vants they are, they utter their pleasure not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, but by signs in heaven, by changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heraldries painted in darkness, and hieroglyphics, written on the tablets of the brain. They wheeled in mazes; I spelled their steps. They telegraphed from afar; I read the signals. They composed together; and on the mirror of darkness my eye traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols; mine are the words. What is it the sisters are? What is it that they do? Let me describe their form and their presence: if Form it were that still fluctuated in the outline, or Presence it were that forever advanced to the front, or forever receded amongst shades.

The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, "Our Lady of Tears." She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of lamentationRachael weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of innocents, and the little feet were stiffened forever, which, heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven. Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy, by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds.

This sister, the eldest, it is that carries keys more than papal at her girdle which open every cottage and every palace. She, to my knowledge, sat all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar-him that so often and so gladly I talked with, whose pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the springtime of the year, and whilst her own spring was budding, He

took her to Himself. But her blind father mourns forever over her; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within his own; and still he awakens to a darkness that is now within a second and a deeper darkness. This Mater Lachrymarum also has been sitting all the winter of 1844-5 within the bedchamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter not less pious, that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of the keys it is that our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly intruder, into the chamber of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honor with the title of Madonna.

The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum, “Our Lady of Sighs." She neither scales the clouds nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops forever, forever fastens on the dust. She weeps not, she groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her sister, Madonna, is oftentimes stormy and frantic, ringing in the highest against heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But our Lady of Sighs never clamors, never defies, dreams not of rebellious aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the twilight. Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary places that are desolate as she is desolate, in ruined cities and when the sun has gone down to his rest.

This sister is the visitor of the Pariah, of the Jew, of the bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galleys; of the English criminal in Norfolk Island, blotted out from the books of remembrance in sweet far-off England; of the baffled penitent reverting his eyes for ever upon a solitary grave, which to him seems the altar overthrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which altar

no oblations can now be availing, whether toward pardon that he might implore, or toward reparation that he might attempt. Every slave that at noonday looks up to the tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points with one hand to the earth, our general mother, but for him a step-mother-as he points with the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but against him sealed and sequestered; every woman sitting in darkness, without love to shelter her head, or hope to illumine her solitude, because the heaven-born instincts kindling in her nature germs of holy affections, which God implanted in her womanly bosom, having been stifled by social necessities, now burn sullenly to waste, like sepulchral lamps amongst the ancients; every nun defrauded of her unreturning Maytime by wicked kinsmen, whom God will judge; all that are betrayed, and all that are rejected; outcasts by traditionary law, and children of hereditary disgrace-all of these walk with our Lady of Sighs. She also carries a key, but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very walks of man she finds chapels of her own; and even in glorious England are some that, to the world, carry their heads proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have received her mark upon their foreheads.

But the third sister, who is also the youngest! Hush! whisper whilst we speak of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes, rising so high, might be hidden by distance. But being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground.

She is the defier of God. She is also the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power, but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions,

in which the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempests from without and tempests from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with tiger's leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum, "Our Lady of Darkness."

DERBY (EDWARD GEOFFREY SMITH STANLEY), EARL OF, an English statesman and scholar, born in March, 1799; died in October, 1869. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church College, Oxford, where he distinguished himself in classical scholarship, gaining the prize for Latin verse in 1819. Up to 1835, he was styled simply Mr. Stanley; then, his father succeeding to the earldom of Derby, he was known by the "courtesy-title" of Lord Stanley; in 1844 he was summoned by writ to the House of Lords, as Baron Stanley of Bickerstaff; and upon the death of his father in 1851, he succeeded as fourteenth earl to the earldom of Derby, and to the great ancestral estates of the family in England and Ireland. Under all of these names and titles Lord Derby was eminent as a statesman. He first entered Parliament in 1821, at the age of twenty-two, and soon took rank among the foremost orators of the time. From time to time he held various cabinet positions, the largest being that of Prime Minister (for the fourth time) in 1866-68. In literature the Earl of Derby is known almost wholly by his translation of the Iliad, of which the first edition appeared in 1864, and the sixth, with many corrections, in 1867. In the Preface to the first edition, Lord Derby

says: