ed up at the sound of wheels, and their eyes encountered. A bright flush passed over her pale cheek, as she gave Vernon a half smile of recognition, and quietly resumed her occupation of tying up a tall lily, her face shaded by a large bonnet from farther observation. Lady Octavia took another deliberate survey of Miss Aboyne through her eye-glass, and having so far satisfied her curiosity, continued, in a careless, half-absent manner-“Oh! a friend of yours, you said, Mr. Vernon!-this person's father-I beg your pardon though she looks really very respectable, poor thing!-quite interesting in that deep mourning. Of course, as you know her, she is not a low person-some Colonel's daughter though, you said, I think? and is he lately dead? and does she live all alone in that pretty cottage? How excessively romantic! and it does not signify for that sort of person, at her age, you know. I suppose she is very poor-some half pay officer's daughter ?" Vernon stammered something, not very intelligible, in reply to Lady Octavia's half question, half soliloquy; but her Ladyship talked on, apparently heedless of his conscious, embarrassed manner. "Do you know, Mr. Vernon, that my maid is a half-pay officer's daughter really a very superior sort of person is Jenkins. Why does not this Miss-I forget her name-go out in some such capacity or as a governess ?-you know, she might get into some family as governess." Vernon's latent spirit and real affection for Millicent being somewhat roused by these annoying comments and interrogations, he was just about to speak more plainly, and would probably have silenced Lady Octavia's voluble malice, by the simple avowal of the relation in which he stood to Miss Aboyne, when her Ladyship, who guessed the coming confession, which it was by no means her intention to draw forth, adroitly diverted her observations from Miss

Aboyne to the surrounding scenery; and before they had well lost sight of Sea Vale, Vernon's spirited impulse had subsided, and he was again engrossed by Lady Octavia, and the gratification of being so graciously distinguished by the high-born beauty. But Lady Octavia's shafts had not glanced harmless; more than one point remained rankling in the mark; and with the next disengaged hour and thought of Millicent, came hitherto unformed reflections on the lingering lot of poverty and obscurity to which they were possibly about to devote themselves, and an involuntary comparison between their ages for the first time occurred to him, in a light that made him wish the difference had been reversed, and that he could count those three years in advance of Millicent. But his better feelings caused him to check, almost as soon as conceived, thoughts that were now as illtimed as ungenerous towards that gentle and confiding being, the most sincere and lowly-minded of all God's creatures, who had been long beforehand with him in regretting, for his sake, her seniority of age, and had not shrunk from commenting on it to himself, with characteristic ingenuousness; for she felt, though he would not acknowledge it, that her prime was already past, while he had barely attained the full flush of maturity. But Millicent's self-depreciation was wholly untinctured with any jealous doubt of Vernon's true affection for her, and indifference to the more youthful attractions of other women; and as he passed the cottage with his beautiful companion, if a sudden and natural comparison presented itself between the blooming loveliness of the latter, and her own more humble pretensions, it was only accompanied by a wish-a woman's fond, weak wish-that, for his sake, she were younger, and fairer, and every way more deserving of the love, of which, however, she apprehended no diminution.

The clouds, the clouds! in the star-lit sky, How they fly on the light wind's wings! Now resting an instant, then glancing by, In their fickle wanderings:

Now they hide the deep blue firmament, Now it shows their folds between,

As if a silver veil were rent

From the jewell'd brow of a queen.

forms

With every passing breath,—
And now a glancing sunbeam warms,
And now they look cold as death.
Oh! often and often have I escaped
From the stir of the noisy crowd,
And a thousand fanciful visions shaped
On the face of a passing cloud!

The clouds, the clouds! round the sun at night

They come like a band of slaves,

That never will grow cold:

And the love of nature is one of these That Time's wave never shrouds, And oft and oft doth my soul find peace In watching the passing clouds.

[In the last number of the Atheneum we referred to the opinion of an English writer on the proposed plan of ornamenting the Waverley Novels with engravings. The following are his remarks on book-engravings in general.]

THE business of a book-engraving, in general, we take to be this: it is meant to serve the purpose of introducing a salutary fretfulness and disagreement into the intercourse of author and reader. If the reader of an "illustrated" volume is so imprudent as to frame for himself, from the hints of the writer, a vivid picture of a man or an occurrence, let him but look to the frontispiece, and we will bet all Mr. Westall's designs to the dullest of Cruikshank's scratchings, that he will cry to sleep again, he will find a London school-miss instead of Miranda, or a Prospero evidently imitated from that great conjuror, Mr. Cobbett.

A book-engraving, above all other engines, is powerful to stuff out the insignificant, and degrade the lofty, to change what is universal, as containing more life than anything else, into that which is common-place, as containing less. It renders the individual and peculiar, general and indiscriminate. It has the true art of mutations to change peasants into stageplayers, and gentlemen into clowns. It makes Don Quixote what all his madness could not make him, vulgar and contemptible; it gives us, for the Duke and Duchess, the Duke and Duchess of St. Albans, and plunders Sancho's face of all its proverb-honored wisdom. How many a gay creature of the element has a book-engraving changed into a Caliban! How many a band of heroes hath it, like Comus, converted into swine! How many a fair lady of song hath it smitten, in the turning of a page, with le

prosy, and deformed with affectation. The burin is the true Ithuriel's spear to give us fiends for angels; it is the real sword of war, which desolates fair landscapes into wildernesses. At its touch the butterflies of poetry grow back to grubs. Egyptian-like, it seats its skeletons beside its gay and revelling thoughts, and mocks us with the contrast. It takes us from the pleasant gardens and the stately chambers of the fancy to a region of shadows and monsters; and a bookseller stands warder at the gate, and tells us, forsooth, that we must pay for admittance. Thank Heaven! there are cheap and unillustrated editions of Shakspeare. We are not always compelled to put up with a coal-heaver instead of Orlando, and be content to think Beatrice a hoyden; or, rather, those resplendent beings are not all doomed to be always followed by the grimaces and screamings of the apes and peacocks from the engraver's Tarshish. We are sometimes allowed to read Homer without being told that a facsimile of Thersites is a portrait of Achilles; and to see Nausicaa at the river in another likeness than that of a modern washer-woman. Praise be to the Bible Society, praise to the folios of our fathers, that there are Bibles without engravings; that we still think of Moses pointing to the brazen serpent, as somewhat different in look and bearing from a showman at the Tower; and that we yet conceive the form of Christ as rather that of a carpenter than a Saviour.

