he saw the worlds a-forming,--earth, sun, and stars. Emerson (or "Sayd") takes Milton at his word, and leads us back into that dark backward and abysm of time, and lets us overhear a conversation between Uriel and the other seraphs. At his speech "the gods shook," because if there is no sin, if all comes round to good, even a lie, then good-bye gods, hells and heavens, and their punishments. But note that, though the All turns your wrong to good in the end, yet you, an individual, suffer for your wrongdoing. In a genial paper in the _Andover Review_ for March, 1887, Dr. C. C. Everett says that Dr. Hedge suggested to him that 'Uriel' probably took its origin in the discussions of the Boston Association of Ministers on the theme (then rife), "There is no line in nature": all is circular, and by the law of reaction every deed returns upon the doer. At any rate, it was written in 1838, soon after his Divinity School Address. ('Emerson in Concord,' by Edward Emerson.) The god of boundaries in ancient Rome--Terminus--gives his name to the cheeriest of monodies or anchoring songs sung by the gayest of old sailors on the sea of eternity, and at last approaching port. Terminus, like Hermes, the Greek god of bounds, was shown in his statues without hands or feet, to indicate that he never moved. Was Emerson a little rusty in his classical lore, or did he boldly and knowingly defy classical verities when he says the divinity came to him "in his fatal rounds"? He seems to have attributed to Terminus patrolling functions like those of his own New England village fence-viewers. Or, rather, speaking in noble and more adequate terms, has he not added to the world's mythologies a new and poetical deity,--the god of the bounds of human life, a kind of avant-courier or Death's dragoman to announce to men their approaching end? 'Terminus' was written about 1866, when Emerson was in or near his sixty-third year, and sixteen years before his death. _William Sloane Kennedy._ * * * * * A DEFENCE OF BROWNING'S LATER WORK. If a defence of Browning's work were to include all he has written since the date when Edmund Gosse said his books were chiefly valuable as keeping alive popular interest in the poet, and as leading fresh generations of readers to what he had already published, it would needs begin as far back as 1868; and considering the amount of work done since that time would require at least a volume to do the subject justice. Fortunately it has long been admitted that Homer sometimes nods, though not with such awful effect as was said to attend the nods of Jove--Hence, in spite of Mr. Gosse's undoubted eminence as a critic, we may dare to assume that in this particular instance he fell into the ancient and distinguished trick of nodding.