rising. The power of
conservatism perishes, when there is no longer anything to keep; the
might of radicalism overflows into excess, when the proper check is
taken away or degraded. So long as the noble is noble and "_noblesse
oblige_," so long as Church and State are true to their guiding and
governing duties, the elevation of the base is the elevation of the
whole. If the standards of what is truly aristocratic in our language
are standards of nobility of thought, they will endure and draw up to
them, on to the episcopal thrones and into the Upper House of letters,
all that is most worthy. Whatever makes the nation's life will make its
speech. War was once the career of the Norman, and he set the seal of
its language upon poetry. Agriculture was the Saxon's calling, and he
made literature a mirror of the life he led. We in this new land are
born to new heritages, and the terms of our new life must be used to
tell our story. The Herald's College gives precedence to the
Patent-Office, and the shepherd's pipe to the steam-whistle. And since
all literature which can live stands only upon the national speech, we
must look for our hopes of coming epics and immortal dramas to the
language of the land, to its idioms, in which its present soul abides
and breathes, and not to its classicalities, which are the empty shells
upon its barren sea-shore.

MIDSUMMER AND MAY.

[Continued.]

II.

When Miss Kent, the maternal great-aunt of Mr. Raleigh, devised her
property, the will might possibly have been set aside as that of a
monomaniac, but for the fact that he cared too little about anything to
go to law for it, and for the still more important fact that the
heirs-at-law were sufficiently numerous to ingulf the whole property and
leave no ripple to attest its submerged existence, had he done so; and
on deserting it, he was better pleased to enrich the playfellow of his
childhood than a host of unknown and unloved individuals. I cannot say
that he did not more than once regret what he had lost: he was not of a
self-denying nature, as we know; on the contrary, luxurious and
accustomed to all those delights of life generally to be procured only
through wealth. But, for all that, there had been intervals, ere his
thirteen years' exile ended, in which, so far from regret, he
experienced a certain joy at remembrance of this rough and rugged point
of time where he had escaped from the chrysalid state to one of action
and freedom