one cannot very readily comprehend. The probability seems to be, that Providence was thereabouts indifferent, in such a matter, respecting either. Quite otherwise, however, was Mr. Thomas Gent's persuasion, as is evident from the manner in which he tells his story. "It was one Sunday morning," says he, "that Mr. Philip Wood, a quondam partner of Mr. Midwinter's, entering my chambers, where I sometimes used to employ him too, when slack of business in other places. Tommy,' said he, all these fine materials of yours must be moved to York!" At which wondering, 'What mean you?' said I. Ay,' said he, and you must go too, without it's your own fault; for your first sweetheart is now at liberty, and left in good circumstances by her dear spouse, who deceased but of late.' 'I pray heaven,' answered I, 'that his precious soul may be happy: and for aught I know it may be as you say, for, indeed, I think I may not trifle with a widow as I have formerly done with a maid."" The news, in fact, though coming unexpectedly, had the immediate effect of re-kindling his old affection, and of suggesting possibilities to be realized, under different conditions, which the marriage of the lady had for the time being put out of the question. But judging rightly, that if he intended to renew his suit in the present state of circumstances, it must be in a very different fashion from that in which he had formerly conducted it, he proceeded at once to take the measures which seemed requisite to success. It was obvious that this time no slowness could be tolerated. It must be a swift decided business, to be gone through much after the manner of a business contract, without indecision or hesitation. Perceiving this, he lost no time in arranging his plans, settling his affairs conformably to the purposes now before him—which was that of marrying the widow of Mr. Bourne, taking it evidently for granted that his proposals would be sure to be accepted. "I made an excuse," says he, "to my mistress [meaning the printer's widow whose business he had been managing] that I had business in Ireland, but that I hoped to be at my own lodgings in about a month's time; if not, as I had placed everything in order, she might easily by any other person carry on the concern. But she said she would not have any beside me in that station I enjoyed, and therefore should expect my return to her again; but respectfully taking leave, I never beheld her after, though I heard she was after very indifferently married." Being in the secret, we know very well that he never intended to return; yet there were probably some reasons why he did not like to tell her so. His whole proceedings were clandestine, as if he deemed it necessary to slip away " on the sly," and get married before anybody was aware of the transaction. "I had taken care," he adds, "that my goods should be privately packed up, and hired a little warehouse and put them in, ready to be sent, by sea or land, to where I should order: and I pitched upon Mr. Campbell, my fellow-traveller,

as my confidant in this affair, desiring my cousins to assist him; all of whom I took leave of at the Black Swan, in Holborn, where I had paid my passage in the stage-coach, which brought me to York in four days' time. Here I found my dearest once more, though much altered from what she was about ten years before that I had not seen her. There was no need for new courtship; but decency suspended the ceremony of marriage for some time, till my dearest at length, considering the ill-consequence of delay in her business, as well as the former ties of love that passed innocently between us by word and writing, gave full consent to have the nuptials celebrated." And performed, accordingly, they were, "in the stately cathedral," the very day of Archbishop Blackburne's installation.

So, after all intervening accidents and turns of fortune, Mr. Thomas Gent is at last united in lawful wedlock to his first love. Having got, as he fancied, the desire of his eyes, he now expected to be happy. His notion of a wife seems to have been that she would make it her constant object in all respects to please him; that she would have no will of her own in any way opposed to his; but that she would meekly wait upon his wishes, and submissively attend to his commands. Now, whether it was owing to his having married a widow instead of a maiden, it is certain he did not find the lady so conformable to his notions of things as he had expected. Those long years of severance had not only wrought changes in her appearance, but changes also of another sort upon which he had not calculated. "I found," he says, "her temper much altered from that sweet natural softness and most tender affection that rendered her so amiable to me while I was more juvenile and she a maiden." She was none the less "sincere" than formerly, but she had contracted what he calls "a presumptive air and conceited opinion," which made him imagine (having noticed it also in others) that "an epidemical distemper prevailed among the good women to ruin themselves and families; or, if not prevented by Divine Providence, to prove the sad cause of great contention and of disquietude." The good lady, during her previous married life or widowhood, had surrounded herself with a set of "pretended friends, spunging parasites, and flatterers, who imposed on good nature," to the serious damage of the household; and it was much to Gent's annoyance that she persisted in keeping up acquaintance with these people. Instead of the delightful conjugal life his fancy had prefigured for him, he declares his days were "embittered with the most undutiful aggravations," and that everything was rendered uncomfortable to him. Mrs. Gent would persist in having her disagreeable teaparties, which he abominated, thinking that so much lavish expenditure would bring them to untimely poverty. He charges his wife with using "senseless provoking arguments" in contending with his objections; and altogether he lets us sufficiently into the secret that she did

not turn out the perfect angel he had expected her to be.

