At last, in some political trouble, he is banished to the very place of his dreams.  He arrives there overnight, and, when he rises and goes forth in the morning, there sure enough are the blue hills, only now they have changed places with him, and smile across to him, distant as ever, from the old home whence he has come.  Such a story might have been very cynically treated; but it is not so done, the whole tone is kindly and consolatory, and the disenchanted man submissively takes the lesson, and understands that things far away are to be loved for their own sake, and that the unattainable is not truly unattainable, when we can make the beauty of it our own.  Indeed, throughout all these two volumes, though there is much practical scepticism, and much irony on abstract questions, this kindly and consolatory spirit is never absent.  There is much that is cheerful and, after a sedate, fireside fashion, hopeful.  No one will be discouraged by reading the book; but the ground of all this hopefulness and cheerfulness remains to the end somewhat vague.  It does not seem to arise from any practical belief in the future either of the individual or the race, but rather from the profound personal contentment of the writer.  This is, I suppose, all we must look for in the case.  It is as much as we can expect, if the fabulist shall prove a shrewd and cheerful fellow-wayfarer, one with whom the world does not seem to have gone much amiss, but who has yet laughingly learned something of its evil.  It will depend much, of course, upon our own character and circumstances, whether the encounter will be agreeable and bracing to the spirits, or offend us as an ill-timed mockery.  But where, as here, there is a little tincture of bitterness along with the good-nature, where it is plainly not the humour of a man cheerfully ignorant, but of one who looks on, tolerant and superior and smilingly attentive, upon the good and bad of our existence, it will go hardly if we do not catch some reflection of the same spirit to help us on our way.  There is here no impertinent and lying proclamation of peace—­none of the cheap optimism of the well-to-do; what we find here is a view of life that would be even grievous, were it not enlivened with this abiding cheerfulness, and ever and anon redeemed by a stroke of pathos.

It is natural enough, I suppose, that we should find wanting in this book some of the intenser qualities of the author’s work; and their absence is made up for by much happy description after a quieter fashion.  The burst of jubilation over the departure of the snow, which forms the prelude to ‘The Thistle,’ is full of spirit and of pleasant images.  The speech of the forest in ‘Sans Souci’ is inspired by a beautiful sentiment for nature of the modern sort, and pleases us more, I think, as poetry should please us, than anything in Chronicles and Characters.  There are some admirable felicities of expression here and there; as that of the hill, whose summit