That morrow came, and with it came the usual preparations for performing the last rites over the remains of our little fellow traveller. Captain Hamilton read the service, and during the progress of it I observed more than one hand drawn hastily across an eye from which nothing but the strongest feeling of sorrow could possibly wring a tear. "We commit the body of our dearly beloved brother to the deep." The words were little more than uttered, when a slight plunge was heard; a few bubbles floated for an instant on ths surface of the water, typical, I thought at the moment, of the brief career of him who had caused them; and all that remained of our little friend lay many fathoms deep beneath the blue waves of the ocean. The dog Lascar, with extended feet, gazed wistfully for a few seconds on the water, whining piteously, and was only prevented from jumping in after his lost playmate by one of the sailors, who held him by the collar.

I ventured at this moment to look up at Mrs. Edwards. She stood pale, motionless, and silent: not a tear or sigh, not a word or groan: but with eyes fixed on the spot where the body of her child had disappeared, she stood more like a figure cut in marble than any thing of flesh and blood. It was some minutes ere any one attempted to disturb her reverie, or offer a word of consolation, and when they did so, she only answered with a faint smile, and turned away.

In less than a month afterwards, we had the same mournful ceremony to perform over her own remains. The poor sufferer's heart was literally crushed-broken.

ROBERT IRVING.

TIME-HONOURED THINGS.

Written after having read, in the work of an American writer an expression of regret that America contained none of the "time-honoured things" that rendered England venerable.

ESTHETICAL CRITICISM.

BY THE EDITOR.

WHATEVER tells upon the human heart and modifies the human character cannot but be worthy of our notice. Whatever one man has looked upon as true, that, though it were scouted before, has henceforth a claim on every heart, and an utterance, that, to the best of his ability, every one should seek to understand. The shapeless block of wood that I, in the sunshine, may look upon with indifference or scorn, my brother, living in the dark corners of the earth, may view as the very personification of his idea of God; it may be to him the symbol and outward sign of the highest majesty and might, and as such he may gaze on it with wonder, and approach and worship it with awe; and I have not the feelings of a man, if I can pass it, and look upon it as I should look upon a common block.

In the wild, and bleak, and mountain fastnesses of Scandinavia arose a religion as wild as her wildest glens, as uncouth and shapeless as her ice-bound and rudest rocks. A religion that told how the cow Audrumbla, the symbol of the atmosphere, licked the earth in its chaos state, or the giant Ymir; and how Bur was born, that is, how the earth emerged from the sea, how his children, Odin, Viel, and Ve, air, light, and fire, put an end to the chaos; or, in the language of the northern cosmogony, slew the giant Ymir,-how his blood made the sea, his flesh the earth, his bones the mountains, his teeth the rocks, and his brains the clouds,— how the tree of human life sprang up and grew. How there are agencies that defy the power and pride of man, giant destinies against which the human will is powerless as water spilled upon the ground, is symbolized in the prose Edda, by the fate of Thor and his companion Loki; where we read, how, when Loki in the contest eat all the flesh, Logi, or devouring flame, eat bones and all,—how Hijalfi ran a race, and was beaten by the dwarf Hugi, or thought,-how Thor endeavoured to empty the drinking horn, but in vain, for it was the ocean that baffled him,-how he wrestled with an aged and decrepid dame named Hela, but was beaten by her, for Hela was death. Why, all this mysterious yet graphic personification of the elements of nature, this witnessing the Godhead

in everything strange and wonderful around, the Norseman standing upon the mountain ridge and believing himself standing upon the bones of the giant Ynin, was the Norseman's best and fairest theory of the beautiful and divine. It was his best, and what more can the sternest of us require? It was nursed in a land of snow and storm, of mountain and of mountain mists, and has an earnestness and sincerity about it which the more graceful mythologies of Greece and Rome had not,

"Wild the Runic faith,

And wild the realms where Scandinavian chiefs

And Skalds arose; and hence the Skald's strong verse
Partook the savage wildness."

SOUTHEY.

Next to a man's theory of the divine is his theory of the beautiful, and the latter depends much upon the former, in an age when a man believes not in divinity, when rites are forms, and religion is a lie-there is a tone of heartlessness and flippancy tainting the thought of the age, or man and the literature in which that thought is embodied. Witness Voltaire and his criticisms on Shakspeare and Addison,-his preference of Cato, and its inanities, to those splendid achievements of human genius which have rendered familiar as household words the ambition of Macbeth, the unhinged, yet busy mind of Denmark's royal son,-the love, strong as death, of a Juliet and Romeo,-the tragic tale of Othello, and the sorrows of King Lear. Witness much of the French drama. Witness the age of the Restoration, when Dryden remodelled and popularized Milton, and Sir William Davenant, in an age of play-going and play-writing, selected and re-cast the Tempest, in the form of an opera. Witness the age that was startled from its sleep by the fervent zeal that made Methodist and enthusiast for the first time, synonymous terms; when Whitfield and Wesley lit up with the truth the darkest corners of our land; when Mason and Hayley, and Warton and West, were looked upon as models of perfection; when prose had sunk into the art of writing correctly, and saying nothing all the while, and verse, while it showed that the writer was a tolerable grammarian, knew something of geography and history, had the names of the three graces and nine muses by heart, yet wanted the "vision and the faculty divine," without which no man may wear the poet's worldhonoured name.

We shall find that true criticism and true feeling go hand in hand; that they are both effects of the same cause, and always co-exist; that as grammar, in its highest and proper sense, is right reason, so æsthetical criticism is right feeling; that it is the heart bowing to the beautiful, however that beautiful may be expressed: whether it may be wrapped in rant, as in Marlowe's Tamerlane;

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