stiffest kind,

Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero are the staples), one in classical philology, one in ancient history, and six in reading at sight, making in all fourteen three-hour papers. It is no slight ordeal, and I wish I had three years instead of two for it. As it is, I expect to read in the long vacation terms. I should not have changed my mind and taken up this regular course, giving up the idea of Germany altogether, but that I decided, after examining into the matter, that this classical tripos work was just the thing I needed to fit me for the position which I hope some day to fill. I also felt that my lecturers, accustomed to the Cambridge way of doing things, would know more exactly what to advise me and would take a more lively interest in my progress, if I were doing regular work. And so I have quite dropped Sanskrit for the present. I have been taking about six lectures a week all winter: two in Greek, public, and one private; two in Latin, private, and one in Latin composition with a class. My private lecturers, Mr. ArcherHind and Mr. Verrall, are of Trinity College, both classical lecturers there and considered especially brilliant scholars. Mr. Archer - Hind is now a university examiner, and Mr. Verrall has just been put on for next year. I am rather sorry for this, because I cannot have lectures from him the last term or two, as you are never expected to be coached by one of your examiners. I do not go in next year, but in February, 1880; but an examiner is always on for two years.

THREE terms have now passed at Cambridge [England], and I have found them very pleasant and very profitable. When I first came here, you know, I intended to spend a year, studying principally Latin, Greek, and perhaps Sanskrit, and then to go on to Germany. When I arrived I found that I could have good advantages for Greek and Latin, and that the lectures of the university professor of Sanskrit, Professor Cowell, were open to women, although none had as yet availed themselves of the privilege. For a little while I was undecided, but very soon it seemed best to me to take the classical tripos, as I found I should be admitted to it on my degree without further examination, the whole thing being as yet informal; and also that I should be allowed to take it in two years. In spite of all the work which I have already done in America in the classics, my "coach," as they call the private tutor here, tells me that I cannot stand among my equals in two years and not probably in three, because my preparation is not such as to give me a fair start. The men come up from the public schools with an immense amount of training in classics, mathematics, or whatever their special subject may be. There is a great deal of reading at sight done, and a great deal of composition, both prose and verse. There is very little, you know, of the former of these exercises done at home, and comparatively little composition. It is one thing to write in Greek unconnected sentences, however difficult, about what Cyrus could, would, or should have done if Clearchus had done something else, and it is quite another thing to be set down to a piece of Macaulay, Burke, or Carlyle, and expected to give it in some kind of Greek or Latin. There was actually a piece from Sartor Resartus set in this year's tripos. There are two papers in prose composition, two in verse, two in ancient philosophy (of the

is not nearly so good as our average B. A. degree. These students are obliged to attend a certain number of lectures and have several examinations to pass, I believe, during the time they are up here. The men who go in for honor, or triposes as they are called, take their previous examination or “ little-go" immediately, and then read for three years with no examinations, having almost always private coaching and being obliged to attend very few lectures. But the new system of intercollegiate lectures offers such advantages that I understand in all the triposes except the mathematical one can go through without coaching. To the intercollegiate lectures, with one or two exceptions, women are not yet admitted. It depends on the favor of the colleges where they are held. The university lectures are of comparatively little value. They are almost all open, and some of them are largely attended by ladies, both students and others, as, for example, Professor Seelye's history lectures. But most of them are not good working lectures, and I have not yet been advised to attend one on the classics by my lecturers.

My work this winter has been chiefly reading Greek and Latin literature and doing prose composition. I do not intend to attempt verse. The set subjects for '80 are the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Plato's Phædo and Philebus, and Cicero's Academica. I have already read the Phædo very carefully, but I must of course review it thoroughly. I have been lately reading the Academica, and more unsatisfactory stuff it was never my misfortune to have to deal with. In the first place, Latin, with all Cicero's command over it, is miserably inadequate for philosophical purposes; and in the second place, Cicero's own ideas are decidedly mixed and his information often incorrect; at least that is the opinion of wiser heads than mine, and to me it seems so. I have not yet taken up the Aristotle, but I expect to find that tough. I have been reading a little ancient philosophy. I have returned to Schwegler for a general textbook, and I have come to the conclusion

that it was the fault of his subject that I found him such a pill on German philosophy last year, for anything more clear and concise I never saw than his outline of the systems of ancient philosophy.

