no blessing,
But are bearing thy youth away,
Faded, and withered, and useless,
Like leaves on an autumn day.

Sit not by the roadside idle,

Grasp something before it goes by! Better to struggle and suffer

Than helplessly sink down and die.

The way has been rough and stony,

And the journey seemed all up-hill;
But there's One who is near in the darkness,
Whose hand shall uphold thee still.

And some time in the dim hereafter,
Some time in the years to come,
Thou shalt lay down thy weapons forever,
At rest, in thy hard won Home.

Charity taken in its largest extent is nothing else but the sincere love of God and our neighbour.

Whatever you have to do, do it with all your might. Many a lawyer has made his fortune by simply working with a will.

'Don't stand on ceremony; come in, said a lady to an old farmer, as she opened the door. 'Why, my goodness! Excuse me, ma'am. I thought all along I was standin' on the door mat.'

Two bees a honey and a dronealighted, towards sunset, upon the trunk of a tree. Muttered the drone to the busy bee, which was laden with honey, I have been looking for all you over the place. I am starving, and you might help me with a little of your substance.' 6 Why so?' asked the other. 'I have had the pleasure of toiling all the day for it. Add the virtue of independence to the dignity of labour, and gather for yourself.' Say you so,' rejoined the drone, then I must take it by force.' But as the drone had no sting, the struggle was vain; and he soon lay legs uppermost, a helpless titbit for a watchful robin. Moral.-The

lazy and the 'loafing' will waste as much time and energy over scheming 'how not to do it' as would suffice to gain an honest living, and come to a troublesome end for their pains.

A PASSING THOUGHT,

C. E. M., MONTREAL.

Every life has its December,
Full of sad repining,

Yet December's darkest heaven
Hides a silver lining.

May will bring, on some sweet morrɔw,
Rosy light and laughter;
Longest grief must have an ending,
If not here, hereafter.

Old party- What d'ye mane by snowballing o' me, yer young wagabones ? Ain't yer got a father o' yer own to snowball?'

A well-fed hog rose up in his sty and dropped a regretful tear. "The beautiful snow has come,' he said, ' and slaying will soon be here.'

'How do I look, doctor?' asked a painted young lady of the family physician. I can't tell, madam, till you uncover your face,' was the cutting reply.

Mrs. Maloney-That's a foine child ov yours, Mrs. Murphy. How ould is he?' Mrs. Murphy. He'll be two years old to-morrow. He was born on the same day as his father.'

An enterprising American firm, to prevent the destruction of their cheeses by rats in their transit to England, packed them in iron safes. It is stated that the rats eat their way through the safes, but found the cheeses too much for them.

REVELATION.

I trod the rustling carpet of the earth, When winter winds had bared the forest trees;

Hushed were the myriad sounds of insect mirth,

That erst had floated on the summer breeze. No voice of bird was heard in warblings sweet,

No pleasant murmur of the growing leaves. 'Death, death,' I said, 'on every side I meet; And Nature for her buds and blossoms grieves.'

Anon I saw the earth apparelled new ; Greenness and growth did everywhere abound;

The skies bent over all the summer blue, And grand old hills with bounteousness were crowned.

The air was stirred with waves of happy strife.

Where'er I turned, I saw the eternal seal. 'Life follows death,' I said: 'through death to life,

Doth nature thus the spirit's law reveal.'

N choosing as the subject of my

To

the Atlantic coast of Canada, I feel that I am assisting to carry out the praiseworthy object the Geographical Society has in view. The second article of the Constitution expressly informs me, a new member, that the society desires above all things: study and make known our country in relation to its productive forces; especially to bring into notice its agricultural, forest, maritime, industrial and commercial resources, with a view to augment its riches and the wellbeing of its population.' A great society like that in London may appropriately, as the parent and prototype of all similar associations elsewhere, follow the explorer into Arctic seas or

A Paper read before the Geographical Society of Quebec.

tropical jungles, and search the wide globe for fresh accessions to the treasures of knowledge which have been amassed under its auspices. Ours necessarily must be a more humble task in the early days of this association; but while it may be less ambitious, it cannot be said to be less useful, from a Canadian point of view. A country like ours, embracing the greater part of a Continent, containing resources still in the infancy of their development, affords a fruitful field of research for the earnest student desirous of furnishing his quota of geographical lore. Amid the bleak regions of Hudson's Bay, or the fastnesses of the mountains that bar the road to the Pacific coast, there is yet much to attract the adventurous traveller and explorer. Even in the older sections of this wide Dominion, there are fresh woods and pastures new' to