OFF THE SKELLIGS.• "OR off the scent," should have been

added, for no title was ever more deceptive. We hoped for some such exquisite descriptions of the West of Ireland coast scenery from Miss Ingelow's pen as Mr. Black gave us of the West of Scotland in his Daughter of Heth ; but a page or two would include all we hear of the magnificent Skelligs, and a very few more all there is about scenery of any kind. Off the Skelligs is a work in four volumes, and four goodly volumes too, bound, as a book of weight should be, in a handsome and heavy sedate chocolate-brown, picked out with black and gold. Miss Ingelow must be a little out of sympathy with the Archbishop of Canterbury for ordering the prayer for fine weather; not that her book is dry reading by any means, only so long- winded that a good spell of rain is essential to satisfactory pro- gress in the autobiography of the young lady whose journal from the cradle to the grave—of her spinsterhood—this four-voluminous work is. Nothing but such a fortunate sea- son as this would be of any avail; for if the days were not continuously wet, the slight thread which the biographer's own identity supplies for uniting one part of the work with another would be insufficient to recall our interest, and remind us of what had gone before. As it is, when at last we finished the 1,200 pages, the thought of the first volume came back to us after an effort with the mingled sigh and smile with which, in mature years, we recall the far-off days of our infancy, and are almost un- able to believe that they belonged at all to the utterly different being who strives with amused tenderness to call up the memory of that little child he once knew. If we did not know that the work had previously appeared in a magazine, our own opinion, indeed, would have been that Miss Ingelow, looking out at the ceaseless rain, in pity for the inhabitants of this wet world—for modern floods do not render provision unnecessary for all "except eight persons"—and anxious to do her share for their amusement during

Off the Skelligs. By Jean Ingelow. London: Henry S. Sing and 00.

their confinement to the countless arks into which our houses are tuned, had prefixed the first and second volume as the work passed through the press, and expanded the other two. The story, in truth, begins at the end of the second volume, and might with advantage have been compressed into two ; for the two first divisions of the young lady's life, though contain- ing many passages of beauty, form by far too long an intro- duction to the tale, leading up to it with inexcusable prolixity.

We have in the first volume the babyhood of our heroine and her brother—in a minster-close and on a solitary common—which would make a very pleasant story of child-life by itself ; in the second, the sal school-life of the girl and the young woman's in- troduction to the world during a cruise in her uncle's yacht, when they see the Skelligs and a burning ship, and pick up a raft full of people-the heroine-autobiographer's " fate " amongst them ; and in the parts of the third and fourth not devoted to district-visiting in London we have the tale proper,—her love for the two half- brothers, and their unconscious rivalahip. There is no little power scattered over the book, as all who know Miss Ingelow's poems will anticipate, but it requires a ruthless pruning. There is far too much conversation—especially about religion—and too little incident, and this is so even in that part of the story which we have called the tale proper ; the visit to Chartres is too com- pletely episodical ; all the district-visiting and wood-engraving work in London is quite incongruous, and the cruising about, and nursing, and dressing the rescued people and children is so vague and desultory that one does not know where one is in time or space. Then, to all intents and purposes, the first six chapters are, as we have implied already, a separate story. Finally there is a want of artistic foresight in introducing persons of whose adventures we are led to desire a completion, but the remarkable circumstances of whose introduction suffer, instead, an unexpected collapse. Thus the mysterious convict, hiding in the minater-tower, fills no place in the story, nor does the lover of the Squire's daughter, who, in the disguise of a tutor to our heroine and her brother, takes up his residence in the windmill ; and even " Snap " (" Tom " when he grows up), who interests us so much more than his sister as a child, never fulfils the promise of his boyhood, and very early disappears in the obscurity of a bar-parlour, as the infatuated husband of its attendant sylph. Nevertheless, there is, as we have said, a great deal of power and beauty in these volumes, and the impression left by them is of some- thing lively, picturesque, and unique, and it is because there is so much in them that is admirable that we feel so irresistibly impelled to point out their many defects. In the conversations, which are the staple of the book, original thoughts and sentimental theories, and repartee and orthodox proprieties, follow each other so rapidly and on such various subjects, that we find it difficult to say whether admi- ration or disapproval predominates, and any discussion of the opinions propounded on God, death, Christianity, politics, coinage, double-flowers, good spirits, Roman Catholicism, handwritings, classics, emigration, poets and musicians, and a thousand other subjects, is clearly impossible in the space allotted to us. But the most striking and, we may add, unexpected feature in the book is the playful humour that comes out in the character of Valentine, the boy lover, and although we do not deny that his fickleness is essential to the story, and not inconsistent with his light and shallow nature, it would have been pleasanter if the gay and innocent flirta- tion had come either to a happy ending or a natural termination in his death,—for which, with the want of consistency to which we have alluded, we are distinctly prepared—instead of leaving him sullen and unprovided for. The warning which the elder brother gives our heroine not to waste her life on an unrequited affection is managed by our authoress with such consummate skill that it quite deceived us, and it would have done perfectly well to leave Brandon an old bachelor, and Valentine and Dorothea happy in each other's love. It is impossible in an extract to give an idea of the light-spirited, pure- minded, gay, shallow, spoilt, affectionate, handsome Valentine—the creation of the story—but we must give a sample of his amusing rodomontade, of which we never get tired.