Nevertheless, he bore his lot with tolerable patience. "In this conjugal captivity, as I may term it," he says, "I was fully resolved, likewise in a Christian sense, to make my yoke as easy as possible, thereby to give no offence to custom or law of any kind." Not being able to shape his condition to his mind, he brought his mind to accommodate itself to his condition. In this way, after a few early bickerings and contentions, Gent and his wife fared on together very passably. They discovered that, after all, they had many tasks and interests in common, and these they appear to have tacitly agreed to cultivate for their mutual satisfaction. So, upon the whole, their married life-after the romance was all knocked out of it-passed on not uncomfortably: a quiet, yet strong attachment, grew up insensibly between them, which sufficed for such emotional cravings as yet clung to them. For, in truth, the romance had all gone before they were married: it had evaporated during that slow ten years' courtship-leaving their respective natures to that extent impoverished, and shorn of its most subtle and refined attractions—as happens, and will always happen, whenever the idea of marriage is enter

The

tained by man or woman as one of interested calculation, and deferred beyond the limits of a reasonable postponement from considerations of over thrift and worldliness. If you want the bloom and beauty of affection, marry while the romance is on; if marriage be only contemplated as a business contract or transaction, entered into for the joint convenience of the parties, it may be desirable perhaps to wait till the romantic element is extinguished, when it can be acknowledged that the object wanted is simply a partner in business, or a companion in society. present veritable history illustrates the inconvenience of losing the romance; showing how what might have been a generous and beautiful attachment, had it been earlier followed out to its authentic issues, became, through the slow and cold process of a long engagement, a mere tame and common-place relationship, founded on conventional interests, but scarcely graced by a particle of sentiment. The inference seems to be, that long engagements have a deteriorating effect on the affection; and that whoever would maintain the integrity of true love must be loyal to its suggestions, and never fail to cherish it as the highest prize and blessing which human life can offer in mitigation of its many cares and troubles.

Apart from the special value Mr. Ruskin's works possess for the art student and critic, they have always other and more common attractions, opening pleasant by-paths out of even severest technicalities, and charming away from noisy toiling town all who will read his pages and receive his lessons. The last volume of "Modern Painters," now some months before the public, is no exception to this rule, but provides so special a feast that we are tempted to re-spread it, making such additions and reflections in so doing as may help to present matters in an interesting form. He invites us into the country; and surely with so cheerful yet pensive a man we can spend a pleasant hour. "Come with me," he says, "and sit and listen, on this green turf or grey rock; I have neither reed, pipe, cithara, nor curds and cream; but here are leaves and trees, and yonder are the clouds-the Angels of the Sea.""

We cannot refuse. We lift the latch, and, though beneath our own roof-tree, we have learned the best, saddest, most enduring lessons; still there are many we may learn beneath the palace-dome of Nature, where no classic tomes can awe us from their shelves, and no ghostly memories stride between us and the objects of

our study. For we must study even here where most men think least of it, and are merely content to enjoy and luxuriate as in the very lap and bosom of ruminating intelligence. Our roof-tree! Yea, Nature has given us many; and it is concerning these fair springing arches, and their veiling fluttering broods that come between us and the sky, typifying our own life in its solidity, passion, and perishing, that we have to learn as well as to unlearn.

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Strange notions, I dare say, we have of leaves and trees, to begin with, like our Hindoo, Persian and Greek predecessors. Man," says the "Veda," is like unto a high tree; the hair is his leaves, the skin his bark, the blood his sap, the bones his hard knots." But casting aside all the fables of Zeus and Ormuzd, and their creation of man from trees, what we have to do is to recognize a certain human element, so to speak, in their beauty and development, leaving all knotty questions of sap and pith and alburnum to be solved, as best they may be, by hard-headed botanists and Linnæan professors. Our first notion of a tree is rather a queer one. hairy tubular roots, a composite stem, divers boughs, and multitudinous fans waving to and fro in the air, called leaves. The roots fix it

It has

firm in the ground, the stem supports and feeds | the boughs, and the leaves supply it with the necessary gases, and robe it with greenness and delight. So far we know, and are too frequently content. But the history of a bud, a leaf, or a branch, is as dim and mythical as the building of a pyramid, the carving of a sphinx, or the life and times of a Cheops. Hence we lose a fruitful source of the most refined and elevated pleasure, and cannot realize half the joy the prisoner of Fenestrelle found in his cherished Picciola.

