unconsciously in these words might be—'The sun, that rejoices, has finished his daily toil; man, that labours, has finished his; I, that suffer, have finished mine.' That might be what she thought, but what she said was, 'It is evening; and the hour is come when the Angelus is sounding through St. Sebastian's.' What made her think of St. Sebastian's, so faraway in depths of space and time? Her brain was wandering, now that her feet were not; and because her eyes had descended from the heavenly to the earthly dome, that made her think of earthly cathedrals, and of cathedral choirs, and of St. Sebastian's chapel, with its silvery bells that carried the Angelus far into mountain recesses. Perhaps, as her wanderings increased, she thought herself back in childhood; became 'pussy' once again; fancied that all since then was a frightful dream; that she was not upon the dreadful Andes, but still kneeling in the holy chapel at vespers; still innocent as then; loved as then she had been loved; and that all men were liars, who said her hand was ever stained with blood."
We might, had we space, quote as a pendant, by way of contrast, to this fragment of the grave, a bit of the gay, in which the writer so liberally indulges, always with a tender humanity however, and a fast friendship for Kate. But limits defy us; and sooth to say, we prefer the grave to the gay passages in this strange eventful history—and many, we surmise, will mistake the seeming levity and familiar chit-chat with which the adventures are, perhaps on the whole prejudicially, interfused.
A curiously different subject follows, viz., "The Last Days of Kant"—originally forming part of the too-brief series in Blackwood, called "Gallery of the German Prose Classics." This account of the closing years of the great transcendental philosopher, which is based on the narratives of Wasianski, Jachmann, Borowski, and others, excited considerable interest at its appearance seven-and-twenty years ago; since which time the improved and constantly advancing knowledge of Kant, on the part of English readers at large, must be such as to warrant our predicting for it a greatly advanced attraction. It is to be hoped that the author's other writings in elucidation of Kant's philosophy and miscellaneous works will be given in future volumes; the narrative speciality of the present volume is, we presume, the reason why none of these valuable exegetical articles are wrought up with this memoir of the professor's ultimate and penultimate years. We should have been glad to see one volume of the series simply devoted to Mr. de Quincey's contributions to the illustration of German literature: perhaps he may yet be induced to adopt the suggestion. The extent of his labours in this field has never been duly recognised; and others, whom really he anticipated in point of time and surpassed in degree of merit, have been landed as the almost exclusive interpreters of Teutonic belles lettres and metaphysics. There is plenty to make up a volume from his scattered criticisms in the London Magazine, Tait, and Blackwood—comprising notices of Lessing, Kant, Göthe, Jean Paul, &c.—and it would be a volume, we submit, greatly in request, in these days of awakened and widely-spread attention to the characteristics of Deutsch literature and life. If only to assert bis own claim, as a leader among those who actually aroused this interest, such a volume is one we fain would see. And its
