silently from head to foot, "Were it but myself I could bear it,-I could bear it."

She answered, with quivering lip, though firm as to her voice, "We will bear it together, beloved. Be not sorrowful. I will be brave. Thou shalt not hear me utter so much as one cry. Weep not; weep not." And she put up her little hands unto his face, whereon his tears falling, they did seem like unto flowers wet with rain, and strove to comfort him with sweet unselfish reasonings,-how she would not suffer but for one knife-stab, and how did she not see him suffer she could bear all without one tear, and how so soon as they should be dead their spirits would be together even as in life they had been. So that, with her sweet forgetting of herself, he did but remember her more, to agonize over the dreadful fate in store for her and the helplessness with which he was weighed down as are the rebellious giants by Zeus-cast Pelion.

Now, when the ship was come near unto the shore, Gigas ordered the sailors to lower boats, and into one of these, having first bound them, he caused Cleon and Autonoë to be placed, and, leaving the ship at anchor, he rowed quickly to the shore. Then he commanded such of the crew as were Tauricans to remain with him, while the others he did order to return to the ship, and, having reached her, to up anchor and away. Then he caused Cleon and Autonoë to be dipped in the waves and their attire to be disordered, that they might seem to have been battling for their lives. Also he and his companions went out into the waters and rended their garments in divers places. Thereafter, lying down upon the sea-shore, they waited for the coming of the dawn.

And when that day was opened whitely above the purple line of the eastern hills,-like to a pale lotus that unfolds upon the dark breast of some Indian river,-there came people running down to the shore,— men and women, young boys, and maidens carrying children yet useless as to their feet. And they cried out with a great voice, and danced as in rejoicing about Gigas and his sailors, and about the twain so closeclinging the one to the other. But, being addressed by Gigas in their own tongue, and the sailors also speaking unto them, they became more quiet in manner, and communed among themselves in low voices.

And after a time they returned to the town whence they had come, and, descending yet a second time unto the shore, brought with them priest and garlands and wine in crystal vessels.

Now, Cleon, being free once more as to his hands, placed Autonoë behind him, and, jerking his knife from the belt of a youth who stood near, said, "Him who doth approach me I will kill as I would a dog!" And three men did he wound nigh unto death, so that the Tauricans were compelled to snare him with ropes ere they could take him. But when they did tear Autonoë from his grasp, he did fasten his teeth in the shoulder of the man who held him, that he roared with pain and fury and ran in among the multitude, saying that this Athenian was no man, but rather a dragon, as had been the first king of Athens.

And Autonoë sobbing saith, "Torture me in whatsoever way thou wilt, but hurt him not! hurt him not!"

Whereat they, not understanding her, laughed with great jollity at what were to them most uncouth sounds.

And they took him, Autonoë following, to the summit of a green hill overlooking the sea. And thereon was an altar erected, and a rudelycarven image of Artemis near it. And already were the sides of the hill, and even the fields below, black with people as a fallen pear with ants. And fires were kindled near the altar; also its horns were hung with wreaths of sea-weed, in token of the sacrifice about to be made.

Then first the priest, taking Autonoë by her short locks, stripped away her peplos from her white shoulders, uncovering her fair bosom to the gaze of the savage throng. And when Cleon saw what had been done, and the desecrating eyes upon the sacred form of her who was his wife, he flung off the hold of those who guarded him, as a wave dashes the foam from its crest, and, seizing upon the priest, hurled him face down into the open fire, and there held him until his face was burned as black as was the soul within his body. Whereat the Tauricans, having borne the maimed man shrieking from the hill, seized Cleon and put the knife to his throat,-when all suddenly there burst in among them a youth, travel-stained and foot-sore, and he cried out, in a loud voice, "Hold! hold, in the name of Artemis!"

And, being refreshed with wine, he spoke in the following words: "Ye do all know me, the son of Thyrsa who was slave unto Democles; and this man did save her life. Moreover, he is that Cleon on whose behalf the great Pallas did appear but a month gone on Areopagus in Athens. Surely, if ye injure so much as a hair of his head, ye will be cursed with dire curses, ye and your children after ye!"

