cacy among the upper summits, the blue of the sky being at the same time purer and deeper than in the plains. Nay, in some sense, a person who has never seen the rose-color of the rays of dawn crossing a blue mountain twelve or fifteen miles away, can hardly be said to know what tenderness in color means at all; bright tenderness he may, indeed, see in the sky or in a flower, but this grave tenderness of the far-away hill-purples he cannot conceive.

Together with this great source of pre-eminence in mass of color, we have to estimate the influence of the finished inlaying and enamel-work of the color-jewellery on every stone; and that of the continual variety in species of flower; most of the mountain flowers being, besides, lovelier than the lowland ones. The wood hyacinth and wild rose are, indeed, the only supreme flowers that the lowlands can generally show; and the wild rose is also a mountaineer, and more fragrant in the hills, while the wood hyacinth, or grape hyacinth, at its best cannot match even the dark bell-gentian, leaving the light-blue star-gentian in its uncontested queenliness, and the Alpine rose and Highland heather wholly without similitude. The violet, lily of the valley, crocus, and wood anemone are, I suppose, claimable partly by the plains as well as the hills; but the large orange lily and narcissus I have never seen but on hill pastures, and the exquisite oxalis is pre-eminently a mountaineer.

To this supremacy in mosses and flowers we have next to` add an inestimable gain in the continual presence and power of water. Neither in its clearness, its color, its fantasy of motion, its calmness of space, depth, and reflection, or its wrath, can water be conceived by a lowlander, out of sight of sea. A sea wave is far grander than any torrent-but of the sea and its influences we are not now speaking; and the sea itself, though it can be clear, is never calm, among our shores, in the sense that a mountain lake can be calm. The sea seems only to pause; the mountain lake to sleep, and to dream. Out of sight of the ocean, a lowlander cannot be considered ever to have seen water at all. The mantling of the pools in the rock shadows, with the golden flakes of light sinking down through them like falling leaves, the ringing of the thin currents among the shallows, the flash and the cloud of the cascade, the earth

quake and foam-fire of the cataract, the long lines of alternate mirror and mist that lull the imagery of the hills reversed in the blue of morning-all these things belong to those hills as their undivided inheritance.

To this supremacy in wave and stream is joined a no less manifest pre-eminence in the character of trees. It is possible among plains, in the species of trees which properly belong to them, the poplars of Amiens, for instance, to obtain a serene simplicity of grace, which, as I said, is a better help to the study of gracefulness, as such, than any of the wilder groupings of the hills; so also, there are certain conditions of symmetrical luxuriance developed in the park and avenue, rarely rivalled in their way among mountains; and yet the mountain superiority in foliage is, on the whole, nearly as complete as it is in water; for exactly as there are some expressions in the broad reaches of a navigable lowland river, such as the Loire or Thames, not, in their way, to be matched in the rock rivers, and yet for all that a lowlander cannot be said to have truly seen the element of water at all; so even in his richest parks and avenues he cannot be said to have truly seen trees. For the resources of trees are not developed until they have difficulty to contend with; neither their tenderness of brotherly love and harmony, till they are forced to choose their ways of various life where there is contracted room for them, talking to each other with their restrained branches. The various action of trees rooting themselves in inhospitable rocks, stooping to look into ravines, hiding from the search of glacier winds, reaching forth to the rays of rare sunshine, crowding down together to drink at sweetest streams, climbing hand in hand among the difficult slopes, opening in sudden dances round the mossy knolls, gathering into companies at rest among the fragrant fields, gliding in grave procession over the heavenward ridges-nothing of this can be conceived among the unvexed and unvaried felicities of the lowland forest; while to all these direct sources of greater beauty are added, first the power of redundance-the mere quantity of foliage visible in the folds and on the promontories of a single Alp being greater than that of an entire lowland landscape (unless a view from some cathedral tower); and to this charm of re

dundance, that of clearer visibility-tree after tree being constantly shown in successive height, one behind another, instead of the mere tops and flanks of masses, as in the plains; and the forms of multitudes of them continually defined against the clear sky, near and above, or against white clouds entangled among their branches, instead of being confused in dimness of distance.

JEAN INGELOW.

JEAN INGELOW was born in 1820 and died in 1897. Her first poems were published in 1850 and the collection best known in 1875.

Possessing greater poetic genius than Felicia Hemans or Letitia Landon, she holds a place prominent in the little circle of English women who wrote poetry in the nineteenth century. As a novelist she was less successful. Directness and simplicity of style characterize her work. Within a rather limited scope her pictures are vivid and reveal a true observance of nature. A certain graceful fancy pervades her poems.

In America Jean Ingelow has been greatly appreciated and a large number of copies of her poems have been in demand.

SONGS OF SEVEN.

SEVEN TIMES ONE.

There's no dew left on the daisies and clover,

There's no rain left in heaven:
I've said my "seven times" over and over,
Seven times one are seven.

I am old, so old I can write a letter;

My birthday lessons are done;

The lambs play always, they know no better;
They are only one times one.

O moon! in the night I have seen you sailing

And shining so round and low;

You were bright! ah, bright! but your light is failing,

You are nothing now but a bow.

You moon, have you done something wrong in heaven
That God has hidden your face?

I hope if you have you will soon be forgiven,

And shine again in your place.

O velvet bee, you're a dusty fellow,

You've powdered your legs with gold!
O brave marsh marybuds, rich and yellow,
Give me your money to hold!

O columbine, open your folded wrapper,
Where two twin turtle-doves dwell!
O cuckoopint, toll me the purple clapper
That hangs in your clear green bell!

And show me your nest with the young ones in it;

I will not steal them away;

I am old! you may trust me, linnet, linnet—

I am seven times one today.

SEVEN TIMES Two.

You bells in the steeple, ring, ring out your changes, How many soever they be,

And let the brown meadow-lark's note as he ranges Come over, come over to me.

Yet bird's clearest carol by fall or by swelling

No magical sense conveys,

And bells have forgotten their old art of telling
The fortunes of future days.

"Turn again, turn again," once they rang cheerily,
While a boy listened alone;

Made his heart yearn again, musing so wearily

All by himself on a stone.

Poor bells! I forgive you; your good days are over, And mine, they are yet to be;

No listening, no longing shall aught, aught discover;

You leave the story to me.

The foxglove shoots out of the green matted heather,
Preparing her hoods of snow;

She was idle, and slept till the sunshiny weather;
O, children take long to grow.