Dividing the leaf orders into tented-plants, living in encampments on the ground, as lilies, and leaving no other memorial than bulb or seed, and building-plants, raising themselves into edifices above the ground, and consolidating and enlarging year by year, Mr. Ruskin divides the latter again into builders with the shield, and builders with the sword. The nomenclature is rather fanciful, but has the merit of accuracy and descriptiveness. Builders with the shield are those who, by expanded leaves, cover and nestle the young buds beneath them, and grow in places where they can minister to the comfort and delight of man. Those with the sword, on the contrary, live in savage localities, and have their leaves like swords, and their scanty buds in the centre of a group of them, hardy and fearless. Most trees belong to the first-class; the pine tree may be taken as the representative of the latter.

It is with the shield builders we have to do just now. Pluck a small branch, beyond where it has just leaped out from last winter's growth and left an awkward knot. You will find the branch smooth, the leaves opposite or alternate, as the case may be, and at the terminal end a small cluster of leaves forming a trefoil if it be a rhododendron branch, a quatrefoil if a horse chesnut, and a cinquefoil if an oak. Underneath each leaf, and sometimes above, are small projecting points, which the leaf guards and shelters. This will be the bud of next spring, and will begin its beautiful unfolding as soon as it has undergone the chemical change whereby a certain amount of saccharine matter is developed. Observe that every pair of buds aims at setting itself at right angles to the pair below. Both lateral and terminal buds have the power to outgrow into shoots next year; but as this would make a merely mathematical tree, various influences operate upon them to cause concession, reticence, and even death. It is not every bud that can command space and light, and sooner than rudely infringe upon a neighbouring bough, it will twist this way and that, turn up or down, feeling its way out with joy and affection, as though it possessed reason and human regard. We shall have to remark this again by-and-bye. But now the leaf is to be formed and unsheathed, and here new laws and beauties appear. Accidents operate to make changes and deviations in shape and size, yet always subordinately with the great heart-law they all follow obediently and lovingly.

Nature will not suffer herself to be tame and

recurring; so almost every class of tree has a different leaf-system and different shapes, no two leaves being at anytime exactly alike. All more or less strive to approach the model of the central or most aspiring leaf in the terminal group; but it alone is a perfect mainsail, whilst they are studding-sails, and invariably show it by being longer on one side than on the other. And now let us mark one or two points in their position. First, we shall find that the leaves of a branch almost unvaryingly fall away from the terminal or uppermost group in graceful concession of mastery; since that alone can indefinitely grow, and upon its outward spring the extension of the tree depends. Second, that the leaves at the end of the spray, by a most beautiful process, succeed and form their cluster at different heights one above the other, so as in no way to impede one another, and present the most striking obliquity of form. The beauty resulting from this successive climbing of clusters can only be fully seen in studying an oak, chestnut, or ash spray. Third, the springing back of the leaves upon their masts, and the gentle deflection of the mast, or stalk itself, where it issues from the bark, the one being the cause of the other, deserves to be noticed in viewing them in their right poise and position. These three laws operate incessantly upon all leaves, and to their modifying and adaptive influences much of their gracefulness and delicate beauty is owing. Each cluster of leaves presents the general aspect of a family group, all actuated by the tenderest regard for each other, never crossing nor overlapping in all their courses, never willingly impeding each others' growth, but full of a tender and exquisite sensibility; all wanting light and air, yet all following the law of liberty that Kant has laid down for we sterner men, in his Metaphysic of Rights"-"So act that the use of thy freedom shall not circumscribe the freedom of any other." There is no fighting, no shuffling for place; but all is order, method, most beautiful symmetry. And here Mr. Ruskin, actuated by the desire he acknowledges farther on in the same volume, of bringing everything to a root in human passion or hope, and tracing every principle of painting to some vital or spiritual fact, takes occasion to compare the disposition of leaves in the crowded foliage of large trees and the more open and scattered spaces of smaller ones, with the same falling into place amongst men. When the community is small, people fall more easily into their places, and take, each in his place, a firmer standing than can be obtained by the individuals of a greater nation. The members of a vast community are separately weaker, as an aspen or elm leaf is thin, tremulous, and directionless, compared with the spearlike setting and firm substance of a rhododendron or laurel leaf. The laurel and rhododendron are like the Athenian or Florentine Republics; the aspen, like England, strongtrunked enough when put to proof, and very good for making cart-wheels of, but shaking pale with epidemic panic at every breeze. Nevertheless, the aspen has the better of the

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potence. The Scandinavian Edda even makes them of a human giant origin. When Ymer was dragged into the void, called "Ginnunga. gap."

"From his brain Were the melancholy Clouds all created."