Then they made him give word in every wise of how he was come thither. And he told them how he had set forth at the behest of Thyrsa, his mother, she having been made acquainted of the design of Gigas against Cleon.

Now, at the name of Gigas, there went up a savage roar, so that he hearing it turned paler than the ashes of the now waning altar-fires. And they cried out, "Where is he? Where is this Gigas who hath defamed our country unto the Athenians,-he who hath denied us, and who hath slain Tauricans in battle?-Gigas! Gigas! Gigas!-Blood!

Blood!"

And the boy, pointing to him, said, "There he is. Sacrifice him!" And they cried out again with fury and with delight, and seized and bound him upon the altar, and, the priest being half dead and unable to officiate, they plunged their knives into his body, men and women, with cries of "Traitor! traitor !" and "For Artemis !" So died Gigas the Taurican.

But Cleon and Autonoë they conducted with all pomp to Hellas, first having laden them with gifts of gold and of jewels. These they, being unable to refuse without discourtesy, bestowed upon the woman Thyrsa, in acknowledgment of her noble act. And they maintained her in their household until the day of her death. And Autonoë's children played about her knees. Also, when the day of her death did come upon her, Autonoë supported her head upon her sweet bosom, and Cleon with his own hand closed her aged eyes.

VOL. XLI.-18

Amélie Rives.

FANCY IN THE MIST.

I.

Go, search the vasty reaches of the Mist,

O Fancy! Haply to thy favored eyes
Green valleys may unbosom, hills may rise,
Where only plains have been.-Go lightly, hist!
Lurk yonder where the King of Elves keeps tryst,
In soft rose-gardens where the dew ne'er dries;
Find out who listens to his fluttering sighs,
Whose wayward lovely lips are deftly kissed!.
Now, more adventurous courses thou shalt beat:
This path shall bring thee where the Wilis lead
Their vacant dance with ever wilder speed,
And this shall bring thee to that dim retreat
Where sit the Fates, and measures dark repeat,
While they the driven wheel and spindle heed.

II.

Stay, flitting one, and what I tell thee list:
Oh, not of Evening, bowed on votive pyre,
And not of Morn, who with an urn of fire
Paceth the hills, a blessed votarist,
And laveth them with molten amethyst,-

Oh, not of Evening or of Morn inquire
Where throbs the heart of passion and desire,
But seek it in the white enchanted Mist,
Most like some human heart that would suppress
Its long-time trouble, yet the blanchéd cheek,
The yeiled eye, the lips too tremulous weak

To ease the loaden spirit of its stress,
Shall the supreme of passion show not less

Than if that eye glanced fire, those lips should speak!
Edith M. Thomas.

MODERN WORD-PARSIMONY.

ORDS," says Lavater, ably in expressing this view of the matter he bore in mind the lucid terseness of his own apothegms. But words can hamstring action as effectually as the dreariest silence, and they can clog and retard it by their own inert and ponderous weight. Now, indeed, that the race for existence spurs us on to swifter efforts, words have been whipped into a corresponding vigor, and literature, shorn of its languid grace, stands stripped like an athlete for the course, carrying nothing that

are the wings of action;" and prob

may interfere with its primary object of getting rapidly over the ground. But before this grand doctrine of haste was preached on every side, words had a different part to play. They were not then the supple servants they are now, but turbulent retainers who by dint of sheer bulk often routed the idea to which they were supposed to minister. Let those who doubt it try, for example, to chase the meaning through some of those long and curiously complex sentences that bristle over Milton's prose pamphlets, and they will find to their great humiliation that it eludes their search, holding itself dexterously concealed in a labyrinthian net-work of words until they give up the pursuit in despair. And their sense of defeat is strengthened by the certainty that Milton of all men knew accurately what he meant to say, and that it was but a trick of the hand that served to hide his thoughts behind their clumsy and artificial barrier. When Mr. Mark Pattison painfully counted the thirty-nine lines and the three hundred and thirty-six words in that one monster sentence from the "Ready Way," it was equivalent to a confession on his part that he could make nothing more out of it than a Gargantuan mass of severely unpunctuated letters.

