Oh, God, forgive you!" and she fell on her knees, covering her face.

'No, no, she's not sinking. Come, cheer up, my girl -it may all be well yet: whatever's possible will be done, but we can't launch the life-boat. In such a sea it would be mere madness to attempt it."

"Then what are they to do?" she cried, despairingly; but the only answer was a quick, "Be quiet now, my good girl," as he shook her hand off, and turned away.

She was quiet, pressing her hands upon her bosom to still the terrible beating of her heart. No word, nor cry, nor sob fell from her; she stood motionless, entranced, like one turned into stone; her lips apart, her wild eyes fastened on the ship, her face livid like death.

Buffeted wildly to and fro, the boat yet came on, dashed forwards on the crest of each swelling waveonwards and onwards towards the great tongue pier that stretched a hundred feet out into the sea. All eyes were watching her all hearts were standing still: many a voice as well as Annie's was hushed in this great moment of suspense. On, on, still!-another second now! Not yet-she is driven back -- a retreating wave has caught her-her decks are under water; she is rising once more-a great sea lifts her up-it bears her forward-it flings her on the pier-she has struck-she has separated-she is sinking! A cry like the cry of one voice breaks from the whole assembled crowd-a wild shriek that spreads far even over the raging sea-a shriek from wives who are made widows-from fathers and mothers who are made childless-from hearts which are made desolate.

Who can save them who can save them, struggling in those surging waters? A cry for help is rising there a cry as wild, as full of agony as that which burst upon the shore, and has broken now into innumerable sounds of woe. But what avails it ? who can save them? They are going down-the waves are wrapping them in their strong, cruel armstheir cries are coming up suffocating from amidst the raging waters.

One woman has broken from the crowd and rushed upon the pier. They try to hold her back, but, laughing wildly, she bursts from them: the wind is madly helping her on-on, on, she cannot return: forward through the spray of the breaking waves--forward to the wreck of the Valentine. Wildly she rushes on one name alone, repeated like a cry, upon her lips-one name, rising ringing on the wind, echoing amidst the waves' deep thunder, calling for an answer, with wrung hands,-with pale, despairing eyes piercing the troubled sea.

Hark! Not in vain-oh, Annie, not in vain-thy prayer is heard-listen !-look down!

Faint, like an echo of her cry-feeble, like a falling breath the answer comes; from the worn battler's dying lips, with passionate death tenderness, her name has broken, and upward-stretching arms are calling to her. She sees ah, hears: a shout of maniac laughter, wildly joyous-then a low soba moaning, trembling cry, and then a spring, and she is with him. Together they go down-together, locked in one another's arms they sink, and the water closes over them: the dark water wraps them in its arms for evermore.

The leaden storm clouds break in the far west-one single clift, through which a flood of crimson light shoots forth across the sea. The white foam sparkles up like silver, the tumultuous waves are glittering like hills of gold: there, where the lovers sank, the heaving sea appears to be on fire. Deep, intense, beautiful, the radiance falls around, playing like golden lightning on the water. They lie below, cold and dead, locked in that long, last, passionate embrace; but, as that crimson glory fades away, perhaps upon its wing it bears their spirits to enter with it through the golden gates.

Low watcher in the cottage on the hill, thou too didst

see that sudden flood of light, and as it fell across thy bed, did no voice come to tell thee that it marked the moment of thy daughter's death? Watch no more; the night is coming on, she never can return. Beneath the wild waves now she sleeps with him she loved; yet think not of her lying there; think rather, when the golden sunlight streams upon thee, that she is looking down on thee through it.

HARRIET MARTINEAU.

HARRIET MARTINEAU is one of the ablest and most vigorous of our living prose writers. We cannot call to mind any woman of modern or of past times, who has produced a larger number and variety of solid, instructive, and interesting books. She has written well, on political economy, on history, on foreign travel, on pschycology, and on education; she has produced many clever tales and novels; her books for children and for men are alike good. She has been a copious contributor to the monthly and quarterly reviews, and she is at present a regular writer of leading articles in one of the best conducted of our morning daily papers. Her life has been one of hard work, and she seems to work for the love of it, as well as for love of her kind. Even when laid on her bed by sickness, she went on writing, as if it had become habitual to her, and then produced one of her most delightful books, her Life in the Sick-room.

