"I once saw in a dream a most beautiful flower, in a wide bed of flowers, all of which were beautiful. But this one flower was es

In the main, Wilson's genius was observing and sympathetic rather than scientific, and his critique on genuine poetry was quite in harmony with his unrivalled word-paint-pecially before my soul for awhile, as I adings of nature and natural objects. The authentic poem awed, or delighted him as did the song of the lark, or the mist rising from Windermere, while the lake became a mirror of dazzling sheen, or as did that experience of upland storm when "Young Kit" was imprisoned in the dense vapor, and he watched the young "peeseweeps" coming out of their hiding-place, while the mother of them and he kept "glowerin" at each other, until the bird, suspecting the storm-stead child might be "Lord Eglinton's gamekeeper," gave a loud shriek, and fled away with her downy bantlings. And hence it is that his criticisms are never pedantic. They are themselves poetry, and, while logically defensible, rather implicitly than explicitly give you a reason for the faith that dwelt in the rapt expositor. At the same time he could both analyze and rationalize with great Bubtlety and conclusiveness; and, as an illustration in part of what we mean, we would refer to his letter to Wordsworth on the "Lyrical Ballads," written while he was still in his seventeenth year - one of the most striking efforts of juvenile criticism we have met with for many a day.

Mrs. Gordon has given us some very exquisite passages from her father's writings. We would gladly quote them all, but we must content ourselves with the following extract from a letter to the professor's early and unchanging friend, Dr. Alexander Blair. What Deodati was to Milton, what Arthur Hallam was to Tennyson, Alexander Blair was to Wilson, while in Wilson's case the companion of his sunny boyhood lived on to be the revered and loved counsellor of his latest days. "I have often seen them,” Mrs. Gordon writes, "sitting together in the quiet retirement of the study, perfectly absorbed in each other's presence, like schoolboys in the abandonment of their love for each other, occupying one seat between them, my father with his arm lovingly embracing the dear doctor's' shoulders, playfully pulling the somewhat silvered locks to draw his attention to something in the volume, spread out on their knees, from which they were reading." The following is the passage we refer $0 :

vanced to the place where they all were growing. Its character became more and more transcendent as I approached, and one large flower of which it consisted was lifted up above the rest. I then saw that it was a light, a prismatic globe, quite steady, and burning with a purity and sweetness, and almost an affectionate spirit of beauty, as if it were alive. I never thought of touching it, although I still thought it was a flower that was growing; and I heard a kind of sound, faint and dim, as the echo of musical glasses, seeming to proceed from the flower of light, and pervade the whole bank with low spiritual music. On trying to remember its appearance and spiritual beauty more distinctly, I am unable even to reconceive to myself what it was; whether altogether different from the other flowers, or some perfectly glorious representation of them all; not the queen of flowers, but the star of flowers, or flower-star. Now, as I did not, I presume, see this shining, silent, prismatic, vegetable creature, I myself created it; and it was 'the same, but ah! how different of the imaginatiou,' mingling light with leaf, stones with roses, decaying with undecaying, heaven with earth, and eternity with time. Yet the product was nothing startling, or like a phenomenon that urged to inquirywhat is this ? but beheld in perfect acquies cence in its existence as a thing intensely and delightfully beautiful, in whose perception and emotion, of whose heavenly and earthly beauty my beholding spirit was satisfied, oh! far more than satisfied, so purer was it than dew or light of this earth; yet as certainly and permanently existing as myself existed, or the common flowers, themselves most fair, that lay in usual spring assemblage in a garden where human hands worked and mortal beings walked beneath the umbrage of perishable trees. Perhaps we see and feel thus in heaven, and even the Alexander Blair, whom I loved well on earth, may be thus proportionately loved by me in another life." Of that we have no doubt; and, amid the music of this exquisite" dreamfugue," we take farewell of one of whom Scotland will long be justly proud. Vale! noble-hearted John Wilson !

From The Spectator.

