calling, and he made literature a mirror of the life he led.  We in this new land are born to new heritages, and the terms of our new life must be used to tell our story.  The Herald’s College gives precedence to the Patent-Office, and the shepherd’s pipe to the steam-whistle.  And since all literature which can live stands only upon the national speech, we must look for our hopes of coming epics and immortal dramas to the language of the land, to its idioms, in which its present soul abides and breathes, and not to its classicalities, which are the empty shells upon its barren sea-shore.

MIDSUMMER AND MAY.

[Continued.]

II.

When Miss Kent, the maternal great-aunt of Mr. Raleigh, devised her property, the will might possibly have been set aside as that of a monomaniac, but for the fact that he cared too little about anything to go to law for it, and for the still more important fact that the heirs-at-law were sufficiently numerous to ingulf the whole property and leave no ripple to attest its submerged existence, had he done so; and on deserting it, he was better pleased to enrich the playfellow of his childhood than a host of unknown and unloved individuals.  I cannot say that he did not more than once regret what he had lost:  he was not of a self-denying nature, as we know; on the contrary, luxurious and accustomed to all those delights of life generally to be procured only through wealth.  But, for all that, there had been intervals, ere his thirteen years’ exile ended, in which, so far from regret, he experienced a certain joy at remembrance of this rough and rugged point of time where he had escaped from the chrysalid state to one of action and freedom and real life.  He had been happy in reaching India before his uncle’s death, in applying his own clear understanding to the intricate entanglements of the affairs before him, in rescuing his uncle’s commercial good name, and in securing thus for himself a foothold on the ladder of life, although that step had not occurred to him till thrust there by the pressure of circumstances.  For the rest, I am not sure that Mr. Raleigh did not find his path suiting him well enough.  There was no longer any charm in home; he was forbidden to think of it.  That strange summer, that had flashed into his life like the gleam of a carnival-torch into quiet rooms, must be forgotten; the forms that had peopled it, in his determination, should become shadows.  Valiant vows!  Yet there must have come moments, in that long lapse of days and years, when the whole season gathered up its garments and swept imperiously through his memory:  nights, when, under the shadow of the Himmaleh, the old passion rose at spring-tide and flooded his heart and drowned out forgetfulness, and a longing asserted itself, that, if checked as instantly by honor as despair, was none the less insufferable