After passions fierce and tender,
After cheerful self-surrender,
Hearts may beat and eyes be met,
And the souls be strangers yet.

Strangers yet!

Oh, the bitter thought to scan

All the loneliness of man,

Nature by magnetic laws
Circle unto circle draws,

But they only touch when met,
Never mingle-strangers yet.

He wrote the following on the death of Thack

eray :

O gentle Censor of our age,

Prime master of our ampler tongue,
Whose word of wit and generous page
Were never wroth except with wrong.
Fielding without the manner's dross,
Scott with a spirit's larger room,
What prelate deems thy grave his loss-
What Halifax erects thy tomb!
But maybe he who so could draw

The hidden great, the humble wise,
Yielding with them to God's good law,
Makes the Pantheon where he lies.

In 1836, after extensive travels in France, Germany, Italy, and Greece, he returned to London where he made his entrée to society, and as heir to a great estate, and as a poet, he was received with open arms. He took apartments

and gave breakfasts, and he had the faculty of bringing together all kinds of people, who if they were not congenial elsewhere certainly were for the time being when with him. He was a singularly complacent and self-sufficient man, never flustered at anything, so that Sydney Smith gave him the sobriquet of "The cool of the evening." Few celebrities ever visited London without being entertained by Mr. Milnes. Carlyle was once storming away in his usual style about the decadence of humanity and the loss of reverence for great men, and said that if Jesus Christ were to return to earth and come to London nobody would pay him the least attention. Then considering a moment, he added: "Yes, I think Dicky Milnes would ask him to breakfast."

At the entertainments he gave he broke up as far as possible the habit of monologue, and made the conversation general. He brought people together of widely different tastes and made them agreeable. Once he was complaining to Carlyle that Peel had not offered him a post in his cabinet, to which Carlyle replied: "No, no, Peel knows what he is about; there is only one post fit for you, and that is the office of the perpetual president of the Heaven and Hell Amalgamation society."

In a letter to his wife Carlyle describes Milnes' methods of drawing out his guests:

He pricks into you with questions, with remarks, with all kinds of fly tackle, to make you bite-does generally contrive to get you into some sort of speech. And then his good humor is extreme; you look into his face and forgive him all his tricks.

W. E. Forster draws a similar picture of him:

Monckton Milnes came yesterday and left this morning—a pleasant, companionable little man, well fed and fattening, with some small remnant of poetry in his eyes and nowhere else; delighting in paradoxes, but good-humored ones; defending all manner of people and principles, in order to provoke Carlyle to abuse them, in which laudable enterprise he must have succeeded to his heart's content, and for a time we had a most amusing evening, reminding me of a naughty boy rubbing a cat's tail backward and getting in between furious growls and fiery sparks. He managed to avoid the threatened scratches.

I must quote another Carlyle anecdote which is given in the "Life of Lord Tennyson." It was Milnes who persuaded Sir Robert Peel to bestow a pension on Tennyson by inducing the prime minister to read "Ulysses," but it was Carlyle who suggested it :

"Richard Milnes," said Carlyle one day, withdrawing his pipe from his mouth, as they were seated together in the little house in Cheyne Row, "when are you going to get that pension for Alfred Tennyson ?"

"My dear Carlyle," responded Milnes, "the thing is not so easy as you seem to suppose. What will my constituents say if I do get the pension for Tennyson? They know nothing about his poetry, and they will probably think he is some poor relation of my own, and that the whole affair is a job."

"Solemn and emphatic was Carlyle's response. "Richard Milnes, on the Day of Judgment, when the Lord asks you why you didn't get that pension for Alfred Tennyson, it will not do to lay the blame on your constituents; it is you that will be damned."

The pension followed shortly afterward.

In

In 1876 Lord Houghton visited the United States and was shown a great deal of attention by his American friends, and was lionized in Washington, Richmond, New York, and Boston. St. Louis he was the guest of General Sherman, and when he visited Chicago he was greatly interested in the public library, to which he had sent a complete set of his works.

On his return home he wrote an article in the Quarterly Review urging closer sympathy and relationship between the two nations.

THE BRONTÉ NOVELS

AND THEIR AUTHORS.

THE "Bronté cult " has been more or less of a literary fad for the past half-dozen years, but apart from that there has hardly been a time in two-score years when some one has not been having something to say about Charlotte Bronté and her sisters." They were and they were not women of genius; they wrote and did not write books that will live in literature; Charlotte was and was not a great novelist ;" and so the discussion goes on in an unceasing round and finds "no end in wandering mazes lost." Andrew Lang has no admiration for Charlotte Bronte and thinks her by no means comparable to Miss Austen. the other hand Mr. Swinburne, Herbert Paul, and many others place her among the great novelists

of the Victorian era.

On

Just now there is a disposition to exalt Emily Bronté's genius above that of the elder sister, and certainly in grim force and weird intensity "Wuthering Heights" is a marvelous story for