and middle-class wedding gifts of the order that professional incomes
can afford for first cousins or intimate friends. Even babas of literary inventiveness are no help in the matter. The most fertile mind sinks into a fatal stupor when that impending wedding present occurs to it, and relapses into the old inexorable fate of a silver or mother-of-pearl butter knife, just as the bird falls into the serpent's fangs. Which of us has not felt the shudder of ghastly gratitude with which we strive to acknowledge the tenth butter-knife pressed upon us by the friend who, after waiting till the latest possible moment had come, and found him nearly a maniac of travailing fancy, rushes to the nearest silver- smith's, and succumbs to the spell which binds paralyzed imagi- nation? In a more opulent sphere of life, we believe, dials occupy the same position, and we have beard of one gentleman who smiled his sickly acknowledgments of his twelfth clock on the morning of his marriage. Then there are people who, determined to be original, and weakly imagining that bronzes are original, stun the senses and darken the air of early happiness with bronze groups of gods or graces ; and others who try to shadow forth their conception of the gorgeousness of the occasion in papier smoke inkstands elaborately adorned with gilt and blue. Then those who invest in books will give you illustrated poets, gorgeously bound, in a size impossible to read, or worse still,, selections from the poets, imbecilely termed "The Home Affections," or "The Heart's Garland," or encumbered with other titles that turn the stomach, and make us register a solemn vow never to open the work after the note of thanks is written.
Miss Faithful! has saved many an endangered intellect for the present year, by this magnificently printed and papered volume of original pieces, intended to welcome the Princess Alexandra. In the first place, as it has been given to the Princess of Wales, there will be a sense of royalty about re- ceiving it, which will be something. Then it is outwardly and inwardly gorgeous, which is considered to be a sine qua non of wedding presents. Then it is new and discussable, which is a great matter when the wedding calls begin. There is a sense of oppressive effort in attempting nowa- days to converse upon Rogers's Italy, even though Turner's illustrations be appended to it ; and as to "The Home Affections," why you have hid it carefully away. But a book that contains Mr. Trollope's newest tale, and that, too, an American tale ; which has got in it French bon mots from M. Louis Blanc, that has one of Mr. Mamice's finest and most characteristic essays, which might lead to discussion of "Essays and Reviews," and Mr. Jowett, and Bishop Colenso, and Church principles in general; and contributions from some twenty other well-known authors, legitimately abusable, if not legitimately praisable,—such a book is almost worth a guinea, even if no one has given it to you, to converse about on these embarrassing occasions. It will have, and deserves to have, a great run as a wedding present, for Miss Faithfull's own work is magnificently done, and rivals the best specimens of masculine printing. And as for the intellectual interior the good element is quite sufficiently good to give the book a real value, while such trash as there is proceeds from that peculiar kind of intellectual inanity, the filigree of embossed gratulatory sentiment, into which weddings have a special tendency to throw human nature all the world over.
Mr. Trollope'e story, "Miss Ophelia Gledd," is quite the best of all his minor performances. It is, we think, the first time that he has ventured seriously into the great world of American manners, and he does so with subtlety, kindliness, and skill. The ques- tion he puts before his readers and tries to enable them to consider for themselves, is whether or not Miss Ophelia Gledd, after her marriage with a rather aristocratic Englishman, will be received cordially into her husband's English circle. For our own part we have no doubt that she will. There wilt be a social tremor and vibration at first,. but the intrinsic simplicity and delicacx of Miss Gledd's (we should say Mrs. Pryor's) character will soon be discovered, and we are inclined to think she may then even become, for a time, the rage. Mr. George Macdonald contributes to this volume verses of a musical beauty, tenderness, and simplicity much above the level of his verses in the "Lancashire Offering." Miss Craig is not quite up to her former mark, but the lines called "March Violets" exhibit that genuinely warm and wax-like impressibility of feeling which Scotch poetry, when at all good, almost always shows in such curious contrast to the hard fibre of the Scotch understanding. Mrs. S. C. Hall's Irish contribution has the real humour which her Irish tales almost always have, and
• which her English always want. Mr. Sydney Dobell contributes
twenty pages of the article peculiar to his literary individuality, —sickly and nerveless verses, which, as a whole, "no fellow can read or understand," but interspersed with lines of rare beauty and expressiveness, which affect us like a living and beautiful blossom amongst a bunch of artificial flowers,—as, for example, the following description of a landscape growing into the light of dawn :—
"But this once thou shalt not stay To mark the forming earth, and how Far and near in equal grey
Of growing dawn, thy well-known land
Now to the strained gaze appears The nebulous umbrage of itself ; and now, Ere one can say this or this, Divides upon the sense into the world that is, As the slow suffusion that doth fill
Tender eyes with soft uncertainties,
Suddenly, we know not when, Shapes to tears we understand."
The finest gleam of poetry in the volume is the grim melan- choly of Mr. Rossetti's sonnet on "Lost Days," one of genuine power :— " The lost days of my life until to-day, What were they, could I see them on the street Lie as they fell ? Would they be ears of wheat Sown once for food, but trodden into clay ? Or golden coins squandered and still to pay? Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet ? Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat The throats of men in hell who thirst slimy? I do not see them here ; but after death God knows I know the faces I shall see, • Each one a murdered self with low last breath :- 'lam am thyself, what has thou done to use And I—and I—thyself ' (lo ! each oae saith) 'And thou thyself to all eternity.' " That is true poetry, though of the proud, egotistic, despondent school,—to which the broad Christian 'philosophy brought out in the very fine essay of Mr. Maurice, teaching us not to harp quite so much on that unhappy little individual ego which is at the root of almost all human despair, stands out in fine relief. The Princess of Wales must not take the average of this volume as the highest type of our modern literature ; but she will find enough that is fine in it to prize highly for its own sake, as well as for the occasion on which she received and the feeling which inspired it.
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