presence of some other fine compensating
or equivalent quality. Perhaps one may say that this equivalent for
grandeur is a certain simple touching of our sense of human kinship,
of the large identity of the conditions of the human lot, of the
piteous fatalities which bring the lives of the great multitude of men
to be little more than "grains of sand to be blown by the wind." This
old woe, the poet says, now in the fulness of the days again lives,

"_If precious be the soul of man to man_."

This is the deeply implanted sentiment to which his poem makes
successful appeal. Nor is it mocked by mere outpouring of scorn on the
blind and fortuitous groping of men and societies of men after truth
and justice and traces of the watchfulness of "the unlidded eye of
God." Rather it is this inability to see beyond the facts of our
condition to some diviner, ever-present law, which helps to knit us to
our kind, our brethren "whom we have seen."

"Clouds obscure--
But for which obscuration all were bright?
Too hastily concluded! Sun-suffused,
A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze,--
Better the very clarity of heaven:
The soft streaks are the beautiful and dear.
What but the weakness in a faith supplies
The incentive to humanity, no strength
Absolute, irresistible, comports?
How can man love but what he yearns to help
And that which men think weakness within strength
But angels know for strength and stronger get--
What were it else but the first things made new,
But repetition of the miracle,
The divine instance of self-sacrifice
That never ends and aye begins for man?"

MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS.

What are the qualities of a good contributor? What makes a good
Review? Is the best literature produced by the writer who does nothing
else but write, or by the man who tempers literature by affairs? What
are the different recommendations of the rival systems of anonymity
and signature? What kind of change, if any, has passed over periodical
literature since those two great periodicals, the _Edinburgh_ and the
_Quarterly_, held sway? These and a number of other questions in the
same matter--some of them obviously not to be opened with propriety in
these pages--must naturally be often present to the mind of any one
who is concerned in the control of a Review, and a volume has just
been printed which sets such musings once more astir. Mr. Macvey
Napier was the editor of t