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Miss Martineau is a woman with a manly heart and head. In saying this, we neither desire to cast a reflection on the sex to which she belongs, nor upon herself. It would be well for women generally, did they cultivate as she has done, the spirit of self-help and self-reliance. We believe it would tend to their greater usefulness as well as happiness, and render them more efficient cooperators with men in all the relations of life. In ordinary cases, unmarried daughters are a burden in a genteel' family of slender means; but in Miss Martineau's case, she has throughout been a mainstay of support to herself and family. Her father was a manufacturer at Norwich, descended from a French refugee family-French Protestants having settled down there in considerable numbers after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Commercial embarrassments having overtaken the Martineaus, the sons and daughters were under the necessity of bestirring themselves in aid of their family, which they did, honourably and successfully. Miss Martineau, who had first taken to writing as a recreation, afterwards followed it as a pursuit and a profession; and in so doing she realized a competency. What was more, she carefully cherished her independence as a writer; and when, overtaken by illness, her political friends, then in power, bestirred themselves to help her, and, in 1840, obtained for her the offer of a considerable government pension, with a conscientious and high-minded feeling, which in these modern times finds few if any imitators, she declined to receive it,-holding it to be wrong that she, a political writer, should receive a pension which was not offered by the People, but by a Government which, in her opinion, did not represent the people. She sincerely preferred retaining her independence and entire freedom of speech with respect to Government and all its affairs, a decision which, however much it may be at variance with our ideas of worldly prudence, we cannot but respect and admire. More recently, also, she has displayed her force of character in another direction;

we mean by the publication, in conjunction with Mr. Atkinson, of the Letters on Man's Developement, &c. With her views, as set forth in that book, we have no sympathy; and we cannot but deplore, in common with her numerous friends, that she was so ill-advised as to publish it. Nevertheless, it was a thoroughly honest act on her part: done at the risk of her popularity, reputation, and good name. She had arrived at conclusions opposed to those generally entertained on certain points; and as a public writer, she conceived that the 'cause of truth" required that she should make a clean breast of it. Here, we think, she committed a grievous mistake; for it can form no part of the duty of any public writer to publish whatever crude notions may get uppermost in her head. The error has, however, been committed; and we merely allude to it here as furnishing a striking illustration of Miss Martineau's character; somewhat similar to her defence of Mesmerism in the Athenæum, when scarcely a voice, except that of Dr. Elliotson, had been raised in its favour.

Miss Martineau displayed reflective powers at an early age. Possibly her deafness, to which she was subject as a child, by shutting her out to some extent from conversational intercourse with those about her, encouraged habits of reflectiveness. She was a timid child, but a quick and accurate observer. Her excellent work on Household Education, contains some autobiographical revelations of her childhood, of a most curious and interesting character. One of these-describing the feelings of wonder and almost awe, with which she contemplated a newly born sister, when she herself was about nine years of age-lets us into a remarkable phase of an observant and thoughtful child's mind. Here is an account of her early reading, from the same interesting book:

"One Sunday afternoon, when I was seven years old, I was prevented by illness from going to chapel,-a circumstance so rare, that I felt very strange and listless. I did not go to the maid who was left in the house, but lounged about the drawing-room, where, among other books which the family had been reading, was one turned down upon its face. It was a dull-looking octavo volume, thick, and bound in calf, as untempting a book to the eyes of a child as could well be seen: but, because it happened to be open, I took it up. The paper was like skim-milk,-thin and blue, and the printing very ordinary. Moreover, I saw the word 'Argument,' - -a very repulsive word to a child. But my eye caught the word 'Satan;' and I instantly wanted to know how anybody could argue about Satan. I saw that he fell through Chaos, found the place in the poetry; and lived heart, mind, and soul in Milton from that day till I was fourteen. I remember nothing more of that Sunday, vivid as is my recollection of the moment of plunging into Chaos: but I remember that from that time till a young friend gave me a pocket edition of Milton, the calf-bound volume was never to be found, because I had got it somewhere; and that, for all those years, to me the universe moved to Milton's music. I wonder how much of it I knew by heartenough to be always repeating some of it to myself, with every change of light and darkness, and sound and silence, the moods of the day and the seasons of the year. It was not my love of Milton which required the forbearance of my parents, except for my hiding the book, and being often in an absent fit. It was because this luxury had made me ravenous for more. I had a book in my pocket, a book under my pillow; and in my lap as I sat at meals; or rather on this last occasion it was a newspaper. I used to purloin the daily paper before dinner, and keep possession of it, with a painful sense of the selfishness of the act; and with a daily pang of shame and self-reproach, I

