who are so unintelligibly obscure to themselves. But to
the merit of those poems, I doubt if even George did justice. It is not
true, I believe, that they are not durable. Some day or other, when all
the jargon so feelingly denounced by Colonel Morley about "esthetics,"
and "objective," and "subjective," has gone to its long home, some
critic who can write English will probably bring that poor little volume
fairly before the public; and, with all its manifold faults, it will
take a place in the affections, not of one single generation of the
young, but--everlasting, ever-dreaming, ever-growing youth. But you and
I, reader, have no other interest in these poems, except this--that
they were written by the brother-in-law of that whimsical, miserly Frank
Vance, who perhaps, but for such a brother-in-law, would never have gone
through the labour by which he has cultivated the genius that achieved
his fame; and if he had not cultivated that genius, he might never
have known Lionel; and if he had never known Lionel, Lionel might never
perhaps have gone to the Surrey village, in which he saw the Phenomenon:
And, to push farther still that Voltaireian philosophy of ifs--if either
Lionel or Frank Vance had not been so intimately associated in the minds
of Sophy and Lionel with the golden holiday on the beautiful river,
Sophy and Lionel might not have thought so much of those poems; and if
they had not thought so much of those poems, there might not have been
between them that link of poetry without which the love of two young
people is a sentiment, always very pretty it is true, but much too
commonplace to deserve special commemoration in a work so uncommonly
long as this is likely to be. And thus it is clear that Frank Vance is
not a superfluous and episodical personage amongst the characters of
this history, but, however indirectly, still essentially, one of those
beings without whom the author must have given a very different answer
to the question, "What will he do with it?"

Return we to Lionel and Sophy. The poems have brought their hearts
nearer and nearer together. And when the book fell from Lionel's hand,
Sophy knew that his eyes were on her face, and her own eyes looked away.
And the silence was so deep and so sweet! Neither had yet said to the
other a word of love. And in that silence both felt that they loved and
were beloved. Sophy! how childlike she looked still! How little she is
changed!--except that the soft blu