Cases of this description are no doubt of rare occurrence. Yet not a year passes in London without something transpiring of the existence of one or more of them in the huge metropolis. Medical men view them with unpardonable indifference. Thus one doctor told me of a lady, whom he had been attending with other physicians, who, it appeared, always announced that they were coming some minutes before they drove to her door. It was very odd, he thought, and there was an end of it.
"M. l'Abbé," said Voltaire to a visitor, who gave him a commonplace account of some remarkable scenes, "do you know in what respect you differ from Don Quixote?"—"No," said the Abbé, not half liking the look of the question. "Why, M. l'Abbé, Don Quixote took the inns on the road for castles, but you have taken castles for inns."
Adieu, dear Archy.—Yours, &c.
Mac Davus.
FOUR SONNETS BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
I. LIFE.
Each creature holds an insular point in space;
Yet, what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound,
But all the multitudinous beings round
In all the countless worlds, with time and place
For their conditions, down to the central base,
Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound;
Life answering life across the vast profound,
In full antiphony, by a common grace?—
I think this sudden joyaunce, which illumes
A child's mouth sleeping, unaware may run
From some soul breaking new the bond of tombs:
I think this passionate sigh, which, half begun,
I stifle back, may reach and stir the plumes
Of God's calm angel standing in the sun.
II. LOVE.
We cannot live, except thus mutually
We alternate, aware or unaware,
The reflex act of life: and when we bear
Our virtue outward most impulsively,
Most full of invocation, and to be
Most instantly compellant, certes, there,
We live most life, whoever breathes most air
And counts his dying years by sun and sea!
But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth
Show out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration, both,
Make mere life, Love! For life in perfect whole
And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,
As nature's magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.