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away out of the smoke and fog, out of the darkness and despair of the life around me. I go upon the wings of the Sunbeam with my Lady Brassey, thankful that one can take such a flight and come back to work all the better for it, all the more able to give a helping hand. Never was book more welcome, never were words more true than those Lady Brassey quotes, and I am sure she is glad to know they are true, and for being able to make them so:

"And the careworn toiler in dusty ways,

The things that I see shall see,
And shall give to the giver his song of praise,
As he shares his joy with me.

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She will also, I think, be glad to hear that it is not for the same philosophic reason which her "baby" gave in regard to the heat that I feel the relief from the fog and misery I have been amongst. Said her "baby" Sunday and a piece of delightful Sunday talk it was to somebody who was grumbling considerably on account of the heat "It is only because you have nothing to do. You would be much better if you had. I feel just the same because I have no lessons to learn to-day." It is not because I have too little to do that I welcome Lady Brassey's book-nay, rather, it is because I have too much to do, and must get a little distraction to make me the better able to do it. As I cannot climb a hill and lift my head above the fog into the blue air and breathe a balmy atmosphere in reality, I do it metaphorically, and go with Lady Brassey on her voyage. Perhaps, also, because, though tied down to city life, I was meant for some other kind of life altogether; because I have had certain small flights "on wings" ere this; because I have always felt, and felt acutely, the truth of the words that

Men were made to roam.

My meaning is-it hath been always thus:
They are athirst for mountains and sea foam.
Heirs of this world, what wonder if perchance
They long to see their grand inheritance.

And so this night I leave England with her, and I rejoice in the storm she did not rejoice in on board the Norham Castle. I join the Sunbeam at Madeira, and, after enjoying the sights of that lovely island, and looking on like "Sir Roger," in this picture of his mistress, as she is thus pleasantly c: rried along, leave for Trinidad, land at Port of Spain, wander about "on shore in the cool of the evening, to enjoy the land-breeze

"In the Trades, the Tropics, and the Roaring Forties." By Lady Brassey. (London: Longmans, Green & Co.)

as it rustles through the leaves of tall trees, or softly whispers through bushes laden with sweetscented flowers, creeping quietly along the ground and just fluttering the wings of the fireflies;" dine

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and noctilucæ." I wander through fragrant forests and fields of waving sugar-cane, and tropical gardens, and see all the wonderful birds and trees, flowers and orchids, that there are to be seen. visit the far-famed Pitch Lake of Trinidad, and form one of the pleasant party which thus crosses the "Plank Bridge," and literally touch pitch without being defiled, making balls of pitch with Lady Brassey and her children, for on account of the pitch being so mixed with oil and water we keep our fingers quite clean, wondering the while how such beautiful and snowy-white candles can be produced, as we see they are, from such a very black and uninviting-looking compound. I assist at sugar-making, watch processions of ants, and think of some human beings whom I know, who are like the "crazy ant," who always seems to be in a violent hurry, and yet to be unable to make up his mind which way he wants to go, moving forwards, backwards, and sidewards, in the most purposeless and insane manner. I find the "Johnny Crows" an inexhaustible fund of amusement. I get to know all about cocoa manufacture and coffee-growing, and get duly rebuked for ever having been deluded enough to think that the beverage called coffee is made from a roasted and ground berry, instead of from a seed; but am comforted by the thought that I am rebuked in the company of Lord Bacon, and Todd, who edited Johnson's dictionary. I look at the curious leaf of the "geographical tree," or picture tree," in which it is said to be always possible to trace in imagination a map or a picture upon its surface. I listen to the serenade of coolies, I drink the most delicious of "cocktails,"

and, finally, once more find myself on board the yacht, and thus spend a Sunday with my Lady in delicious idleness. But before we come to Jamaica, we see with Lady Brassey the most remarkable sunset ever even she beheld. This is how she describes it :

"In the west the sun was sinking behind a glorious pile of golden and rosy clouds resting on a bed of daffodil

sky, such as I am sure (could we conceive such a thing as stellar consciousness) the morning star might love to fade in or the evening star to rise from, and which melted into the most tender blues and greens. Across this swept upwards a streak of deep red, like a giant comet dyed in blood. To the southward was a tremendous: miss of heavy clouds, with a curious projection like a black island and a prominent hea lland. This imaginary island seemed to open at intervals, and to admit a flood of light, which illumined the headland and the surrounding sky with bright flashes of yellow sheet lightning and sulphurous blue forked lightning. To the eastward a grey cload discharged a passing shower, while over our heads the young moon shone serene and clear in a cloudless blue sky, as if sich things as rain and thunder clouds had no existence. The whole scene filled one with wonder and awe at the mysterious loveliness of the atmospheric effects of nature."