So much for my studies during the past winter. Now, perhaps, you may wish to hear something of my other experiences. I have not been at Newnham Hall, which was too full when I made application, but at a similar institution, Norwich House. This is in many ways a much less desirable place. Newnham was built for a college, but Norwich House is simply a house hired in the town to accommodate the continually increasing number of students. Although it was a boys' college, still it was always a make-shift, combined out of two or three small houses and added to, and the rooms are small and more or less inconvenient. I will say nothing of the fact that it has no closets, for Newnham Hall, a new and well-built house, has nothing but recesses with curtains hung in front for clothes. What do you think of that for civilization? But I hardly need to ask a native of New England, where the closets are little rooms. There have been about seventeen girls at Norwich House this year, and I have found them very pleasant acquaintances. Among them I have also been so fortunate as to find a few friends. The social atmosphere of the house has indeed quite reconciled me to my stay there. I do not feel certain that I shall like Newnham, where I shall be next year, any better, or so well, with all its advantages. Most of the Norwich House girls are much less advanced than I, and that I have found a certain disadvantage, not that some of them are not cleverer, but we are not on the same ground. They are all going in for the various groups of the Cambridge higher local examinations. I have become acquainted during the winter with some Cambridge people, connected, as about all the nice Cambridge people are, with the university, and have found many of them very kind and hospitable. I am enjoying my stay there greatly, and am well pleased with the

prospect of nearly two years more. The May term, and especially the boat-race week, is a gay season at Cambridge, and I had during this term quite as much outing as was good for my studies.

The Christmas vacation of seven weeks I spent partly in London, but mostly in Cambridge. In London I saw the opening of Parliament, which was not very much, and heard a debate in the House of Commons. I was in London just at the time of the opening of the university to women, and heard a good deal about it from people I met. One distinguished physician said, as I was told, in the debate, that he had one dear daughter, but he would rather see her in her grave than that she should enter the medical profession! The London University has received much commendation, but it should be remembered that Oxford and Cambridge have the question of residence to deal with, and however much we may approve of the theory, the practical application must be matter for careful consideration and experiment. The great majority of the Cambridge men, I know, are watching Girton and Newnham with the greatest interest, and many are lending a helping hand wherever they have the opportunity. Some who are already heavily burdened with their own college work are most generous in giving of their small leisure to these institutions, and I have no doubt that if all goes well, quietly and not at such a very far distant time these colleges will be incorporated with the university. I think there is all the difference in the world between the spirit of the Harvard and that of the Cambridge examinations for women. The people who planned

the Harvard examinations wish that institution to hold out against women as long as possible; those who planned the Cambridge examinations wish just the opposite.

When I was a child, and spake as a child, reckless of grammar and rhetoric, there was no trouble; but, growing mindful of the proprieties of speech, I became conscious of a need, dimly felt at first, and hardly recognized, but ever growing more imperative, until now it calls loudly every time I open my mouth to speak, or take a pen to write. For instance, I am writing a story, and come to the following sentence: "Then they had a delightful time reviewing the whole transaction, each stoutly defending the course of the other, and severely blaming"I pause. "Himself" will not

do, because one of them is a woman. "Herself" is out of the question, for the other is a man. Once I should have written themselves," but now I know better. That sentence can never be finished. I must write it over again, using "both" instead of "each," and failing to express my exact meaning.

Again, I am writing a business letter. I say, "If there are any further preliminaries to be arranged, let Mr. or Mrs. Smith come out on the ten o'clock train, and we will meet Here I stop. Not "him," for Mrs. Smith might come; not "her," for it might be her husband. I will not reconstruct my sentence, and say "them," when I particularly wish they should not both be present.

And so am I tormented at every turn, my only comfort being the fact that I am not alone in my misery. How often do I see a fellow-mortal pause in the middle of a sentence, groping blindly for the missing word, and then begin over again, or flounder miserably and ungrammatically through to the bitter end!

Why should we not have a new word? What is the use of such men as Professor Whitney, or Professor Max Müller, or Mr. Richard Grant White, if they cannot help us in a real trouble like this? They are like the entomologists who spend years of patient research in finding out the scientific name of the potato bug, and cannot tell us how to get rid of him. Let the eminent linguists leave the spelling reform and such trifles long enough to coin us a word which shall spare a preacher from saying, as I heard one

once, "Let every brother or sister examine himself or herself, and looking into his or her heart find out his or her besetting sin, and resolutely cast it from him or her."

I do not believe there is a writer in the country that is not hampered every time he no, she There! I've run against the old snag.

Corot scarcely ever reproduced himself. He is untranslatable. But if it were possible to put him in a book, I have seen a score of his pictures that would bind in charmingly with the Story of Avis. Ten of his works, great and small, landscape and genre, -lyric and epic poetry, which shed their dreamy beauty over the Cottier Collection, remind me of what a writer in the April Atlantic said of Miss Phelps's story, in this wise: "That would be a dull and cold reader indeed who should fail to be impressed by the emotional intensity of the tale, its mental refinement,

.. and the highly poetic quality of its diction." Reduce this dictum to studio phrase, and it stands for Corot. His landscapes represent the true meaning of such passages in the Story of Avis as these: "Her future, through the budding of that spring, advanced to meet her. She became electrically prescient of it. She throbbed to it as if perplexing magnetisms played upon the lenient May air.... Never had she seemed before to be in such harmony with the infinite growing and yearning of nature. . . . She spread the spring showers upon her palette, and dipped her brushes in the rainbow. . . . The air was full of the languors of unseen buds; far and faint upon the shore summoned the rapture of the hidden sea. . . . The imperfectly The imperfectly defined scent of buds faded from an air gone drunk with yielding blossoms.”