Dorothea is leaving them, and he makes a proposal to her in half - earnest, and she laughs at him. Giles is the elder brother :— "Come, I will make you another proposition ; I will be engaged to you, but you shall be free.'—' That is impossible ! An engagement must be a mutual thing.'—'It need not be, that I see. Well, D., a, you are so obliging as to permit it—indeed, I do not see how you can help it, —I hereby record my intention, and my circumstances. I shall have a thousand pounds when Giles has given it to me ; and shortly after I am of age, if he will but let me go to Cambridge, I shall have a Bachelor's degree. Such are my prospects ; I lay them at your feet ; I am an engaged man.'—' Whakfrantic nonsense And you are quite free. Now, don't look so furious—don't, or Giles will see it ! I shall hang four-and- twenty of the best of the portraits of you round my room, and I shall

wear one in eaoh waistcoat pocket. I shall kiss your Greek lexicon every day, and heave up two sighs over the happy past. Dear me, how pleasant it is to be engaged ! We shall correspond, of course? What do you think Giles said to me, this morning ? why that I did not treat the girls who visit us with sufficient respect. That my manner was too jocose and too careless.'—' Did he mention me in particular ?'- 'Yes, Yes, among others. Our beloved Giles has some queer notions as to the deference which is due to ladies, and inseparable from true regard.. He says I am rude sometimes, and also exacting.'—' I quite agree with him.'—' So I told him. I remarked that you had several times made the same observation yourself.'—' And what was his reply ?'—' Oh! a great deal that was not at all to the purpose ; but as I did nothing but laugh, he became furious, and we had a short quarrel, attn. which—'— 'After which you made it up, and shook hands ?' I suggested, for I wanted him to tell me some more.—' Shook hands ?' he repeated, with scorn. 'There was no occasion for that ; in real life men don't quarrel and make it up as they do in books. Scene for the Novel 0 brother of my heart !' he exclaimed, guide of my tender infancy, let not cold disdain or irritating chaff part true spirits.' Then he flung himself on the manly breast of his brother, who strained him to his heart; they wept, and the latter imprinted a fraternal kiss on his ample brow.' Let me see how many years it is since I kissed Giles. Not since he went to New Zealand, I think, and I wouldn't have done it then on any account, if there had been anybody to look on. No we didn't shake hands, but we are all right again."

Except the two brothers and Dorothea and poor Tom, there are- no very interesting characters—for we don't much care for pieces of orthodox perfection like Ann Molten, and think Dorothea was un- precedentedly favoured in not being frightfully robbed by a woman. who, at the first interview with her young mistress, informed her- that "her desire was to work not with eye-service, as pleasing. men, but as to the Lord "—although all to whom the heroine introduces us after she is grown up are natural, with many clever little life-like touches, while those she describes to us as surround- ing her childhood are as shadowy and unreal as those we only knew in very early life always are.

Miss Ingelow's poetic nature is apparent from the beginning, in the avoidance of anything, both in circumstances and scenery, which is common-place, and in dealing only with the picturesque. Thus the children with whom the story opens are preternaturally pre- cocious, thoughtful, and imaginative ; and their surroundings—first an old minster, and then an open heath with only a windmill in sight—nourish these qualities—one young tutor is frightened away by the boy of five informing him, with respect to a language which he and his younger sister had invented, that "she ought to know better than to expect all our verbs to have strong preterites." The incident of the burning ship, off the Skelligs, is another expression of the same tendencies. It is finely told :—