HIAWATHA IN LATIN.*

THIS is not an age or country in which we can reasonably complain of the paucity of our sensations. Whether we seek new impressions or not, they overtake us almost beyond the limits of philosophic digestion. Nevertheless it may be said, as, indeed, we find, that the number and the novelty of the sensations required to overcome the listlessness of life will vary in different individuals. Where most men are spell-bound by the extraordinary rapidity of the events which surround them, a few minds may be so ardent, so versatile, and ethereal, as to be unsatisfied with a progression of daily discoveries in every branch of knowledge almost too numerous to record, and a frequency of political and social revolution, so far as we yet know, historically unparalleled. Nor can we quarrel with the preternatural mental activity of such highly gifted persons, beyond the involuntary astonishment which we may feel at their quaint feats of intellectual funambulism. In this respect the body throws much light upon the mind. Professor Blondin might, for aught we know, lead a blighted existence, but for the outlet he has found for his exuberant daring on the highest rope yet known. Boys will fly madly up half a dozen flights of stairs, for the pleasure of sliding down the banisters with a breathless rush, and a good thud at the end, where your ordinary man will grumble inwardly at the few steps he may have to ascend in order to consult a friend on important business. Yet, on the whole, we sympathize with the boys, and with those scholars who refresh their fevered wits with the like intellectual pranks. We should all be the better for a little more gymnastics. The Greeks of old must have drawn something of their unapproachable plasticity of mind from the elasticity of their bodies; and those glorious exercises which made their physical beauty the typical model for all future generations of sculptors, must have contributed something to the noble symmetry and miraculous versatility of their wits. The converse may not be true. A plastic mind may not argue a plastic body. Whether Professor

*Hiawatha rendered into Latin. By Francis William Newman, Professor of Latin in University College, London. Walton and Maberly, Upper Gower Street.

Newman, for instance, the versatility of whose mental parts is truly astonishing, can also dance upon a rope, we cannot say. But surely, when apparently no longer satisfied with the common impossibility of translating Homer into English, he suddenly resolved upon the translation of Hiawatha, of all books in the world, into Latin, we may be permitted to say, with all due admiration for his genius, that we can only compare him with those interesting and philosophic young experimentalists who, tired of things as they see them under ordinary circumstances, proceed to refresh and heighten their sensations by looking at the world, with head inverted, through their legs.

Even in itself, Hiawatha was, perhaps, the most acrobatic experiment of modern literature. Mr. Longfellow, when he wrote Hiawatha, had fluttered over the realms of almost the whole of modern poetry, touching here, settling there, here culling, and there sipping, and dropping milk and honey in his random unlabored flight from place to place. But poets (do angels ?) tire of common milk and honey; and in the golden decline of his meridian, Mr. Longfellow craved a new craving, and loved a last love-the passionate erratic love of a poetic second childhood. Very childlike is Hiawatha. The poet had plucked the leaves of the old rose tree one by one, and peered into the old Teutonic heart till Teutonia seemed to pall, when he was smitten with a desire to peep into the innocent secrets of a virgin breast, and chose the brown inarticulate bosom of the Indian muse. He peeped, and fell,-at her feet. We say nothing of the qualities of the lover on this his new love errand,-devotion, knight-errantry, genius, enthusiasm, the many-colored prattle of passionate last loves,-all were there. But surely no lovesick knight, of much amatory experience, in quest of new delights, ever dedicated such an epistle to the fairy of his dreams, or besieged her ravished and astonished ear, with such a sweet simplicity of strange surprising compliments, protestations, raptures, and visions of visionary charms. The "mirage of imaginative thought," the prismatic quaintnesses, queer conceits and infantine ingenuities, with which Mr. Longfellow invested the guttural, great masculinity of the old Red Indian is surely the eighth wonder of modern poetry. Cinderella in diamonds,

or a wild Highland lassie decked in purples and ermine, and suddenly presented at court, are nothing to the plight of the Indian muse, when she awoke to self-consciousness in the arms of Mr. Longfellow.

"Ille ridens: Ideirco (inquit)
Dacotarum virginem prae ceteris
Egu mihi in connubium peto;
Ut, coalescentibus populis
Coalescant utrorumque vulnera."

with

"For that reason, if no other,
Would I wed the fair Dacotah;
That our tribes might be united,

That old feuds might be forgotten, And old wounds be healed forever!" Here, again, the Latin stands in much the same proportion to the original as Othello's speeches to Puck's.

