birds sang to Milton's Eve in Milton's Paradise. Sweet he is, and various, rich, and strong, beyond all English warblers, save the nightingale but his speciality is his force, his rush, his overflow, not so much of love as of happiness. The spirit carries him away. He riots up and down the gamut till he cannot stop himself; his notes tumble over each other; he chuckles, laughs, shrieks with delight; throws back his head, droops his tail, sets up his back, and sings with every fibre of his body and yet he never forgets his good manners. He is never coarse, never harsh, for a single note. Always graceful, always sweet, he keeps perfect delicacy in his most utter careless ness. : up In nature there is nothing melancholy? Mark that slender, graceful, yellow warbler, running along the high oak boughs like a perturbed spirit, seeking restlessly, anxiously, something which he seems never to find; and uttering every now and then a long anxious cry, four or five times repeated, which would be a squeal, were it not so sweet. Suddenly he flits away, and flutters round the pendant tips of the beech-sprays like a great yellow butterfly, picking the insects from the leaves; then flits back to a bare bough, and sings, with heaving breast and quivering wings, a short, shrill, feeble, tremulous song; and then returns to his old sadness, wandering and complaining all And why should we overlook, common day long. Is there no melancholy in that though he be, yon hedge-sparrow, who is cry? It sounds sad: why should it not be singing so modestly, and yet so firmly and meant to be sad? We recognise joyful so true? or cock-robin himself, who is here, notes, angry notes, fearful notes. They are as everywhere, honest, self-confident, and very similar (strangely enough) in all birds. cheerful? Most people are not aware, one They are very similar (more strangely still) sometimes fancies, how fine a singer is cock- to the cries of human beings, especially robin now in the spring time, when his song children, when influenced by the same pasis drowned by, or at least confounded with, sions. And when we hear a note which to a dozen other songs. We know him and us expresses sadness, why should not the love him best in winter, when he takes bird be sad? Yon wood-wren has had (as he does sometimes in cold. wet summer enough to make him sad, if only he recoldays) that sudden wistful warble, struggling lects it; and if he can recollect bis road fiom to be happy, half in vain, which surely con- Morocco hither, he maybe recollects liketradicts Coleridge's verse : wise what happened on the road-The long weary journey up the Portuguese coast, and through the gap between the Pyrenees and the Jaysquivel, and up the Landes of Bordeaux, and through Brittany, flitting by night, and hiding and feeding as he could by day; and how his mates flew against the lighthouses, and were killed by hundreds; and how he essayed the British Channel, and was blown back, shrivelled up by bitter blasts; and how he felt, nevertheless, that that was water he must cross,' he knew not why: but something told him that his mother had done it before him, and he was flesh of her flesh, life of her life, and had inherited her 'instinct' (as we call hereditary memory, in order to avoid the trouble of finding out what it is, and how it comes). A duty was laid on him to go back to the place where he was bred; and he must do it: and now it is done; and he is weary, and sad, and lonely; and for aught we know thinking already that when the leaves begin to turn yellow, he must go back again, over the Channel, over the Landes, over the Pyrenees, to Morocco once more. Why should he not be sad? He is a very delicate bird, as both his shape and his note testify. He can hardly keep up his race here in England; and is accordingly very uncommon, In nature there is nothing melancholy. But he who will listen carefully to the robin's breeding song on a bright day in May, will agree, I think, that he is no mean musician; and that for force, variety and character of melody, he is surpassed only by black-cap, thrush, and nightingale. And what is that song, sudden, loud, sweet, yet faltering, as if half ashamed? Is it the willow-wren, or the garden warbler? The two birds, though very remotely allied to each other, are so alike in voice, that it is often difficult to distinguish them, unless we attend carefully to the expression. For the garden warbler, beginning in high and loud notes, runs down in cadence, lower and softer, till joy seems conquered by very weariness; while the willow-wren, with a sudden outbreak of cheerfulness, though not quite sure (it is impossible to describe bird songs without attributing to the birds human passions and frailties) that he is not doing a silly thing, struggles on to the end of his story with a hesitating hilarity, in feeble imitation of the black-cap's bacchanalian dactyls. And now is it true that 6 while his two cousins, the willow-wren and the chiff-chaff, who, like him, build for some mysterious reason domed nests upon the ground, are stout, and busy, and numerous, and thriving everywhere. And what he has gone through may be too much for the poor wood-wren's nerves; and he gives way; while willow-wren, black cap, nightingale, who have gone by the same road, and suffered the same dangers, have stoutness of heart enough to throw off the past, and give themselves up to present pleasure. Why not?