" It was as it seemed but a moment that I had stared out into the mist looking for the boats with still sleepy eyes ; then, as the sailors that were left tramped back to the forepart of the yacht, I turned again. The mist had shaken itself and rolled on before a light air that was coming. I saw two great pathways now lying along the waters,—one was silver white, the pathway of the wan moon, the other was blood- red and angry, and a burning vessel lay at her head. Oh that sight ! can I ever forget it The fire was spurting from every crevice of the black hull, her great mainmast was gone, the mizen mast lay with several great white sails surging about in the water, and she was drag- ging it along with her. The foremast only stood, and its rigging and sails had not yet caught. A dead silence had succeeded now to the commotion in the vessel: men were standing stock still, perhaps wait- ing for their orders, and my uncle's were the only eyes that were not strained to follow the leaping and dazzling spires. I never saw anything like the horrible beauty of that red light. It added ten- fold to the terror of the scone to see her coming on so majestically, dragging with her broken spars and great yards and sprawling sails_ She looked like some splendid live creature in distress, and rocked now a good deal in the water, for every moment the wind seemed to rise, bringing up a long swell with it. The moon went down, and in a few- minutes the majestic ship supplied all the light to the dark sky and black water. I saw the two little dark boats nearing her, knew that my brother was in the foremost, and shook with fear, and cried to God to take care of him; but while I and all gazed in awful silence on the sailing ship, the flames, bursting through the deck in a new place, climbed up the fore rigging, and in one single leap, as if they had been living things, they were licking the sails off the ropes, and shooting higher than her topsails, they spread themselves out like quivering fans. I saw every sail that was left in an instant bathed in flames ; a second burst came raging up from below, blackening and shrivelling everything before it ; then I saw the weltering fire run down again, and still the wreck, plunging her bows in the water, came rocking on

and on The black water took in and quenched all that blazing

tophamper, and still the awful hissing was audible, till suddenly, as we seemed to be sheering off from her, there was a thunderous roll that

sounded like the breaking of her mighty heart, and still glorious in beauty she plunged head foremost, and went down blazing into the desolate sea. In one instant that raging glow and all the fierce illumination of the fire was gone, darkness had settled on the face of the deep. I saw a few lighted spars floating about, that was all ; and I smelt the fire and felt the hot smoke rushing past my face as the only evidence that this was not a dream."

But this would not be a fair criticism if it made no allusion to the passages—of which there are so many in Miss Ingelow's poems— in which true sentiment is marred by a little wire-drawing. Here is an illustration, in a passage from which we gain a vague

but delicious sense of the beauty of night in the islands of the tropics, but the effect of which is somewhat injured by elaboration :

"We fluttered about here and there, from continent to island ; we treated all with great respect ; it did not belong to us who lived on the edge and upper fringes of the earth, and there was danger in the beauty, and beauty in the danger. Then it was that after awhile I began to be sure that the world was yet young ; she was a wild thing that God and His Time had only half tamed ; and sometimes by day and always by night, I derived from her ways and the sleep that was on her a con- sciousness of her life as a whole. For after sunset, till about midnight, it would often seem that she was slumbering while yet everything on her that had life was restless and stirred, and came out to drink ; and they called and cried to one another and to their Maker (for they are not so unconscious of God as men are,—at least it has long appeared so to me,—but they do not love Him as many of us do), and some of them seemed to cry to Him defiantly, and others grumbled and com- plained. Then about the dead middle of the night, in some parts of the tropical zones, but not in all, there would come a pause, as if the living creatures were appeased and at rest, and thereupon the dark beautiful world would wake up, and while the stars in their courses made it plain to me how fast she was rolling, a sort of murmur would sound, whether from within and sent up from her mighty heart, or from without and borne by the multitudes of the waves, I cannot tell ; but it is not to be forgotten when once it has been hoard, and it seemed like a message sent up into the heaven to remind her Maker how he had held her in hand very long, and sent her on very fast, and she was not wearied, but altogether amazed, at the greatness of the way. I was so strangely impressed with these sensations, that I often came up in the night, and sometimes Tom—who saw how awful and tender the night-time seemed to me—would call me when there was anything more than usually beautiful to be seen. It was always the same; there was a message, and it was going up to God. Sometimes when I slept after such a midnight watching, I have dreamed that I hoard an answer, "It was not long, it was only a very little while that she had rolled. It was not far,—but a very little way."

But we have overpassed our limits without having said nearly all we have to say, both of faults and beauties, and have only room to suggest to Miss Ingelow to master the perfecto and participles of the verbs "to ring," "to sing," "to sink," and the like, and the difference between the transitive and intransitive verbs "to wake." In some parts of these volumes the correction of the press has been unusually careless.