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the hearse among the flowers that "sad embroidery wear." A second point to notice concerns the lines that are marked "nugatory." Both Shakespeare and Milton had the instinct to see that just as, on the one hand, a flower passage must not be a mere catalogue, so, on the other, each item must not be unduly emphasized. And so we find that, while Milton has his "tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine," and his "well-attir'd woodbine" to make up the bunch, Shakespeare also has his

Bold oxlips, and The crown-imperial, lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one!

a "nugatory" passage which Mr. Ruskin omits from his quotation. So much, then, for the contrast of Imagination and Fancy.

In resuming what has been said about the two great characteristics of the poetical mind, its passion and its imagination, it may be useful to illustrate from the picture that our great dramatist has drawn of the poetical character in the person of Macbeth. Macbeth, indeed, was a poet without a conscience; but that circumstance is to the advantage of our illustration, since we shall not be able to confuse his morality with his poetry. There are several points that may be noticed.

1. First, though on this much stress must not be laid, we observe Macbeth's power of summoning up, and vividly objectifying impressions of sense. He sees an air-drawn dagger. He hears a voice say, "Sleep no more."

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age,

As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have; but, in their stead,

Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth

honor, breath,

Which the poor heart would fain deny, but dare not.

Especially characteristic here of the poet seems to me the pause on the idea of curses, to realize them, before going further, "curses, not loud, but deep."

3. In the third place, we remark that, as Macbeth realizes with such vividness and such emotion the qualities of everything that appeals to him, so one thing is always suggesting another with similar qualities:

Then comes my fit again; I had else been perfect;

Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,

As broad and general as the casing air; But now I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confined.

When the ghostly voice that he hears, the echo of his own imaginative mind, suggests to him the terrible thought that he has murdered not the king only, but Sleep, the greatest friend of man, he is at once absorbed in the thought of all the wonder and mystery of sleep, which he draws out into a long string of images; forgetting all about the business he had been engaged in, and the bloody daggers in his hand, until his practical wife in blank amazement breaks in with, "What do you mean?" No one, again, is likely to forget the desolate images under which he sums up his idea of the worthlessness and meaninglessless of human life:

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is seen no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

4. I would point out, further, as a frequent trait of the poetic nature, Macbeth's simplicity; shown partly by his interest in his own moods; for ex

ample, in such sayings as "False face must hide what the false heart doth know;" more curiously in his speculation why he could not say "Amen” when the groom he was about to murder said, "God bless us;" most curiously in his irritation at ghost-walking:

The times have been That, when the brains were out, the man would die,

And there an end; but now they rise again,

With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,

And push us from our stools; this is more strange

Than such a murder is.

5. Finally, though in this I am trespassing on a subject which I hope to discuss in a second paper, we cannot but observe Macbeth's extraordinary talent for expression. I will give but one instance. Shakespeare, whether by design or chance, has reserved for him, perhaps, the most remarkable presentment in literature of the phenomenon of falling night

Light thickens,

an expression which gives not only the fact of growing darkness, but also its qualities.

The picture of the poetical nature that Shakespeare has given us in Macbeth is considerably heightened if by the side of it we add for contrast his Richard II. Without working out the parallel in any detail, it will be enough to call attention to two points. In the first place, Richard has no imagination in the sense which we have seen reason to give to that term; he has no intuition into the scope and meaning and consequences of events. Compare, for instance, with Macbeth's picture of old age, Richard's picture of a dethroned king:

I'll give my jewels for a set of beads, My gorgeous palace for a hermitage; My gay apparel for an almsman's gown;

My figured goblets for a dish of wood; My sceptre for a farmer's walking staff,

My subjects for a pair of carved saints;

And my large kingdom for a little grave, &c.

The points in the picture which rouse Richard's emotion, and which he sets cut before us, are all merely superficial; never once does he touch the real heart of the matter. The other noticeable thing is that Richard is much less interested in persons or events than in his feelings about them, and then only in such as are lamentable; and perhaps, it would be true to add, less in the lamentable feelings than in the pathetic language in which they can be expressed. He "hammers out" a simile as though it The National Review.

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THE STUDY OF PLANT LIFE.

The Alps! Amongst fairly well-todo English men and women, are there any whose hearts do not beat a little faster at the word, either in memory of happy days of long ago or anticipation of such to come? The early start, the toil and vicissitudes of the day, the cozy inn, the well-dressed dinner to meet a raging appetite, the social evening, and then those crisp, clean sheets, altogether make it just a luxury to live and move and feel. It is a glorious thing to conquer the Jungfrau, to look down from the summit of Mount Blanc on a subject world of snow and ice and crevasses. These are amongst the things that brace the nerves, harden the sinews, and make the Anglo-Saxons who delight in them a dominant race.

