promptings of instinct to the highest exercise of reason,--from apes and baboons to Bacons and Newtons. The blind lead the blind;--the unseeing law operates on the unperceiving creatures; and they go, not together into the ditch, but direct onwards, straight as an arrow, and higher and higher at every step. Another class look with profound melancholy on that great city of the dead,--the burial-place of all that ever lived in the past,--which occupies with its ever-extending pavements of gravestones, and its ever-lengthening streets of tombs and sepulchres, every region opened up by the geologist. They see the onward procession of being as if but tipped with life, and nought but inanimate carcasses all behind,--dead individuals, dead species, dead genera, dead creations,--a universe of death; and ask whether the same annihilation which overtook in turn all the races of all the past, shall not one day overtake our own race also, and a time come when men and their works shall have no existence save as stone-pervaded fossils locked up in the rock forever? Nowhere do we find the doubts and fears of this class more admirably portrayed than in the works of perhaps the most thoughtful and suggestive of living poets:-- "Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams, So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life? 'So careful of the type!' but no, From scarped cliff and quarried stone, She cries, 'A thousand types are gone; I care for nothing; all shall go: Thou makest thine appeal to me; I bring to life, I bring to death; The spirit does but mean the breath. I know no more.' And he,--shall he, Man, her last work, who seemed so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies And built him fanes of fruitless prayer, Who trusted God was love indeed, And love creation's final law, Though Nature, red in tooth and claw, With ravine shrieked against his creed,-- Who loved, who suffered countless ills, Who battled for the true, the just,-- Be blown about the desert dust, Or sealed within the iron hills? No more!--a monster then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime, That tore each other in their slime, Were mellow music matched with him. O, life, as futile then as frail,-- O for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer or redress, Behind the vail, behind the vail!"