to grow upon their regards; and
meanwhile conclude with the following exquisite landscape,--no bad
specimen of that ability of word-painting which is ever so certain a
mark of the true poet:--

'Below me spread a wide and lonely beach,
The ripple washing higher on the sands:
A river that has come from far-off lands
Is coiled behind in many a shining reach;
But now it widens, and its banks are bare--
It settles as it nears the moaning sea;
An inward eddy checks the current free,
And breathes a briny dampness through the air:
Beyond, the waves' low vapours through the skies
Were trailing, like a battle's broken rear;
But smitten by pursuing winds, they rise,
And the blue slopes of a far coast appear,
With shadowy peaks on which the sunlight lies,
Uplifted in aerial distance clear.

_November 8, 1854._

THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA.

After the labour of years, the seventh edition of the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_ has been at length completed. It is in every respect a
great work--great even as a commercial speculation. We have been
assured the money expended on this edition alone would be more than
sufficient to build three such monuments as that now in the course of
erection in Edinburgh to the memory of Sir Walter Scott. And
containing, as it does, all the more valuable matter of former
editions--all that the advancing tide of knowledge has not obliterated
or covered up, and which at one time must have represented in the
commercial point of view a large amount of capital--it must be obvious
that, great as the cost of the present edition has been, it bears
merely some such relation to the accumulated cost of the whole, as
that borne by the expense of partial renovations and repairs in a vast
edifice to the sum originally expended on the entire erection.

It is a great work, too, regarded as a trophy of the united science
and literature of Britain. Like a lofty obelisk, raised to mark the
spot where some important expedition terminated, it stands as it were
to indicate the line at which the march of human knowledge has now
arrived. We see it rising on the extreme verge of the boundary which
separates the clear and the palpable from the indistinct and the
obscure. The explored province of past research, with all its many
party-coloured fields, stretches out from it in long perspective on
the one hand,--luminous, well-defined