But if Mr. Longfellow wrought a miracle of poetry, Mr. Newman has out-Longfellowed Longfellow. The lovely chameleon babble of Hiawatha in the loud plain tongue of conquering Rome is not more wonderful than would be our nursery rhymes on the lips of Milton's Satan, or, if you please, Spenserian English turned into commercial Chinese. To have attempted to spin the iron bars of imperial Latin into a limp covering for Longfellow's most impalpable of impalpabilities, is almost as towering an is attempt at intellectual Herculeanism as the bodily efforts of the Titans to scale Ether with the heaping up of mountains.

Compare for instance,—

"I should answer, I should tell you;
From the forests and the prairies,
From the land of the Ojibways,
From the land of the Dacotahs,"

with the Latin version,

"Ego respondeo et tibi confirmo;
Ex silvis atque immensitatibus herbosis,
E vastis Septentrionis lacubus,
E finibus Oggibbawaiarum,
E sedibus Dacotarum.”

"And the smoke rose slowly, slowly,
Through the tranquil air of morning;
First a single line of darkness,
Then a denser bluer vapor,"

rendered by

"Per matutinam aëris quietem
Lente lentus surrexit fumus,

Unum primo nigredinis filum,

Tum densior caerulescens vapor," where the Latin hobbles after the ethereal English much like a donkey with a cannon ball at its leg ogling a lovely unapproachable thistle. Nor can it be said that Mr. Newman labored under even the usual difficulties of prosody or vocabulary. For he has discarded all regular metre, and only consulted his own ear-while he has added many new words to the Latin language of his own creation, expressly coined for the Do not the English lines, in their tone present translation, such as "atror," for and rhythm, apart from the mere ideas, blackness; "procor," to woo; "jejunare," somehow or other involuntarily call up the to fast. But although, upon the whole, we sweet, unconscious babble of a rosy, curly- think Mr. Newman's attempt unsuccessful, pated Saxon child, shrieking and paddling we are far from wishing to convey that what in its bath, with the bees buzzing in at the he has attempted might have been better open window, and the swallows screaming done. What we think, and for reasons which in the morning sun? But all that the Latin suggests is a grim parody upon "Cæsar's Commentaries," or a stern lesson in military geography to his subalterns from some gruff old captain of Praetorians, with the added indefinable twang of a Franciscan monk In conclusion, we bid Mr. Newman faremouthing out" Immensitatibus." There is well. We admire his talents, though we rather regret that he should not apply his a military tramp, too, about the lines, like the feet of many legions. Not that Mr. such a feat of strength on his part, we can very great powers to larger purposes. After Newman meant it--but when he touched the only lament that there seems so little left in gong, it roared, instead of prattling. The the world likely to afford him a new sensainfantine element is absolutely lost-an ele- tion. Yet, perchance, there is one thing ment which Mr. Longfellow piqued himself left. One hope remains. Let Mr. Newman upon having fetched from the deepest depths of the Indian bosom, but which we shrewdly suspect he drew from Anglo-Saxon Christianity.

Again compare,—

we lately detailed, is, that the translation was a Quixotic attempt to begin with, which Mr. Newman was perfectly warranted in attempting, if he pleased, but which, ab initio could not possibly succeed.

ican forests, and, having learnt Indian, transonly make up his mind to repair to the Amerlate Hiawatha back into the own native tongue of the Indians. Then, perhaps, he may consent to rest in peace upon the soft cushion of dearly earned repose.

POETRY.-Katie Lee and Willie Grey, 578. Sea-Gleams, 578. In the Moonlight,

578. A Gladstonian Distinction, 609.

SHORT_ARTICLES.-Railway from Smyrna to Ephesus, 596. Researches on the Na-

ture and Treatment of Diabetes, 591. Earthquakes in Fayal, 599. Inquest on the Body

of Hannah Brooks, 603. Wonderful Discovery in Electricity, 603. The Revolutionary

Debt, 609.

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