666 'There is no God !' the wicked saith,
'And truly it's a blessing,

For what He might have done with us
It's better only guessing.'

"There is no God!' a youngster thinks,
'Or really, if there may be,
He surely did not mean a man
Always to be a baby.'

"Whether there be,' the rich man says, It matters very little,

For I and mine, thank somebody,
Are not in want of victual!'

"Some others also, to themselves,

Who scarce so much as doubt it, Think there is none when they are well, And do not think about it.

"But country folks, who live beneath The shadow of the steeple; The parson and the parson's wife; And mostly married people; "Youths green and happy in first love, So thankful for illusion; And men caught out in what the world Calls guilt in first confusion; "And almost every one when age, Disease, or sorrows strike him, Inclines to think there is a God,

Or something very like Him."

Then follows a cluster of beautiful little poems. The Spirit revels in his wit, and Dipsychus himself assumes a gayer vein. It is he who breaks forth in these lines:

"Afloat, we move. Delicious! Ah
What else is like the gondola?
This level floor of liquid glass
Begins beneath us swift to pass.
It goes as though it went alone
By some impulsion of its own ;
How light it moves, how softly! Ah,
Were all things like the gondola !" &c. &c.

Yet the next minute he cannot but bethink him of the boatman at work out there in the hot sun to procure him this delicious movement of the gondola.

"Di. Our gaieties, our luxuries,

Our pleasures and our glee,
Mere insolence and wantonness,
Alas! they feel to me.

How shall I laugh, and sing, and dance?
My very heart recoils,
While here to give my mirth a chance
A hungry brother toils.

The joy that does not spring from joy
Which I in others see,
How can I venture to employ,

"Sp. O come, come, come! By Him that sent us here,

Who's to enjoy at all, pray let us hear?
You won't, he can't! Oh no more fuss!
What's it to him, or he to us?
Sing, sing away, be glad and gay,
And don't forget that we shall pay.
This world is very odd, we see,
We do not comprehend it;
But in one fact we all agree,

God won't, and we can't, mend it." Then the Spirit chants those jovial lines, which will meet with an echo far and wide, and which are distinguished by the refrain:—

"How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! How pleasant it is to have money!"

These and some others have been already printed separately in the first volume-more is the pity; for we are persuaded that if "Dipsychus" had been at once given to the world, in all its freshness, in the form it has here, there is not a critic in the three kingdoms who would not have been loud in its praise. It is difficult to compare it with the more imaginative poetry of Tennyson or Browning, but there is a third name amongst our still living poets which may suggest an apt comparison. Those who are fond of arranging or classing their favourite poems according to their degree of merit would perhaps bracket together "Philip Van Artevelde" and "Dipsychus." The masterpiece of Taylor has all the advantage of completeness, and it has far greater variety of character; the fragment of Clough, on the other hand, deals with a subtler range of thought, and with speculative moods which awake the deeper sympathies of the age. Both writers are distinguished by pure and forcible English; both desire first of all to be understood, and, for this end, take care that they understand themselves. We, for our own part, are not given to make this sort of catalogue of our favourite writers-we should never be quite satisfied with the order in which we had arranged them; but we venture on this parallel in order to show unmistakeably the high estimation we have of "Dipsychus."

It has, as the author left it behind

ture of any kind, yet we have still to mention what may be said to be the knot of the poem, the urgent problem that Dipsychus has to solve with himself. The soul wants action as well as thought, and where is noble action to be found? Shall a man sit idle till a grand purpose unfolds itself? Do grand purposes come to idle men? or does idleness fit us for them when they do come? Yet, again, if a man, for commonplace ends, gives himself to a laborious routine, will not this commit him irrevocably to the mean and ignoble? and the Spirit together pass in review the several professions, as of arms, the Church, and the law, and of course with little result. Yet there must be activity of some kind. No great opportunities come to men who sit idle upon the ground:

"High deeds

He

Haunt not the fringy edges of the fight, But the pell-mell, of men. O what and if E'en now by lingering here I let them slip, Like an unpractised spyer through a glass, Still pointing to the blank, too high?"

But he has no sooner uttered this senti

ment than the opposite fear of debasing the mind by sordid habits returns upon him

"O and to blast that Innocence, which though Here it may seem a dull unopening bud, May yet bloom freely in celestial clime!" Ay! but this innocence-will idleness secure it any better than ordinary selfish action?

"Life loves no lookers-on at his great game,

The dashing stream

Stays not to pick his steps among the rocks, Or let his water-breaks be chronicled; And though the hunter looks before he leaps, "Tis instinct rather than a shaped-out thought

That lifts him his bold way. Then instinct,

hail;

And farewell hesitation. If I stay,
I am not innocent; nor if I go-
E'en should I fall-beyond redemption lost."

on them; they cannot deliberately choose for it. What Dipsychus wants is action that shall be

"In its kind personal, in its motive not." What refined Socialism is to give us this? and would it not be action of a very mechanical kind, however pure its motive ?