slipped away from the table when the dessert was set on, to read in another room. I devoured all Shakspere, sitting on a footstool, and reading by firelight, while the rest of the family were still at table. I was incessantly wondering that this was permitted; and intensely, though silently grateful I was for the impunity and the indulgence. It never extended to the omission of any of my proper business. I learned my lessons; but it was with the prospect of reading while I was brushing my hair at bed-time; and many a time have I stood reading, with the brush suspended, till I was far too cold to sleep. I made shirts with due diligence, being fond of sewing; but it was with Goldsmith, or Thomson, or Milton open on my lap, under my work, or hidden by the table, that I might learn pages and cantos by heart. The event justified my parents in their indulgence. I read more and more slowly, fewer and fewer authors, and with ever-increasing seriousness and reflection, till I became one of the slowest of readers, and a comparatively sparing one."

Miss Martineau was born in June, 1802, and was already an author at twenty years of age, in 1822, when she published her first little volume, entitled Devotional Exercises, for the use of young persons. This book was soon followed by another of the same description, entitled Addresses, with Prayers and Hymns, for the Use of Families and Schools. These works were of the "orthodox Unitarian" school, to which class of religionists the Martineau family belonged. A number of minor publications followed, chiefly little tales-some of them in. tended for children; but the writer's powers were grow ing apace, and when, in March, 1830, the Monthly Repository published an advertisement by the Committee of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, offering premiums for the production of three tracts, the object of which should be the introduction and promotion of Christian Unitarianism amongst the Roman Catholics, the Mahometans, and the Jews respectively, she determined to compete for the prizes. Three distinct sets of judges were appointed to adjudicate upon the essays sent in; and when their decision had been come to, much to their own surprise they found that the same writer had won all the three prizes! Miss Martineau was the successful essayist. It is not our business to enter upon the subject of these essays, which were, perhaps, such as Miss Martineau herself would not now write. They were, however, much praised at the time they appeared, and exhibit a vigour of thought and a finish of style remarkable in so young a writer. But, previous to the production of these essays, Miss Martineau had been practising her hand extensively in the pages of the Monthly Repository, where we find her publishing Essays on the Art of Thinking in 1829, with numerous criticisms on books, articles on education, morals, and politics,-tales, chiefly religious, poems, and parables.

But Miss Martineau's name did not come prominently before the public as an author until the appearance of her Illustrations of Political Economy, which originated in the following way: a country bookseller asked her to write for him some little work of fiction, leaving the choice of subject to herself. About that time machinebreaking riots were frequent in the manufacturing districts; and as the subject would doubtless be a good deal discussed in the Martineau's home, the head of which was a manufacturer, an interesting plot was at once suggested. The Rioters, a story, was the result; and it was followed by another in the following year, entitled, The Turn Out. In these tales the author afterwards confessed that she wrote Political Economy for the first time without knowing it. Some time after, on reading Miss Marcet's Conversations on Political Economy, the idea occurred to her of illustrating the principles of this science in a narrative form. She repeatedly discussed the

lane; and finally, they part off on the village green, each to some neighbouring house of the gentry. Behind the village and the heath stretches the railroad, and I watch the train triumphantly careering along the level road and puffing forth its steam above hedges and groups of trees, and then labouring and panting up the ascent till it is at last lost between two heights, which at last bound my view. But on these heights are more objects; a windmill, now in motion and now at rest; a lime-kiln, in a picturesque rocky field; an ancient church tower, barely visible in the morning, but conspicuous when the setting sun shines upon it; a colliery, with its lofty wagon-way, and the self-moving wagons running hither and thither, as if in pure wilfulness; and three or four farms, at various degrees of ascent, whose yards, paddocks, and dairies I am better acquainted with than their inhabitants would believe possible. I know every stack of the one on the heights. Against the sky I see the stacking of corn and hay in the season, and can detect the slicing away of the provender, with an accurate eye, at the distance of several miles. I can follow the sociable farmer in his summer-evening ride, pricking on in the lanes where he is alone, in order to have more time for the unconscionable gossip at the gate of the next farm-house, and for the second talk over the paddock fence of the next, or for the third or fourth before the porch or over the wall where the resident farmer comes out, pipe in mouth, and puffs away amidst his chat, till the wife appears, with a shawl over her cap, to see what can detain him so long; and the daughter follows, with her gown turned over her head (for it is now chill evening), and at last the sociable horseman finds he must be going, looks at his watch, and, with a gesture of surprise, turns his steed down a steep broken way to the beach, and canters home over the sands, left hard and wet by the ebbing tide, the white horse making his progress visible to me through the dusk."