But it is only to the few that this high privilege is given. The vast majority of men, and still more of women, must perforce content themselves with humbler joys, with less boastful conquests. And yet I know not but that the memory of a week at Zermatt, of the like at Mürren, or, to travel south, at Monte Generoso, may not have sweeter memories for these than for the conquerors of peaks.. To this end, however, it is essential that they should have some pursuit which will replace the use of the ice-axe; nor have we much difficulty in determining what this should be for the majority of educated people. Next to its glorious peaks and snowfields, the great beauty of the Alpine chain is its flowers. one who has once seen a field of Gentiana verna in the Engadine in June, or of Primula farinosa in the lowlands about the same time, can ever forget them. To me the memory will ever be green of my first introduction to Androsace carnea. It was high up, with little visible all round but snow.

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projecting rock cropped out of the snow; in a hollow a little soil had accumulated, and this was cushioned with this lovely plant.

Saussure studied geology in the Alps with a purpose, and other men of science have left behind them far-reaching results from researches in the same beautiful mountains; but studies of this kind need a long and laborious previous training. There is, perhaps, nothing that will enable ordinary people, who have neither time nor inclination for deep study, to taste a few drops of the sweets of science with such pleasant accompaniments, as an intelligent study of botany.

The adjective is intentional, and should be emphasized; for there is a large class of persons, chiefly young ladies, who go abroad furnished, at best, with "Wood's Tourist Flora," and a dictionary of botanical terms. Their brothers bring them in large handfuls of flowers from their walks, and they spend laborious evenings identifying these; but to some it never seems to occur that it is worth inquiring as to the function of the stamens which they count so conscientiously; why the blossom of one flower is of gorgeous hue while another is insignificant; why some emit their scent by day and others by night; why one droops its head and another holds it erect; why one is bare in the throat and others covered with hairs; or why in some species these hairs point upwards and in others downwards;-with a hundred similar questions. Nor is it only in the study of botany that such knowledge comes in usefully. How pleasant it must be to the geologist when he comes across a fragment of what once was wood, but, probably millions of years ago, was converted into flint, to be able to tell

at a glance whether the tree of which it was a part belonged to the endogenous or the exogenous order of plants; to that family of which the palms are now the most noted examples, or that to which most of our forest trees belong; and how much such a knowledge may suggest of the natural history of the country at the time, of its climate, its fertility, its fauna!

I humbly apologize! I am afraid that I may be misunderstood as speaking disrespectfully of the young ladies aforesaid. Nothing could be further from my thoughts or intentions. I have spent too many delightful evenings in assisting such investigations with the microscope to speak lightly of them. The object of this paper is, not to discourage botany of this kind, but to suggest to those who practice it how much more delightful their study would be if they would pursue it a little deeper.

Few things could conduce more to this than a previous study of Kerner's most interesting work on "The Natural History of Plants," admirably translated by F. W. Oliver, profusely illustrated (a great help to the beginner), and published in four half volumes, comprising about 1,800 pages. When we learn from him how it is that the instant the snow has melted from a spot, there the Soldanella is found in full bloom we shall look upon its graceful, fringed bells with a quickened interest.

If you ask a class of children what is the essential difference between themselves, as representatives of the animal kingdom, and a cabbage, as representing the vegetable kingdom, you will (at least if the children are Irish, as all my little neighbors are) receive a number of answers more or less intelligent. You will be told that one is alive and the other not; that one can feel, see, hear, taste, smell, and the other not; that one is

capable of locomotion and the other fixed to the soil; or if it be a higher class in a board school, you will probably hear something about exhaling respectively carbonic acid gas and oxygen, or about consuming organic and inorganic matter as food; and yet one and all of these characteristics can be shown to belong to some species only, not to all.

The truth is that there is no clearly defined division between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. It is often difficult, if not impossible, to declare of some that are just on the borderland to which kingdom they belong. The most up-to-date definition is that about food attributed above to the objectionably precocious infant at the head of a board school; and yet how far it is from being a true definition will be seen from the following examples.

To begin with ourselves. We and many other animals make salt, a pure mineral, a constant article of food, while not a few plants are as truly carniverous as a tiger, catching their prey, converting their structure for the time being into a stomach, and digesting the nutritious parts just as we do our dinner. Our bogs and mountains are studded with the attractive little sundew (Drosera rotundifolia and longifolia). From a loose rosette of battledore-shaped leaves rises the panicle of somewhat inconspicuous flowers. The leaves are thickly sprinkled with bright red tentacles, each crowned with a tiny drop of sticky mucilage, which glitters in the sun and gives the plant its name. But woe to the fly that is attracted by its beauty! Once let him light upon it and there is no escape, the mucilage holds him fast. There is a story somewhere of an Englishman who won a large sum at a gambling house in Paris. Unwilling to walk the streets at night with so large a sum about him, he was persuaded to engage a room in a lodging-house next

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