and then passes along down the line of descent, (breaking out in all manner of boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men were only as shortlived as horses, could be readily traced back through the square-roots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you have hung the armorial bearings of the De Champignons or the De la Morues, until one came to beings that ate with knives and said "Haow?") that no person of right feeling could have hesitated for a single moment.

The second of the ravishing voices I have heard was, as I have said, that of another German woman.I suppose I shall ruin myself by saying that such a voice could not have come from any Americanized human being.... It had so much woman in it,— muliebrity, as well as femineity;-no self-assertion, such as free suffrage introduces into every word and movement; large, vigorous nature, running back to those huge-limbed Germans of Tacitus, but subdued by the reverential training and tuned by the kindly culture of fifty generations. Sharp business habits, a lean soil, independence, enterprise, and east winds, are not the best things for the larynx. Still, you hear noble voices among us,-I have known families famous for them, but ask the first person you meet a question, and ten to one there is a hard, sharp, metallic, matterof-business clink in the accents of the answer, that produces the effect of one of those bells which small trades-people connect with their shop-doors, and which

spring upon your ear with such vivacity, as you enter, that your first impulse is to retire at once from the precincts.

Ah, but I must not forget that dear little child I saw and heard in a French hospital. Between two and three years old. Fell out of a chair and snapped both thigh-bones. Lying in bed, patient, gentle. Rough students round her, some in white aprons, looking fearfully business-like; but the child placid, perfectly still. I spoke to her, and the blessed little creature answered me in a voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in it which you have heard in the thrush's even-song, that I hear it at this moment, while I am writing, so many, many years afterwards. C'est tout comme un serin, said the French student at my side.

These are the voices which struck the key-note of my conceptions as to what the sounds we are to hear in heaven will be, if we shall enter through one of the twelve gates of pearl. There must be other things besides aërolites that wander from their own spheres to ours; and when we speak of celestial sweetness or beauty, we may be nearer the literal truth than we dream. If mankind generally are the shipwrecked survivors of some pre-Adamitic cataclysm, set adrift in these little open boats of humanity to make one more trial to reach the shore,-as some grave theologians have maintained,—if, in plain English, men are the ghosts of dead devils who have "died into life,"

(to borrow an expression from Keats,) and walk the earth in a suit of living rags which lasts three or four score summers,-why, there must have been a few good spirits sent to keep them company, and these sweet voices I speak of must belong to them.

EXTRACTS FROM MRS. BROWNING'S "AURORA LEIGH."

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ENGLISH LANDSCAPE.

OT a grand nature. Not my chestnut woods
Of Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spurs
To the precipices. Not my headlong leaps
Of waters, that cry out for joy or fear
In leaping through the palpitating pines,
Like a white soul tossed out to eternity
With thrills of time upon it. Not indeed
My multitudinous mountains, setting in
The magic circle, with the mutual touch.
Electric, panting from their full deep hearts
Beneath the influent heavens, and waiting for
Communion and commission. Italy

Is one thing, England one.

How Adam lived in a garden. All the fields
Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like;

The hills are crumpled plains, the plains, parterres,—
The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped;
And if you seek for any wilderness,

You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed
And grown domestic like a barn-door fowl,
Which does not awe you with its claws and beak,
Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up,
But which, in cackling, sets you thinking of
Your eggs to-morrow at breakfast, in the pause
Of finer meditation.

Rather say

A sweet familiar nature, stealing in

As a dog might, or child, to touch your hand
Or pluck your gown, and humbly mind you so
Of presence and affection, excellent

For inner uses, from the things without.

LIFE.

O Life,

How oft we throw it off and think,—“ Enough,
Enough of life in so much!— here's a cause

-

For rupture; herein we must break with Life,
Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,
Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!"
-And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes
And think all ended. Then, Life calls to us
In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,
Above us, or below us, or around ...

Perhaps we name it Nature's voice, or Love's,
Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed
To own our compensations than our griefs:

Still, Life's voice!-still, we make our peace with Life.

THE SOUL'S INTIMATIONS OF IMMOR-
TALITY.

The cygnet finds the water; but the man
Is born in ignorance of his element,
And feels out blind at first, disorganized
By sin in the blood, his spirit-insight dulled
And crossed by his sensations. Presently
We feel it quicken in the dark sometimes;
Then mark, be reverent, be obedient,-
For those dumb motions of imperfect life
Are oracles of vital Deity

Attesting the Hereafter. Let who says
"The soul's a clean white paper," rather say,
A palimpsest, a prophet's holograph
Defiled, erased and covered by a monk's,

The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on

Which obscure text, we may discern perhaps
Some fair, fine trace of what was written once,
Some offstroke of an Alpha and Omega
Expressing the old scripture.

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