and let the new creature emerge erect and free,—­make way, and sing paean!  The age of the quadruped is to go out,—­the age of the brain and of the heart is to come in.  The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized.  Man’s culture can spare nothing, wants all the material.  He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.  The formidable mischief will only make the more useful slave.  And if one shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna.  He will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefit.

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR.

  Between the dark and the daylight,
  When the night is beginning to lower,
  Comes a pause in the day’s occupations
  That is known as the Children’s Hour.

  I hear in the chamber above me
  The patter of little feet,
  The sound of a door that is opened,
  And voices soft and sweet.

  From my study I see in the lamplight,
  Descending the broad hall-stair,
  Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
  And Edith with golden hair.

  A whisper, and then a silence: 
  Yet I know by their merry eyes
  They are plotting and planning together
  To take me by surprise.

  A sudden rush from the stairway,
  A sudden raid from the hall! 
  By three doors left unguarded
  They enter my castle wall!

  They climb up into my turret
  O’er the arms and back of my chair;
  If I try to escape, they surround me;
  They seem to be everywhere.

  They almost devour me with kisses,
  Their arms about me entwine,
  Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
  In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

  Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
  Because you have scaled the wall,
  Such an old moustache as I am
  Is not a match for you all?

  I have you fast in my fortress,
  And will not let you depart,
  But put you down into the dungeons
  In the round-tower of my heart.

  And there will I keep you forever,
  Yes, forever and a day,
  Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
  And moulder in dust away!

THREE-MILE CROSS.

It seems but yesterday, although more than thirteen years have gone by, since I first opened the little garden-gate and walked up the path leading to Mary Russell Mitford’s cottage at Three-Mile Cross.  A friend in London had given me his card to the writer of “Our Village,” and I had promised to call on my way to Oxford, and have a half-hour’s chat over her geraniums with the charming person whose sketches I had read with so much interest in my own