"For indeed

The earth moves slowly, if it move at all,
And by the general, not the single force
Of the linked members of the vast machine,
In all its crowded rooms of industry
No individual soul has loftier leave
Than fiddling with a piston or a valve."

The Spirit interposes. We must, after
all, submit to do as the rest are doing.
"Sp. To move on angels' wings were sweet;
But who would therefore scorn his feet?
It cannot walk up to the sky;
It therefore will lie down and die.
Rich meats it can't obtain at call;
It therefore will not eat at all,
Poor babe, and yet a babe of wit!
But common sense-not much of it-
Or 'twould submit,
Submit, submit ! "

We have quoted already with unusual length: we must hurry up what remains to be said. From the Second Part, of which but very little seems to have been written, we learn that Dipsychus found the requisite impulse for action in a love not of the most virtuous order. But, having received the requisite impulse, he has toiled and risen in the profession of the law till he has attained the dignity of Lord Chief Justice. The close is somewhat enigmatical. The reader perhaps will be better pleased to excogitate his own interpretation than to receive one from us.

The whole terminates with a second "Easter Day," the burden of which is that Christ has risen! As joy and grief intermingle in life, and yet, on the whole, joy conquers grief, so belief and unbelief will mingle, but finally faith is conqueror.

"For all that breathe beneath the heaven's high cope,

Joy with grief mixes, with despondencehope."

of a French redoubt, near the village of Ainhoè. The infant was baptized in the cathedral, and spent his childhood in the town, of Chester, in which town he preached in the year 1858, almost for the last time on English ground. At the age of eleven, in January 1825, he was sent to Westminster, and three years later gained a place on the foundation.

Those who knew him later at Rugby, at Marlborough, or in India, will readily understand that the young Cotton, a boy of, for a time, weakly constitution and unadventurous spirit, bore little voluntary part in the outdoor life and amusements of his generation. Yet the accounts that have reached us from his cotemporaries bear striking evidence to two points singularly characteristic of the man-the unity that held together, and the steady growth which distinguished, the different stages of his life. We are told of "the generosity and latent tenderness of his disposition," of "the dry quaint humour of his peculiar genius," of the "pleasant banter in which he would express his considerate sympathy for his juniors," and, by one of those who knew him best and now mourns his loss, of his power of rising above and recovering from his own faults and weaknesses. If the man was great beyond the promise of the boy, the boy was still the father of the man. Nor will friends in England, or in India, be surprised to hear that he was in great demand as a teller of stories; that his acting in the part of the old nurse in the Eunuchus was something to remember long; that he was full of odd fun, breaking out sometimes into practical jokes, of which our venerable cotemporary Sylvanus Urban, and a score of Westminster tradesmen, were among the victims; and that he was at the same time an insatiable reader. Last of all, he is still remembered as having, in days when such a fact was not likely to be unnoticed, "regularly said his prayers "at night, and having never been heard "to use coarse or violent language." His name, we may add, may yet be seen carved on the stonework of the school

In 1832 he left school for Cambridge, entering Trinity as a Westminster scholar, with a high rather than brilliant character for attainments and abilities. It would be out of place to dwell at any length on his undergraduate career. He himself would tell stories characteristic of himself, or of the Cambridge of the day. His regularity in reading was such that he would put out his candle as the clock struck twelve, were he in the middle of a line in a Greek play. His hospitality led him, on one occasion, though no smoker, to buy a box of cigars to regale a breakfast party of his faster friends. By a strange accident the cigars were good, and his guests discomfited all his plans for reading by remaining to smoke in his rooms till dinner. He would dilate on the narrow views as to educational aims which he shared at the time; how he laughed to scorn the suggestion of his tutor that he should read a certain period of history in Niebuhr, "as though "Niebuhr had anything to do with a "place in the Tripos." Meantime his sterling qualities and quaint humour made him welcome to a large and varied circle. Among his closest friends were the late lamented William Conybeare, Dr. Howson, and two pupils of Dr. Arnold, C. J. Vaughan and J. N. Simpkinson, both a year or two his juniors. One of those who knew him then speaks thus: the date is the end of his third year at Trinity :

"By this time, high in repute for "ability, and conspicuous for consistent "Christian example, he was already far "advanced in the development of his "mature character. The instincts of a "kindred nature had for some time past "drawn him towards Dr. Arnold, who, "though a stranger to him personally, "and by no means at that time an object of universal admiration, was "regarded by him with almost as deep

a reverence as by Rugby men them"selves. And he soon became intimate "with some of the Trinity Rugbeians, "more especially with Dr. Vaughan, "who eventually introduced him to Dr.