-who knows? There is labor, danger, bereavement, death in nature; and why should not some, at least, of the socalled dumb things know it, and grieve at it as well as we? Why not? Unless we yield to the assumption (for it is nothing more) that these birds act by some unknown thing called instinct, as it might be called z ory; and are, in fact, just like the singing birds which spring out of snuff boxes, only so much better made, that they can eat, grow, and propagate their species. The imputation of acting by instinct cuts both ways. We, too, are creatures of iustinct. We breathe and eat by instinct: but we talk and build houses by reason. And so may the birds. It is more philosophical, surely, to attribute actions in them to the same causes to which we attribute them (from experience) in ourselves. But if so,' some will say, birds must have souls.' We must define what our own souls are, before we can define what kind of soul or no-soul a bird may or may not have. The truth is, that we want to set up some dignity of human nature; some innate superiority to the animals, on which we may pride ourselves as our own possession, and not return thanks with fear and trembling for it, as the special gift of Almighty God. So we have given the poor animals over to the mechanical philosophy, and allowed them to be considered as only mere cunningly devised pieces of watch work, if philosophy would only spare us, and our fine human souls, of which we are so proud, though they are doing all the wrong and folly they can from one week's end to the other. And now our self-conceit has brought its own Nemesis; the mechanical philosophy is turning on us, and saying, The bird's "nature and your "human nature" differ only in degree, but not in kind. If they are machines, so are you. They have no souls, you confess. You have none either.' But there are those who neither yield to the mechanical philosophy nor desire to stifle it. While it is honest and industrious (as it is now) it can do nought but good, because it can do nought but discover facts. It will only help to divide the light fron the darkness, truth from dreams, health from disease. Let it claim for itself all that it can prove to be of the flesh, fleshly. That which is spiritual will stand out more clearly as of the Spirit. Let it thrust scalpel and microscope into the most sacred penetralia of brain and nerve. It will only find everywhere beneath brain and beneath nerve, that substance and form which is not matter or phænomena, but the Divine cause thereof; and while it helps, with ruthless, but wholesome severity, to purge our minds from idols of the cave and idols of the fane, it will leave untouched, more clearly defined, and therefore more sacred and important than ever Those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet the master light of all our seeing ; Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal silence; truths that wake To perish never; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Then sing, ye birds, sing out with joyous sound, as the poet philosopher bids you. Victorious analysis will neither abolish you, nor the miraculous and unfathomable in you and in your song, which has stirred the hearts of poets since first man was man. And if any one shall hint to us that we and the birds may have sprung originally from the same type; that the difference between our intellect and theirs is one of degree, and not of kind, we may believe or doubt: but in either case we shall not be greatly moved. So much the better for the birds,' we will say, and none the worse for us. You raise the birds towards us, but you do not lower us towards them. What we are, we are by the grace of God. Our own powers and the burden of them we know full well. It does not lessen their dignity or their beauty in our eyes to hear that the birds of the air partake, even a little, of the same gifts of God as we. Of old said St. Gutblac in Crowland, as the swallows sat upon his knee, "He who leads his life according to the will of God, to him the wild deer and the wild birds draw more near;" and this new theory of yours may prove St. Guthlac right.. women. It is the greatest mistake to suppose that, except in a very unsophisticated time of life indeed, a woman allows her countenance to tell anything upon her; but, apart from her power and instinct of deception, there is again that if we may so term it. physiological advantage which she derives from her ancestors, and which enables her without effort to wear an expression which may be eminently more attractive than that which she could claim in her own right. If a man is first brought to love a woman for her face he is pretty certain to continue to set the tune of his thoughts about her to that keynote. He expects certain qualities are dor St. Francis, too, he called the birds his brothers. Whether he was correct, either theologically or zoologically, he was plainly free from that fear of being mistaken for an ape, which haunts so many in these modern times. Perfectly sure that he himself was a spiritual being, he thought it at least possible that birds might be spiritual beings likewise, incarnate like himself in mortal flesh; and saw no degradation to the dignity of human nature in claiming kindred lovingly with creatures so beautiful, so wonderful, who (as he fancied in his old-fashioned way) praised God in the forest, even as angels