teachers have undervalued,—­for vindicating the uses of doubt,—­and, finally, for a specimen of intellectual intrepidity of which one could wish there were less need.  And withal how royally he presumes upon a welcome for candid confession of his thought!  Such a presumption could be created in his soul only by a great magnanimity; and the evidence of this on his pages sheds a beauty about all his words.

But he is not an Oedipus.  He has guessed; and the riddle awaits another comer.  A science of history he has not established; the direction in which it lies he has not pointed out; and if Hegel and his precursors have failed to indicate such a science, the first clear step toward it remains yet to be taken.  And should some majestic genius—­for no other will be sufficient for the task—­at length arise to lay hold upon the facts of man’s history, and exercise over them a Newtonian sway, he will be the last man on the planet to take his initial hint from Auguste Comte and the “Positive Philosophy.”  This mud-mountain is indeed considerably heaped up, but it is a very poor Pisgah nevertheless; for it is a mountain in a pit, whose top does not rise to an equality with the broad common levels, far less with the high table-lands and skyward peaks and summits of intelligence.

RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN.

From Leamington to Stratford-on-Avon the distance is eight or nine miles, over a road that seemed to me most beautiful.  Not that I can recall any memorable peculiarities; for the country, most of the way, is a succession of the gentlest swells and subsidences, affording wide and far glimpses of champaign-scenery here and there, and sinking almost to a dead level as we draw near Stratford.  Any landscape in New England, even the tamest, has a more striking outline, and besides would have its blue eyes open in those lakelets that we encounter almost from mile to mile at home, but of which the Old Country is utterly destitute; or it would smile in our faces through the medium of those way-side brooks that vanish under a low stone arch on one side of the road, and sparkle out again on the other.  Neither of these pretty features is often to be found in an English scene.  The charm of the latter consists in the rich verdure of the fields, in the stately way-side trees and carefully kept plantations of wood, and in the old and high cultivation that has humanized the very sods by mingling so much of man’s toil and care among them.  To an American there is a kind of sanctity even in an English turnip-field, when he thinks how long that small square of ground has been known and recognized as a possession, transmitted from father to son, trodden often by memorable feet, and utterly redeemed from savagery by old acquaintanceship with civilized eyes.  The wildest things in England are more than half tame.  The trees, for instance, whether in hedgerow, park, or what they call forest,