There is also ministry. The clouds screen the hot sun from us, soften the blue air into warm beauty and blessed brightness, cling in crowns and robes of mist about our hills, and patter with joyful drops upon our thirsty fields and dusty streets. They may yet be "pillars of cloud" and "pillars of fire." Above all these is mystery, endless, unfathomable. The old question in Job comes to us again in its weird solemn tones, "Knowest thou the balancing of the clouds?" Why are they so light? How do they balance and yet not rise beyond our vision? How do they contain so much water, and yet move like airy balloons and silken-sailed argosies? Why does not the lightest puff of wind burst their spherical globules of air and water, if such they be? In what does their coherency consist? heat or electricity? And their shape-Who heaves them into heaps, rolls them into pavilions, spins them into webs, and dashes them into foam? Why do they not float on, flat and wooflike, unbroken and unchanged? Why be laughed away by morning light, and gather again when the Sun puts off his robe and crown? Why hold up the crimson psalter for Nature's evening psalm, and float in lengthy mastadons and ptero-dactyles over his grey corse and grave? Here is mystery enough to excite our imagination, tempt our reason, and humble our heart much we know, but more we must be content not to know, accepting as our answer the reply Plotinus the Mystic has put into the mouth of Nature: "It behoves thee not to disquiet me with interrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as I am silent and work without words." Assuredly there are many lessons and many warnings for us, coming in the soft foldings and convolutions of the clouds. Let us mark their orders. We will begin with the soft cirri of the upper air. Height is the first thing we note concerning them, and calm seeming stillness. As they never touch or cross the highest mountains in Europe, they must form above an elevation of 15,000 feet, and it is this that gives them such serenity. They are mostly indicative of serene and settled weather. Various and shifting as they are, they have a symmetry of their own, and beginning with a few fibres increasing in length and tenacity, a silent law of growth mould them into transverse bars, fading into traceless vapour, and drifts them into silken plumy sweeps known as mares' tails. Their sharp edges are always windward, whilst their farther ones are soft, melting, imperceptible. The two kinds, the hairy and the plumy, occasionally intersect each other with a most beautiful effect, outshining all the grandeur of mediæval scrolls and Alhambra courts. Their multitude also gives an impression of infinity

and sublimity. They undulate into ripples an divide into flocks, forming what is commonl called a mackerel sky. On a winter morning' sunrise, by a moderate calculation of their ranks, Mr. Ruskin tells us that he arrived at the fact that there were no less than 50,000 of them in the field of sight. Their voluntary union into flocks was noticed long since by our poets. Milton sings

"Of some gay creatures of the element,
That in the colours of the rainbow live,
And play i' the flighted clouds.

And their slow stilly movement and silent recognition of the wind are sweetly rendered by Shelley

"Underneath the young grey dawn, A multitude of dense, white fleecy clouds, were wandering in thick folds along the mountains, Shepherded by the slow unwilling wind.

In the middle, or central cloud region, the great masses of cloud are formed, grouped for general purposes under the term cumuli, from their piledness and supposed manner of building up by vapour from beneath. And here in the very outset we are met with the first difference. The cloud flocks seemed to own the power of the wind; but these cumuli, although in reality impelled by the same power, nevertheless appear to move in thorough ndependence, and swell out and rotate as though possessed of an independent will. Hence they are called by our author "cloud-chariots," and in the lesser ones floating beside them, and the thin films trampled out before them, as by hoof of fervid steeds, the description is well borne out. Diana herself might range the cerulean round, in such delightsome manner. And they grow from chariots into larger fields and flying continents. They imitate on the grandest scale our own mountain ranges, boiling up in Titanic energy, toppling into avalanche, rending into chasm, and glittering into crevasse and glacier. Miles upon miles of colossal cloud, they dwarf our mountains into pigmies, and expand our wonder almost into idiotcy. Their pictures are marvellously beautiful. Now a cap-cloud will hang about some lofty peak, as in imitation of earthly reality; and anon a tiny cloudlet will sail along their snowy bosomed valleys, touch a moment the uttermost top, and then, catching the wind, burst away in glee. Range after range they stretch in wildering beauty, boundaring for us the infinite unfathomable Beyond, and filling our fancies with couchant angel forms

"High on some lofty cloud-cliff, harp in hand, Singing the sun to sleep, as down he lays His head of glory on the rocking deep. Ancient artists, but very imperfectly succeeded in representing, or catching any adequate idea of these gigantic masses; nor have modern ones done much better. Only Turner in his "Babylon," "Pools of Siloam," "Lake of Como,' and others, has succeeded in doing them anything approaching to justice. He has, if Mr.