There are many persons, no doubt, who would derive no image whatever of an author's meaning from his writings; and for these we suppose it is that book-engravings are peculiarly intended. And in these cases, undoubtedly, they are generally such as exhibit a wise adaption of means to ends. Minds that can make to themselves, by the aid of books, no notion of anything that is in nature, are very fit to be entertained by sketches of what is completely unnatural. We would suggest, that even for such people it is needless to connect the pic

ture with the book, as a volume is rather a clumsy frame for a copper-plate. But for this class of readers the greatest possible difference between the author's mind and the artist's is of no importance whatever. If, indeed, they could suspect for a moment that there is a similarity of intention between the author's mind and the artist's, the consequence would be a troublesome and futile attempt to trace out the connection, and a great deal of time would be vainly wasted in an enterprise which from the first would, for the greater part of the "reading public," be absolutely desperate. But there is in truth no such danger. And in this point of view we have always particularly admired "Boydell's Shakspeare Gallery," which exhibits on a large scale the forms and gestures of certain fantastic beings as amusing as the fantoccini, or the dancing dogs, or learned cats; and whose identity with the "fine spirits" of the poet will never for an instant be questioned by our unsuspicious public.

There are, undoubtedly, artists of powers equal to those of any writers whom they might think fit to illustrate. When Wilkie is in question, it may seem strange to say that we object to all designs from passages in wellknown books; yet we do dislike such attempts, even when made by men of genius, as we should dislike to see in a poem a stanza by a different hand from that of the author; and still more if the stanza were a paraphrase of something gone before, with all the diversity of conception and expression which it would necessarily derive from the genius of its maker. A man of genius cannot by possibility reproduce with a mere difference of form, the thoughts of another man, and will always either introduce some evidences of original thought, which will prevent the illustration from being what a book-illustration ought to be, or (if he be guided by some temporary and external consideration, instead of the inherent laws of his own genius) he will attend to nothing but the details, which he will very probably represent even

more ineffectually than a meaner man, who could never look beyond them; and, when we were dealing in one page with a living being, we shall find in the next, as an "illustration" to assist us in our conception of it, a ghastly and lifeless mummy.

This reasoning will probably be met with examples of cases in which books have been successfully illustrated by engravings. The most celebrated of our day are those of the designs by Retsch, Flaxman, and, perhaps, Pinelli. The works of the last, which are less known in this country than those of the two former, supply a good instance for our purpose. Let any one compare Pinelli's larger designs from some of the Italian poets with the very smallest and most careless of his drawings of peasants and banditti, and he must at once see the difference in spirit, ease, expression, composition, even accuracy of drawing, between the scratchy span of paper on which a man of high talent has created for himself, and the more elaborate exhibitions of ill-made heroes and awkward heroines, into whom a copyist has attempted to transfuse that spirit which cannot be imbibed from its living original by a dead imitation. It is useless to collect with so much care the bones and ashes. They are a poor consolation to the mourner for the life he loved. But how much vainer and more foolish is it, when we are walking in amaranthine gardens, among the disembodied essences of poetry, to mock us with the funeral urn, which is of the earth earthy, and contains only dust and relics.

Retsch and Flaxman are perhaps somewhat more difficult to dispose of than Pinelli. And here we must remark that, condemning, as we do, the practice of binding up engravings, and poems or novels, together; asserting, as we do, that the practice will almost always lead to the junction of the living with the dead body, or of the real man and his wraith, or of dissimilar men in a case in which no difference is endurable, and that the being of the

When

poet will scarcely ever have a satisfactory double in the being of the artist, we are yet not called upon to show that subjects taken from fictitious compositions are not very proper for painting. It is the jaxta-position which we chiefly complain of. we read a fine poem, and afterwards see a fine painting of the same subject, each is to us a separate creation. Tie them together, and attempt to persuade us that they relate not only to people of the same names and in the same circumstances, but to the same individual men and women, and you are forced to abstract whatever is substantial and characteristic in the one work of art or the other, to consider it as a mere shadow of its prototype; or else we revolt against the whole proceeding, will not believe that opposites are identical, and have our impression of the reality of both weakened by the vain pretence on which it has been sought to subjugate us. Looking at the illustration of “Faustus" this week, having read the poem of "Faustus" last week, we are content to see in the former a beautiful story beautifully told; but, in so far as our conception of the poet's meaning is broken in upon by the images received from the engravings, (except as regards one or two points,) we are pained and fretted by the interference.

It is indeed very possible, that, in some cases, a great painter may completely express, in lines and colors, the conception of a great poet; though it has very seldom been done in the noblest pictures of scriptural subjects. But, if it were done ever so completely, how many persons are there whose minds are so evenly cultivated, that they would receive the same impression from the two works of art ? Probably not ten in England. And, though it be true that if, regarded separately, it is probable each would make a deep effect, yet, unless those effects were precisely correspondent, the evil of having the poem and the drawing on the same page would very much outweigh the good.