We see much in Jamaica to delight us, and we laugh at the saying of certain military men in regard to the country that "the first year you are quartered in Jamaica you admire the scenery; the second year you collect the ferns; the third year you go mal." We find the blue peaks of the bluest mountains in the world "enchanting," and do not "skip" a page, as Lady Brassey thinks we may do, while she breaks into rhapsodies of admiration of the flora of the tropics. We do not see any necessity for the apology which she thus prettily tenders:-"There is a French proverb, you will remember (we don't remember it, but it does not the least matter), that tells you that when you are with wolves you must needs howl; and a lover of nature must needs be rapturous (without absolutely howling) when he gazes on the vegetation of the West Indies."

From Jamaica we go to the Bahamas, putting, as we go, some messages into hermetically-sealed soda-water bottles, and give them to the Gulf Stream to carry wherever it will, and visiting the Stirrup Cay Light. At Nassau, we have a great time among the corals, sponges, gorgonias, echini (sea eggs), sea weeds, sea flowers, coloured fish, and armies of crabs. We make the acquaintance of the singing-tree, whichthe pretty fluffy flowers being now over, and the pods being ripe-made, when stirred by the wind, a delicious soft cooing sort of noise, easily audible when all else was still. "I think," says Lady Brassey, "the masculine cynic who tried his best to be ill-natured, and called the 'singing-tree' woman's tongue because it was always chattering, paid us ladies rather a pretty but unintentional compliment. I only wish all tongues were half so sweet and soft, and made so little mischief." Going from Bahamas to Bermudas, we speculate as to where the sargasso weed comes from, and bottle and preserve five dozen of it; we get most unfortunately some of our pets roasted to death; we encounter a revolving storm, and the Sunbeam behaved so well as to earn for herself the

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name of "The Beauty," and in a succession of bad days to get the highest encomiums passed on her by her mistress. At Bermuda we had some

capital bathing, there being no dread of sharks; and we entertained to dinner no less a personage than Prince George of Wales, and "spent a very cheery evening, enlivened by plenty of music." Here, too, we see the most extraordinary number of fish-cow fish, calf fish, hog fish, porcupine and fish, pilot fish, "snappers," 66 sergeantmajors;" but beautiful above all, the angel fish, "the most ethereal-looking objects I ever saw in this prosaic world of ours. In shape and colour especially they more than realised childhood's idea of what an angel's wings should be like— celestial blue, purple, and gold, in every possible shade of delicate tint, on a sort of substratum of pale, shimmering brown. Their movements, too, might almost be said to be angelic, as they swam gracefully through the water, just as one might imagine an angel would float through endless space. To complete the resemblance, they had the most exquisite eyes, and a calm, serene expression of face." We visit the celebrated Walsingham Caves; we sit under Moore's tree, where he wrote the lines which our hearts echo"Oh had we some bright little isle of our own, In a blue summer-ocean, far off and alone;

Where simply to feel that we breathe, that we live, Is worth the best joy that life elsewhere can give.' We go to St. David's, one of the most curious and primitive islands of the Bermudas, where Sir

Henry Lefroy tells us that he saw a man ploughing, with a team consisting of his wife, a donkey, and a pig! We pass on to Fairyland, but have taken a rough day for that enchanted and enchanting region; we have some gun and torpedo practice from the men-of-war there; and then

"Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship”

to the Azores, and in these

"Happy isles,

Like those Hesperian gardens, famed of old;
Fortunate fields, and groves, and flowery vales,”

my flight on wings, the white wings of Lady Brassey's Sunbeam, comes to an end.

The book is almost finished, and my time, though not my patience, is exhausted. A few minutes of delicious reverie, of an ardent longing for a voyage on the Sunbeam, and then once more to work. When shall we men and women cease to dream and to long? Our pleasant, far-travelled, beautiful sight-seeing authoress has not ceased to do so, for she writes as she looks dreamily over the side of her yacht: "I thought, as each little stick or weed went floating by, of the marvellous scenes and adventures through which it must have passed, and how I would give the world to behold what it had no eyes to see!"

And I, my Lady, on this day of fog, in this great city of much misery, would give the world to behold what your eyes have seen, and for your beautiful descriptions of which, I am your most grateful and envious ORION.

Men of Note.

SIR ALEXANDER

THE sudden and unlooked-for death of Sir Alex. Grant was a sad event in many ways, and will make the past year a memorable one in the history of the Edinburgh University. Sir Alexander had not only completed his elaborate "Story of the University," but brought its Tercentenary Festival to a magnificent close, when, with the interval of a few summer months, he was summoned away. He might have fairly hoped to reap, in quiet and learned leisure for some years still, the fruit of his labours; but his life has been unexpectedly broken just when it seemed at its fullest.