Again, if that modern scholar who complained that at Oxford his time was "all frittered away in lectures" could but be transported back to the universities of Jena or Wittenberg in the sixteenth century, he would find how trifling a matter was mere time in the estimation of the learned. When Karpzow took a year to interpret the first chapter of Isaiah, he was considered on the whole to have made fair speed with his subject. Haselbach, a Viennese theologian, lectured for twenty-two years upon that same chapter, and was unhappily cut off by death before he had finished his theme. Pacinchelli delivered seventy-four lectures on the four chapters of the book of Jonah. Penziger gave three hundred and twelve lectures on Daniel, and fifteen hundred and nine on Isaiah, the delivery of which took twenty-five years. Passing on then to Jeremiah, he proceeded to expound that prophet for seven years, and was beginning to make some headway with his subject, when Death, who alone seemed capable of bringing matters to a conclusion, unfeelingly interrupted the course. Those were truly the days when

Men must have had eternal youth,

Or nothing else to do.

Mr. Haweis, who is never prone to flatter, assures us in one of his sermons that we can hardly realize the puny nature of our own minds;" but the theologian who could deliver fifteen hundred lectures on Isaiah plainly took another view of man's capacity. "Like spiders," says Mr. Baring-Gould, "they spun interminable threads out of their own bodies;" but the spider's thread is not interminable. It is, in fact, a strictly limited quantity, and when the season's supply is exhausted the spider goes homeless or seeks a boarding-house; whereas the assortment of words is practically measureless, and to this day they are the only articles that the thrifty Teuton is apt to use extravagantly. Mr. Matthew Arnold and Mr. Pattison have both recorded their vigorous protest against the superfluous wrapping, the "blue mist," in which modern German writers persist in enveloping their most original

thoughts; while Schopenhauer, who thoroughly enjoyed a jeer at his countrymen's expense, acknowledged with mischievous glee that to be at once both emphatic and unreal was enough to set them floating in an ocean of complacency.

On the other hand, the French writer of to-day, profiting by the severe training of the past and the critical development of the present, has learned to perfection the delicate manipulation of words. If he does not confine himself as rigorously as did his classical predecessor to a diction shorn of every excrescence and containing only the essential elements of his work, neither does he permit himself to loiter in dishabille through the flowery paths of literature. If the beggarly thirty thousand words of the old French Academy Dictionary can no longer meet all his requirements, his conception of authorship is to use with discretion the materials he has at hand, rather than encumber himself with fresh supplies. "Do you read the dictionary?" asked Théophile Gautier of the young Lafayette, who had come to him for counsel. "It is the most fruitful and interesting of books. Words have an individual and a relative value. They should be chosen before being placed in position. This word is a mere pebble; that, a fine pearl or an amethyst. In art the handicraft is almost everything. Inspiration, yes, inspiration is a very pretty thing, but a little banale; it is so universal. Every bourgeois is more or less affected by a sunrise or sunset. He has a certain measure of inspiration. The absolute distinction of the artist is not so much his capacity to feel nature, as his power of rendering it."

Nevertheless, it must be felt before it can be rendered, and Gautier's sympathy for nature is a little like that of Louis Leverett in "A Bundle of Letters," who, while always talking about the sky, was quite content to look at it through a window-pane. But in the dexterous use of words, the choosing and fitting of each one, as the worker in mosaic selects and fits each tiny bit of stone, in this art, it must be admitted, the French poets have reached perfection. And this art is precisely what the scant leisure of modern life and the growing multiplicity of books have conspired to render most desirable in literature. Diffuseness, once the great prerogative of genius, has sunk into the unpardonable sin, and the first melancholy lesson taught to the young aspirant is the absolute need of condensation. Perhaps it was the scarcity of paper as much as any other outside influence that helped the youthful Brontés to digest their thoughts so thoroughly before committing them to black and white. Those who have looked upon the specimens of Charlotte's early writing, so cramped and fine that it is hardly decipherable, can realize what a rare commodity were the few precious sheets they trudged over the moors to buy.

And a universal scarcity of paper would be no small help in pushing our experiment to its furthest limit, in curtailing, if possible,

-the already curtailed cur.

When history is told us in a succession of brief "episodes;" when the ponderous memoir of the past has shrunk to the two hundred pages of a "Men of Letters" series; when the five-volume novel has given