While Miss Martineau was thus confined to her sickroom, gazing upon such pictures as these, she heard at a distance of the wonders of mesmerism, how that it had raised the palsied from their couch, cured the epileptic, and soothed the nerves of the distracted. Having tried every imaginable remedy, she determined to try this; and whether from the potency of the remedy or the force of the patient's imagination, certain it was that she was shortly after restored to health. The cure has been variously accounted for, some avowing that nature had accomplished a crisis, and worked out a remedy for herself; others, with Miss Martineau, insisting on the curative power of the mesmeric passes. The subject was well discussed in the Athenæum a few years since, by Miss Martineau on the one side and by the editor on the other; nor would it be an easy matter to sum up the net results of the controversy. With all Miss Martineau's amount of unbelief on some points, we cannot but regard her as extremely credulous on others; and though she is liberal to the full on general questions, there are topics on which she seems to us (particularly in her book on Man's Development) to be a considerable bigot. It is quite possible to be bigoted against bigotry, and to be superstitious in the very avoidance of superstition. There was a good deal of force in the rough saying of Luther, that the human mind is like a drunken peasant on horseback, set him up on one side and he falls down on the other.

Miss Martineau's best book is the History of England during the Peace, published by Charles Knight. It is an extremely able, painstaking, and, we think, impartial, history of England since 1815. It exhibits the results of great reading and research, as well as of accurate observation of life and manners. It is unquestionably the best work of the kind-indeed it may be said to stand by itself, as a history of our own times. Its execution docs

the author much credit, and we trust she will long be spared to produce books of equally unexceptionable quality and character.

AUSTRIAN SALT MINES.*

HAVING enjoyed an excellent opportunity for exploring the curious mineral treasure-house near Salzburg, it is natural to desire that others should be interested in the same scenes, and if possible drawn into a region which Sir Humphrey Davy pronounced unequalled by Switzerland itself for romantic views, sublime mountain-heights, and lakes that Italy might envy. Intelligent travellers, who have tired of the hackneyed route by railroad, and crossed from the Danube by way of Lintz and Gonünden to Salzburg, have wanted words to express their admiration of scenery continually changing from sublimity to loveliness-the greenest and best tilled fields, the most picturesque little lakes, the marble crests of snow-clad Alps, the frowning gloom of vast forests, uniting the beauty of various lands in one.

Salzburg, the nearest city to the principal salt-mines, is really unequalled for beauty of position by any inland town in the world. A romantic castle, once belonging to the archbishops, and built 800 years ago, towers over the city-in one of the dungeons of which an archbishop suffered a long confinement for having taken to himself a wife in other apartments many of the instruments of torture remain by which Protestants were worried out of life not very long ago. A better memorial of their pious lordships is a tunnel cut through the native rock more than 400 feet long, bearing the bust of its builder, Archbishop Sigsmund, with the inscription, "The rocks tell of thee!" I was still more interested by an ordinary, comfortable-looking house, the birthplace of Mozart, whose bronze statue by Schwanthaler struck me as one of the noblest in Europe. Nor is this the only master of song whose memorials Salzburg rejoices to treasure: a mean-looking tomb was shown in one of the city churches as that of the great Hadyn, but I suspect it is some other personage of his name, as the composer of The Creation died at Vienna, and would hardly have remained to this time with so poor a monument.

All the walks and gardens of the town are arranged so as to display the magnificence of surrounding nature, showing how busy the hand of taste has been; while ruder art has carved half a street of dwellings out of the lime rock, erected two imposing castles and a famous old riding-school of solid stone.

But we must hasten to Hallein, the salt-village, over which towers the salt mountain Durnberg, which we have first to walk up on the outside, and then descend through its hollow heart. Fortunately again for a lonely traveller, the Church had availed herself of the constant necessity of ascending this lofty hill, and erected what she calls "a Calvary" along the way, and, being at the right season when the Catholic heart of Germany pours itself out with a peculiar and refreshing enthusiasm, fair village maidens, and sometimes tottering village sires were my companions up the steep road; and, every little while, a rude shrine stood at my side, with a crucifixion rudely carved, and some scene from the "Last Suffering" painted beneath. And here this unsophisticated devotion gave free vent to itself in groans, and prayers, and sighs, and tears, then passed on refreshed and lightened to the next lowly altar, where another picture carried the Saviour still nearer to his crucifixion-agony. And so I had company enough, and of those who, though differing from me entirely in opinion, I could have fellowship with at the heart-not questioning their sincerity, and rejoicing, as I did, at the joy which their religion evidently gave their child-souls. From Putnam's Magazine.