Sir Alexander Grant was specially known at Edinburgh and Oxford. His repute was academic rather than popular. But he deserves a niche in our columns, as in the general esteem of his country

men.

GRANT.

He was a Scot of the Scots; and yet till he came to Edinburgh as Principal of the University he had known little of Scotland. He went to St. Andrews, indeed, years before, and found his wife there, as well as found friendships which lasted all his life. But he was born in New York, and educated in England. Even after his marriage he spent nine years in India, and only for the first time obtained a footing in his ancestral country when he settled in Edinburgh, sixteen years ago, at the age of 42. It is all the more remarkable that he filled his position as Principal there with so much distinction and usefulness. But he was eminently a man fitted to grace such a position. It was not only that he had been a distinguished student and tutor at Oxford, and had previously filled the position of Principal of Elphinstone

College at Bombay, and been Vice-Chancellor of the University and Director of Public Instruction there; but he was by nature, as well as training, highly qualified to be the head of the Metropolitan University. He had a great talent of administration, and delighted especially to organise and direct matters connected with education. He possessed a wide knowledge of educational methods of the requirements not merely of higher or University instruction, but of primary and secondary as well. He had great facility with his pen, and could draught 'schemes' with an ease, intelligence, and distinctness of outline seldom rivalled. Ile was, moreover, a man of cultivated urbanity of manner, and of eminently peaceful and conciliatory tendencies, while by no means lacking in reforming zeal. No post, therefore, could have fitted him better than that which he filled in Edinburgh, although it may be regretted that details of administration occupied him so much, to the exclusion of more intellectual work for which he was also eminently fitted. His edition of Aristotle's Ethics, before he went to India, showed amply what he was capable of doing as a student and author. His "Story of the University of Edinburgh," in two volumes, in the year of his death, proved his powers of intellectual labour undiminished; but his pen no longer seemed to move so gracefully, or with such bright

ness and compactness as before.

One is apt to think that higher work of this kind would have been more fitted for him, and proved a more lasting memorial of his genius. But it is difficult to say. He could hardly have done all that he did for the Edinburgh University if his mind had been intellectually preoccupied apart from it. And Edinburgh and its University, at least, have no cause to regret that he gave them so much of his mind and work. He filled a place in the society of the metropolis and in the progressive life of its great College which no one could so well have filled, and which no one can well replace. He will be remembered in after years as identified with a special era of the University's prosperity and widespread celebrity.

No name certainly deserves to be so well remembered in connection with the latest and most memorable event in its history. It is sad to think of his having passed so suddenly away before its glory was well spent. But his great services will not pass away. Many friends, not only in Edinburgh, will long miss his friendship and mourn his death.

We cannot close our brief notice better than with the following extract from the last effort of his pen-the striking address which he delivered to the students at the opening of the present session:

In the addresses which we have received from foreign Universities, we find in some cases that appeals are made to us to aid in withstanding the materialistic and pessimist philosophies which are to so great an extent oppressing the continent of Europe. These are

appeals to the philosophy and to the attitude of the University of Edinburgh in the future. Who can tell what the course of human thought in another fifty years may be? But I see no indication in the present, and no reason to expect in the future, that the University of Edinburgh, on its philosophic side, however much it may admire the fruitful methods of Darwinism in its earlier phase, will accept the mechanical cosmism of Darwinism in its extreme developments, or its clumsy and infelicitous attempts to evolve reason out of matter; nor, again, that our successors will consent, in obedience to the unwholesome dic. tates of a few jaundiced spirits, to renounce all hope of human happiness in this life or another. These philosophies assume an attitude as if the last word on the greatest questions had been spoken. But what a want of imagination is this! Probably the last word can never be spoken, in a world where we know in part, and see as in a glass darkly. But in the meantime, metaphysics, so far from being discarded as a scholastic dream, seem to have a new future opened to read in a German book "that the great necessity of the them; they are now looked up to and called upon, and I present day is an organic fusion of idealism with the results of modern physical science." Should this be carried out, metaphysics will justify their name, as the science that comes after physical science: thus will they culminating point and crown of the other sciences. And take the place assigned to them by Aristotle as the so it may come to pass that here or elsewhere it may be given to metaphysics to justify, or even to demonstrate to the reason, those beliefs which we now hold to by faith, and to give assurance that the glorious increase of physical knowledge is not destined to be a mere increase of sorrow; that the hope of the Christian is not an idle dream; that mankind is not left fatherless, with no

answering heart in the void abyss.

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