did in heaven. In a word, the saint, though he was an ascetic, and certainly no man of science, was yet a poet, and some-mant in her mind which he alone has been what of a philosopher; and would have possibly so do extremes meet-have hailed as orthodox, while we hail as truly scientific, Wordsworth's great saying — From the London Review. WE find in " Adam Bede" what to us seems a part explanation of a very difficult social problem. Speaking of Hetty, Miss Evans says that "her face had a language that transcended her feelings." And then she goes on to say that "there are faces which nature charges with a meaning and a pathos not belonging to the single human soul that flutters beneath them but speaking the joys and sorrows of foregone generations; eyes that tell of deep love which doubtless has been, and is somewhere, but not paired with these eyes, perhaps paired with pale eyes that can say nothing-just as a national language may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the lips that use it." We often meet people with a plain story enough written in their faces, but when we have studied their natures, we find our reckoning completely falsified by our acquaintance with them. This, unfortunately for men, occurs most frequently with one clever enough to perceive. He wonders make him happy. The lady who sits oppo- | site may either have this as an inheritance, or put on something like it when she dresses. If her attractiveness be from the first source she deserves no credit for it, and her character may utterly belie it; if she accomplishes it by the second plan, her admirers may be assured that she will no more take the trouble of keeping it up to please him, once the necessity for pleasing him seems to depart with marriage, than she will take the trouble of being sentimental about him two years after that event. A plain or an ugly woman, if she cannot make herself handsome, can always make herself desirable to some one, and that one is the man whose ideal expression corresponds with the mask for society with which nature has provided the sex. This is what is meant by the saying, that a woman is seldom unmarried save through her own fault. Every woman gets many chances if she but knew them; not every woman, however, will recognise the lover whose infatuation is sufficiently profound and desperate to bring him to the point. Unreasoning admirers, if ladies but knew it, - admirers who are caught with eyes, or tangled in Nærea's golden hair," make as good husbands as the most sensible and speculating of admirers. A man who has plunged hopelessly into a sentimental attachment, accepts the situation after a while with a steady and enduring pertinacity, if only fairly encouraged; and nothing will bring him more swiftly or more as suredly to this state than the sight of a type and manner of face on which some subtle emotion is stirred within him whenever he sees it. 66 To turn for a moment from the more sentimental aspect of false faces, it is curious to notice what complete changes in the character of a countenance is effected by age, and above all how great is the change when death lays its hand upon it. Apart from the alteration due to physical reasons, there is unquestionably an unaccountable relapse into phases of expression which we have seemingly dropped years ago. One of the most touching incidents of the deathbed is the recognition by parents and relatives of a youth and freshness on the face of the departed, and of an expression associated with school-time, boyhood, and the spring of life. Harsh and hard-featured men and women when lying at rest, have little of the ruggedness and the ungraciousness which they carried with them through the world. Even old age-old age sinking out in decay takes a strange beauty at the close, and a score of years, with the furrows and the lines of years, disappear, to permit, as it were, a trace of the beautiful child-time to return again. Or is it that all our other faces were "false faces" except this? Perhaps so. Death is very sincere and very truthful. It would be pleasant at least to think that when passion was spent, the socket burned down, and thought and brain asleep, nature herself comes to vindicate whatever is good in us by a distinct and final manifestation. The brother of Death, as the poet calls Slumber, does not treat us so. In dreams our faces often seem worn and weary, and even convulsive to those who look on us in that state. do not cast away the false face at night. We bear it as our thoughts have formed it, and our working existences, but at the finish we are done with it. The face of a dead wife will seem far more familiar to those who have known her in girlhood, than to the man who has known her as husband for more years than they have seen her. We With all faces we should be tolerant. Men and women hide themselves from each other by face as well as by words, and after a while the effort costs them nothing; the expression is set. Your physiognomist is as great a fool as your lover, and just as likely to be mistaken. No one except a born idiot who is sealed on the forehead with idiotcy, would carry his true inner character into the market world; and no woman ever does. But what we cannot perceive may not be so bad, and may be better than that which we think we can detect. Many persons play a game of brag with those whom they meet in this respect, by assuming what is