nal contentment of the writer. This is, I suppose, all we must look
for in the case. It is as much as we can expect, if the fabulist shall
prove a shrewd and cheerful fellow-wayfarer, one with whom the world
does not seem to have gone much amiss, but who has yet laughingly
learned something of its evil. It will depend much, of course, upon our
own character and circumstances, whether the encounter will be agreeable
and bracing to the spirits, or offend us as an ill-timed mockery. But
where, as here, there is a little tincture of bitterness along with the
good-nature, where it is plainly not the humour of a man cheerfully
ignorant, but of one who looks on, tolerant and superior and smilingly
attentive, upon the good and bad of our existence, it will go hardly if
we do not catch some reflection of the same spirit to help us on our
way. There is here no impertinent and lying proclamation of peace--none
of the cheap optimism of the well-to-do; what we find here is a view of
life that would be even grievous, were it not enlivened with this
abiding cheerfulness, and ever and anon redeemed by a stroke of pathos.

It is natural enough, I suppose, that we should find wanting in this
book some of the intenser qualities of the author's work; and their
absence is made up for by much happy description after a quieter
fashion. The burst of jubilation over the departure of the snow, which
forms the prelude to "The Thistle," is full of spirit and of pleasant
images. The speech of the forest in "Sans Souci" is inspired by a
beautiful sentiment for nature of the modern sort, and pleases us more,
I think, as poetry should please us, than anything in "Chronicles and
Characters." There are some admirable felicities of expression here and
there; as that of the hill, whose summit

"Did print
The azure air with pines."

Moreover, I do not recollect in the author's former work any symptom of
that sympathetic treatment of still life, which is noticeable now and
again in the fables; and perhaps most noticeably, when he sketches the
burned letters as they hover along the gusty flue, "Thin, sable veils,
wherein a restless spark Yet trembled." But the description is at its
best when the subjects are unpleasant, or even grisly. There are a few
capital lines in this key on the last spasm of the battle before alluded
to. Surely nothing could be better, in its own way, than the fish in
"The Last Cruise of the Arrogant," "the shadowy,