Yes; the "kind of anticipation" through which Joanna Baillie conceived and wrote her noble tragedies. Where did she, whose life was pure and "retired as noontide dew," find the dark, stern, terrible elements, out of which she framed the delineations of character and passion in De Montfort, Ethwald, Basil, Constantine?--where but in her own prophetic heart and genius?--in that intuitive, almost unconscious revelation of the universal nature, which makes the poet, and not experience or knowledge. Joanna Baillie, whose most tender and refined, and womanly and christian spirit never, I believe, admitted an ungentle thought of any living being, created De Montfort, and gave us the physiology of Hatred; and might well, like Goethe, stand astonished at the truth of her own delineation. * * * * * LITERARY WOMEN. Rehbein once observed to Goethe "that the women who had distinguished themselves in literature, poetry especially, were almost universally women who had been disappointed in their best affections, and sought in this direction of the intellect a sort of compensation. When women are married, and have children to take care of, they do not often think of writing poetry." This is not very politely or delicately expressed; but we must not therefore shrink from it, for it involves some important considerations. It is most certain that among the women who have been distinguished in literature, three-fourths have been either by nature, or fate, or the law of society, placed in a painful or a false position; it is also most certain that in these days when society is becoming every day more artificial and more complex, and marriage, as the gentlemen assure us, more and more expensive, hazardous, and inexpedient, women _must_ find means to fill up the void of existence. Men, our natural protectors, our lawgivers, our masters, throw us upon our own resources; the qualities which they pretend to admire in us,--the overflowing, the clinging affections of a warm heart--the household devotion,--the submissive wish to please, that feels "every vanity in fondness lost,"--the tender shrinking sensitiveness which Adam thought so charming in his Eve,--to cultivate these, to make them, by artificial means, the staple of the womanly character, is it not to cultivate a taste for sunshine and roses, in those we send to pass their lives in the arctic zone? We have gone away from nature, and we must--if we can--substitute another nature. Art, literature, and science remain to us. Religion, which formerly opened the doors of nunneries and convents to forlorn women, now mingling her beautiful and soothing influence with resources which the prejudices of the world have yet left open to us, teaches us another lesson, that only in utility, such as is left to us,--only in the assiduous employment of such faculties as we are permitted to exercise, can we find health and peace, and compensation for the wasted or