places them in the succession in which he finds them in the rocks,—­it is not the embryologist who devises the changes through which the living Polyps pass as he watches their growth; they only read what they see, and when they compare their results they all tell the same story.  He who reads most correctly from the original is the best naturalist.  What unites all their investigations and makes them perfectly coherent with each other is the coincidence of thought expressed in the facts themselves.  In other words, it is the working of the same Intellect through all time, everywhere.

When we observe the practical results of this sequence in the position of Corals on the Reef, we cannot fail to see that it is not a mere accidental difference of structure and relation, but that it bears direct reference to the part these little beings were to play in Creation.  It places the solid part of the structure at the base of the Reef,—­it fills in the interstices with a lighter growth,—­it crowns the summit with the more delicate kinds, that yield to the action of the tides and are easily crushed into the fine sand that forms the soil,—­it makes a masonry solid, compact, time-defying, such a masonry as was needed by the great Architect, who meant that these smallest creatures of His hand should help to build His islands and His continents.

THE AUTHOR OF “CHARLES AUCHESTER.”

When Mr. Disraeli congratulated himself that in the “Wondrous Tale of Alroy” he had invented a new style, he scarcely deemed that he had but spun the thread which was to vibrate with melody under the hand of another.  For in none of his magical sentences is the spell exactly complete, and nowhere do they drop into the memory with that long slow rhythm and sweet delay which mark every distinct utterance of Elizabeth Sheppard.  Yet at his torch she lit her fires, over his stories she dreamed, his “Contarini Fleming” she declared to be the touchstone of all romantic truth, and with the great freights of thought argosied along his pages she enriched herself.  “Destiny is our will, and our will is our nature,” he says.  Behold the key-note of those strangely beautiful Romances of Temperament of which for ten years we have been cutting the leaves!

In “Venetia,” hint and example were given of working the great ores that lie in the fields about us; and when Elizabeth Sheppard in turn took up the divining-rod, it sought no clods of baser metal, but gold-veined masses of crystal and the clear currents of pure water-streams;—­beneath her compelling power, Mendelssohn—­Beethoven—­Shelley—­lived again and forever.