Does this appear extravagant or affected? Allowing the genuineness of the feeling, I think that the sober admirers of Miss Phelps's remarkable work will agree that Corot's landscapes are a more proper and natural medium for its expression, while conservative taste, or old fogyism, or impenetrability, whichever you choose to call it, sets down both

as being equally insane and devoid of meaning. Sentiments and feelings are discovered in the same way as physical laws and asteroids, or mechanical processes. The undiscovered ones exist, but cannot speak. Combinations of colors, or words intended to express them, have to conquer and work their way into the fibre of the masses before the latter can believe in them or derive corresponding sensations therefrom. Painting has an advantage in this conquest, because it is unconstrained and many-sided, like music, and offers a softer cheek to the conservative's kiss of submission.

Corot is a stranger to many who feel that they are members in the guild of high art, and because they derived their art ideas from the commonplace and realistic schools. His companionship can be won only through his poetic nature. They are a proportionally small class who readily see and appreciate true poetry, even when it is indicated by perfect rhyme and metre; and it is more difficult still to be able to find, and at pleasure to pitch, the poetic key in landscape painting. But once found, how sweet a symphony the landscape sings!

The skeptics come naturally by the suspicion that the suddenly developed admiration of Corot is a craze and half a humbug. They wonder why the young man, who left a draper's counter at twenty-six, and spent the remaining forty-nine years of his life studying and dreaming in the home of Claude, in the fields and under the soft skies of Italy, or in the sentimental and sunny atmosphere of France, did not achieve complete recognition in all this time, if he had the genius that is now claimed for him. He certainly painted enough pictAnd the art dealers who had bought on speculation the several hundred paintings which the public did not crave — took advantage of the artist's death, in February, 1875, to make a collective exhibit of them, and by wellknown means to awaken public attention. His reputation mounted, like mercury by summer fervor, high up among the names of Rousseau, Troyon, Diaz, and Millet. It is easy to accord fame

ures.

to the dead when the public is made to realize that it has been blind and unfeeling; and it is not discreditable to the honest belief in Corot of those who had the selling of these pictures that they have been dealt out with caution and commercial art.

- A short time since there entered an editorial office in New York an intelligent-looking young negro of twenty-one or twenty-two years. His dress and address were prepossessing, and the editor put his pen behind his ear and received the inevitable bundle of MSS. with a sentiment somewhat akin to pleased expectation. "Here at last," thought he, "is the indication of that which we have long been anticipating. The coming generation of negroes will be like this young chap." He adhered, however, to his invariable rule never to examine a MS. while the author waits, and after a few words of encouragement bowed his visitor out, and at once (unprecedented and inexcusable promptness!) opened the package which had been laid on the desk. It contained the wretchedest trash that ever courted recognition as poetry.

The editor determined not to snub the young man, so he violated another custom of the office by returning the MSS. at editorial expense, no stamp having been left, and wrote a kindly letter advising careful reading and memorizing of Longfellow, Tennyson, Whittier, and other poets.

A week passed, and the young man again entered with a buoyant step and confident air. He laid down his package and hastened modestly away. Here is his letter of acknowledgment, and following it is one of the poems which resulted from his study of the best models:

MR. EDITOR, After didicating my unfeigned gratitude to you for the kind and parental information which you condesended to communicate to me, in your letter of the 17th of Nove (last) by telling me, that I required much study of the best english writers and much genuine literary culture before I could hope to gain admission to the columns of the

best publications; I beg you to allow me to trespass upon your inteligent patience once more, by offering to your valuable journal, three more poems, of my humble composition. With great respect, your obedient servant,

NAPOLEON BONAPART BROWN.

THE WIDOWER'S ADIEU. BY NAPOLEON BONAPART BROWN. AND must thou go my dearest wife, To return again O never? Departed from this world of strife Forever and forever.

I no more thy gladening face shall see
Whilst the rivulet murmer to the river;
No more wilt thou my consort be
Forever and forever.

With thee I 've roamed the lake and lea
And where the aspens shiver
And yet from thee I now must be
Forever and forever.

Sweetly repose in thy satin-lined tomb Forget thee I will never

May there be glee beyond thy gloom Forever and forever.

Fall dewdrops whilest the gentle wind blows
Upon the tomb where lies my Bella
Welcome my love a sweet repose
Forever and forever.

In the land sublime may be thy rest
Where toil shall find thee never
Where thou wilt in heavenly royalty dress
Forever and forever.

Thou hast loved me long and true, A companion thou wert ever, But now to thee I bid adieu Forever and forever.

Yet must thou go my dearest wife
To return again O never?
Departed from this world of strife
Forever and forever.

One evening while I was stationed at Lexington, Kentucky, I rode out to see the great crow roost. It was one of the most remarkable sights I ever witnessed. The place was about seven miles from the city, on the Danville pike. The roost was so ancient that the oldest inhabitant could not tell when the crows first commenced coming there. Many years ago the roost was nearer Lexington, but as the trees were cut away the crows moved southward, always seeking the next piece of timber.

At the time of my visit, there were no large forests in the country near the city,