called an impenetrable countenance. There is a necessity for this, as there is for reserve of every other kind. We can no more with social decency express our hatred, contempt, love, horror, rage, or impatience on our countenances, than we can the corresponding sentiments in language. Motley in faces is our only wear during life; in death we shall be fixed and consistent, smiling and placid generally, until the worm has his turn at us where no one sees in the dark. From the Spectator. HATS AND BONNETS. Is the funnel-shaped hat, the Hat of Europe, the distinctive mark of the West, which no Asiatic mentions without scorn, and no man who wears it ever dreams of defending by any argument of health, beauty, or convenience, about to perish? It looks like it, for the extraordinary superstructure has at last been attacked in the rational way. Artists have denounced the tall hat, doctors have condemned it, wits have satirized it, quiet citizens have allowed that it has every bad quality a head-dress can have, and still Western mankind has pertinaciously adhered to a costume it did not approve. The attack was too revolutionary. Some people wanted us all to go bareheaded, which seemed to men accustomed to go covered impossible; some to adopt the wideawake, which was condemned as vulgar; some to fall back on a straw hat, which was inconvenient. A man with a bare head is half-dressed, wideawakes are worn by grooms, a straw hat breaks when lifted properly in a bow, and altogether every substitute failed. At last some genius hit out a bright idea. Leave the silk hat alone, but lower its crown, and, lo! the work was done. Monthly, almost hourly, the height of the funnel hat declines, the brims widen, the edges turn up, until, if the reformers have only nerve and cash, we shall in twelve months be wearing a reasonable headdress, a low, stiff sombrero of silk-covered card-board, with soft interior edges, than which no one could wish for a more reasonable or more becoming covering. It will be light, for there will be little of it; will shade the eyes and neck - far more important because it has broad brims; can be taken off for a bow, because those brims are stiff; and will not heat the head, because it has the single merit of the old hat -it admits of scientific ventilation. Shorten the silk-covered funnel to three inches at most, widen the brims to at least two and a half, turning them up a little, make the inside edges soft with an india-rubber belt, the linen or paper substitute is a blunder, and india-rubber only a makeshift till chemistry helps the hatter, and we shall have a head covering acceptable at once to the hygeist, the artist, and the philosopher who believes equality incomplete without at least a possible democracy of dress. There never will be any democracy of the kind-only look at the tailors' fitter in his perfect costume! but that is of minor importance. - He will think there is, and as under a Household Suffrage he is master, that will mollify him, and not hurt anybody. Seriously, no head-dress has ever been invented which will better answer its many purposes - be lighter, cheaper, cooler, or a more perfect protection than the low-crowned, broadbrimmed, well-made silk "hat." It is the head-dress of our great grandfathers, — who came out well in portraits, -improved and simplified by the utilitarian genius of the year 1867. It is not perfect yet, but if the Prince of Wales can only be kept straight, and does not reduce the height of his hat more than an inch a month, and does not ask Parliament for any money, so as to become unpopular, we shall win the Hat game yet. It is just possible that the ultimate result of the Bonnet movement may be equally satisfactory. People's judgments upon the bonnet of to-day are disturbed, because they will import into the controversy the entirely irrelevant question of the most artistic method of dressing women's hair. Just as they thought they were condemning crinoline when they were really discussing the morality of ankles, so they think they are discussing bonnets when they are really abusing chignons. If the chignon has anything to do with the bonnet, argument becomes impossible or futile; we might as well discuss the glove that would best suit people who wore artificial thumbs. The bonnet of the day is a very good bonnet, even considered by itself, and it is only an introduction to something better. It has, in the first place, all the negative qualities. It does not hide the face like a poke. It is not brazen, like a pork-pie. It does not necessarily surrender the complexion to all the winds of heaven, or that particular wind which in Britain suggests that the "other place " must lie due east. It does not ruin the complexion by compelling its wearer to throw a red shade on pink cheeks, or a green shade on an alabaster face, or a blue tinge over a creamy blonde, or an orange tint over, best colour of all, let the poets say what they like, -the glowing brunette. It is, ask any woman else,supremely comfortable, it will arrange itself to any rational mode of dressing the hair, chignons are warts, not adornments, admits of any colour, it will carry any veil, it can be made at any price, or of any material, and, that such felicity should be attainable to husbands!-it will pack in any box. The band-box, that impossible article of luggage which nobody would carry, even couriers shied at it, which it |