All these political regrets and doubts, however, cannot lessen or affect our interest in those ingenious, subtle, and delicate speculations which Mr. Greg called _Enigmas of Life_. Though his _Creed of Christendom_ may have made a more definite and recognisable mark, the later book rapidly fell in with the needs of many minds, stirred much controversy of a useful and harmonious kind, and attracted serious curiosity to a wider variety of problems. It is at this moment in its fifteenth edition. The chapters on Malthus and on the Non-Survival of the Fittest make a very genuine and original contribution to modern thought. But it is the later essays in the little volume that touched most readers, and will for long continue to touch them. They are as far as possible from being vague, or misty, or aimless. Yet they have, what is so curiously rare in English literature, the charm of reverie. As the author said, they 'contain rather suggested thoughts that may fructify in other minds than distinct propositions which it is sought argumentatively to prove.' They have the ever seductive note of meditation and inwardness, which, when it sounds true, as it assuredly did here, moves the spirit like a divine music. There is none of the thunder of Carlyle (which, for that matter, one may easily come in time to find prodigiously useless and unedifying); there is not the piercing concentrated ray of Emerson: but the complaints, the misgivings, the aspirations of our generation find in certain pages of Mr. Greg's book a voice of mingled fervour and _recueillement_, a union of contemplative reason with spiritual sensibility, which makes them one of the best expressions of one of the highest moods of this bewildered time. They are in the true key for religious or spiritual composition, as Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar is; thought and emotion are fused without the decorations of misplaced rhetoric. That meditations so stamped with sincerity, and so honestly directed to the actual perplexities of thoughtful people, should have met with wide and grateful acceptance, is no more than might have been expected. Least of all can their fine qualities be underrated even by those who, like the present writer, believe that, ponder these great enigmas as we may, we shall never get beyond Goethe's majestic psalm:-- Edel sey der Mensch, Huelfreich und gut! Denn das allein Unterscheidet ihn Von allen Wesen Die wir kennen.... Denn unfuehlend Ist die Natur: Es leuchtet die Sonne Ueber Boes' und Gute, Und dem Verbrecher Glaenzen, wie dem Besten, Der Mond und die Sterne.... Nach ewigen, ehrnen Grossen Gesetzen Muessen wir alle Unseres Daseyns Kreise vollenden. Nur allein der Mensch Vermag das Unmoegliche; Er unterscheidet Waehlet und richtet Er kann dem Augenblick Dauer verleihen. End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3), by John Morley