What! feel remorse, where, if a cat had sneezed,
A leaf had fallen, the thing had never been
Whose very shadow gnaws us to the vitals.

This consideration of contingencies, this question of to be or not to be, is forcibly illustrated in Schiller's Wallenstein's Tod. In the first act of that tragedy, Wallenstein soliloquises in this strain of quasi-fatalism: Can he no longer what he would? no longer draw back at his liking? he must do the deed because he thought of it?

By the great God of Heaven! it was not
My serious meaning, it was ne'er resolved.
I but amused myself with thinking of it.

Again and again he pauses, and remains in deep thought. Anon comes the reflection :

My deed was mine, remaining in my bosom :
Once suffer'd to escape from its safe corner!
Within the heart, its nursery and birthplace,
Sent forth into the Foreign, it belongs
For ever to those sly malicious powers
Whom never art of man conciliated.

And the scene of agitated hesitancy closes with the moody man's self-gratulation on his conscience being, thus far, free from crime:

Yet it is pure-as yet!-the crime has come
Not o'er this threshold yet-so slender is
The boundary that divideth life's two paths.

Happier he that can put Himself in Hubert's case and honestly affirm,

This hand of mine

Is yet a maiden and an innocent hand,

Not painted with the crimson drops of blood.
Within this bosom never enter'd yet

The dreadful motion of a murtherous thought.

A happiness only to be rated aright, perhaps, by an actual" murtherer," like the nameless one from whom Shakspeare wrings the most natural, most unavailing cry,

O that it were to do!-What have we done?

Well it is, for all of us, that we cannot discern the thoughts and intents of the heart, one in another— cannot detect the almost culprit, the imperfect criminal, under the fair outside of the seemingly perfect gentleman. There is a poem of Barry Cornwall's, devoted to what some might consider a morbid analysis of a friend's "Interior" (that is the name of the piece), in which the person addressed, hitherto reckoned the "flower of jolly, gamesome, rosy friends," is bid

Unloose your heart, and let me see
What's hid within that ruby round.

The result of the revelation is, that here “our illpaired union ends." At least, the intimacy is destroyed. The fellowship is, on second thoughts, allowed to continue-on slacker terms, indeed, and by a frailer tenure, but still a recognised existence such as it may be.

No,-let's jog on, from morn to night;
Less close than we were wont, indeed;
Why should I hate, because I read
The spots kept secret from my sight,
And force some unborn sins to light?

Owen Meredith-if that now transparent pseudonym is still to be used-in the opening soliloquy of his Clytemnestra, makes the guilty queen-guilty in thought, and not as yet in deed-meditate on the compunctious visitings that perturb her bosom, and ask herself the reason of all this incurable unrest. Wherefore to her-to her, of all mankind, this retribution for a deed undone?

For many men outlive their sum of crimes,

And eat, and drink, and lift up thankful hands,
And take their rest securely in the dark.
Am I not innocent-or more than these?
There is no blot of murder on my brow,
Nor any taint of blood upon my robe.

—It is the thought! it is the thought! . . and men
Judge us by acts! as tho' one thunder-clap

Let all Olympus out.

In fine, the gist of her wistful self-questioning is, why should she, an imperfect criminal, be tortured with remorse as for a perfected crime?

But it comes across her, in an after-stage of her progress towards accomplished guilt, that

Surely sometimes the unseen Eumenides

Do prompt our musing moods with wicked hints,
And lash us for our crimes ere we commit them.

ABOUT A LITTLE CANDLE'S FAR-THROWN

BEAMS.

A Cue from Shakspeare.

BRIGHT, to this hour, as when Portia saw it at a distance, on her return to Belmont, shines that little candle in her hall, which suggested to her the moral simile, So shines a good deed in a naughty world. Bright it shines on, still; for Shakspeare lighted it from the perennial fire of his own genius-a light that never was on sea or shore. And in so doing, he did, in his way, what the martyr bishops of the previous generation had done in theirs,-lighted a candle that should never be put out. For when will Shakspeare cease to be read? And while he is read, every one will be familiar with the soft sheen of that taper which attracts Portia's eye, as she nears stately Belmont on her return from Venice:

That light we see is burning in my hall.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

General literature would supply a milky way of such reflected lustres, cared any inquirer to bring

them within focus. Sometimes the light would be perdurable, like Portia's candle; but sometimes evanescent as a will-o'-the-wisp, dim as from the poorest of "dips," or the feeblest of rushlights. Let us, however, glance at a few here and there, of the little candles that throw their beams in story more or less afar.

There is Hero's for instance--though no taper, but a torch-to light Leander through the dark waters to his love:

The boy beheld,—beheld it from the sea,

And parted his wet locks, and breath'd with glee,
And rose in swimming, more triumphantly.

Nightly it thus served for his guiding-star. At times, when winds blew fresh and strong, the "struggling flare seemed out;" but Leander trusted not to seeming, and knew that his watchful Hero was but shielding it with her cloak; and sure enough, in another minute the light would beam forth again all the brighter for that interval of eclipse.

The people round the country, who from far
Used to behold the light, thought it a star,
Set there perhaps by Venus as a wonder,
To mark the favourite maiden who slept under.
Therefore they trod about the grounds by day
Gently; and fishermen at night, they say,

With reverence kept aloof, cutting their silent way.

How that light went out at last, and with it the light of Hero's life, is it not written in poems and stories by the score, classical and romantic, old and new?