“pure crude fact,
  Secreted from man’s life when hearts beat hard,
  And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since.”

It moves from none of the supernatural agencies which give the impulse to our interest in Faust, nor from the sublimer passions and yearning after things unspeakable alike in Faust and in Hamlet.

Yet, notwithstanding its lack of the accustomed elements of grandeur, there is a profound impressiveness about The Ring and the Book which must arise from the 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