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are artificial flowers in the market, but the wilding hedge-rose is not the less lovely.

But there are fiercer temptations, sharper emotions, sterner trials to be faced than those in which Tennyson most avails us. To some people they hardly come at all, to most at very rare intervals. And partly for that reason, the poet who has dealt with them most habitually, most courageously, most truly, finds comparatively few readers; because either you must have experienced those emotions yourself—and that depends mainly upon outside circumstances or you must have the imaginative capacity for really realising their existence in other people before you can understand the poet's treatment of them. That has a good deal to do with Browning's 'unintelligibility;' in spite of which, whatever Browning's permanent position in literature may be, he appears to me to be emphatically now, at least for the younger generation, the most valuable moral and intellectual force of the century.

Even with this limitation to a particular generation, that is making a pretty strong statement, especially when a section of the said younger generation is engaged in relegating Browning to the category of intellectual gymnasts, and inviting us to draw our inspiration from the superior sanity, force, and insight ofIbsen. If anyone finds himself the better for reading Ibsen, by all means let him read; but to claim him as the truest guide, philosopher, and friend for a humanity which wants perhaps more than anything else to be assured that life is worth going through with and pain worth enduring, has a certain absurdity about it.

For the key to Browning lies in the intensity of his conviction that life is worth living just because pain is worth suffering.

'For what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence

For the fulness of the days? Have we withered and agonised? Why else was the pause prolonged, but that singing might issue thence?

Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized ? ' We start on life's journey with all the sanguine pride of youth; others have failed, but the victory will be reserved for us. Well, when the fruit does not drop into our outstretched hands, or it may be we find that the tree is guarded by a very pestilent dragon (on which we can make no ostensible impression at all, whereas it can, and does, make a very disagreeable impression on us), then we sometimes begin to despair. Failure is very dis

heartening; and when we begin further to suspect that on the whole failure is the rule, not the exception, to

'Look at the end of work, contrast

The petty done, the undone vast,

This present of ours with the hopeful past,'

the natural man turns pessimistic. But Browning realised all this to the full, and it did not make a pessimist of him. Now there is a certain kind of optimism which under such circumstances is merely enraging-the optimism of the successful' man who, because he has aimed low, has reached his mark and is thoroughly contented; who is unconscious that all success is so far failure that there must ever be a beyond. This is the optimism which does not even know that there is an ideal; it is blankly unsympathetic from sheer want of imagination. But there is another kind of optimism; the optimism of one who knows what failure means, has tasted the bitterness of the bitter drink, has felt the sting with all its keenness; the optimism that refuses to be daunted. And this is possible only as the outcome of a very intense conviction that ''tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do;' failure is in the things done, that took the eye, and had the price;' and the things done are of small account at best.

'What I aspired to be

And was not comforts me;

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.'

To have an ideal and to strive after it at any cost of suffering, and if it prove actually attainable, to realise a new ideal beyond and above; so seeking always something higher than that to which we have attained, and whether we achieve or not, to go on striving

"Tis but to keep the nerves at a strain,
Dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,

And, baffled, get up and begin again;

So the chase takes up one's life-that's all,'—

this is what makes life worth having, and without this it is a poor sort of affair. And with Browning this rested on other convictions so vigorously and intensely expressed, so vitally bound up with everything that he spoke most convincingly, that one can only stand amazed at the suggestion, which has been soberly made by admirable but surprising persons, that he is a

'dangerous' writer. This is not, however, either the time or the place to enter on a discussion of Browning's theological ideas. What he was, and what he has done for us, he summed up in those last lines of his, which shall also be the last in this series

of papers :

6

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,

Never dreamed though right were worsted wrong might triumph,
Held, we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,

Sleep to wake.'

ARTHUR D. INNES.

SUN-RAYS AND STAR-BEAMS.-III.

Questions.
JUNE.

9. Describe the complex make of a Ray of Light.

10. Explain the use of a telescope, and the main difference between a Refractor and a Reflector.

II. How can we be aware of the existence of stars, which no human eye has ever seen?

12. What is meant by the Diffraction of Light?

Answers to be sent to Miss Coleridge, Cheyne, Torquay.

CLASS LIST FOR APRIL.

Marks up to 10 are given for each answer. Papers cannot be returned or individually corrected. Walnut and Mrs. M. K. do not compete for the prize. The Competitors under sixteen are so much in line with the others that there is no need of a separate Class List for them. An extra prize will be awarded to them if they persevere. Marks are given for correctness and clearness, not for length.

Hypatia, 40; Moonshine, 35; Titania, 33; G. H., 33; Saxon, 33; Eine Mädchen, 30; Mary Churchill, 30; Walnut, 26; Hawthorn, 20; Joanna, 18; John Yeatman (under eleven), 15; Mrs. M. K., 10; Fra Diavolo, 35.

C. R. COLERIDGE.

SUN-RAYS AND STAR-BEAMS. `

BY AGNES GIBERNE, AUTHOR OF SUN, MOON, AND STARS,' THE
WORLD'S FOUNDATIONS,' 'THE OCEAN OF AIR,' ETC.

III.--RADIANT WAVELETS.

ALTHOUGH Wave-motions in the air are essentially the same as those produced on the surface of water, there is a difference which must be clearly borne in mind. It is that, while the waves of water can only advance in rings or circles on its surface, soundwaves are sent forth spherically in all directions through the atmosphere which fills all our space.

Precisely the same is it with the rapid mysterious waves or impulses propagated by a source of light. Hold up a candle, and note how the rays of light flow in all directions simultaneously, up, down, and on every side, except where your interposing arm checks the flow and casts a shadow, though even there some measure of light, reflected from particle to particle of air, creeps round it.

A candle which can brighten a room will, if placed out-of-doors, do visibly the same for only a very small space just around itself; yet the sphere of pale light springing from it actually extends far-as far as the flame can be seen by any power of vision, not to say a great deal farther. It seems, indeed, to us, looking through darkness at the tiny glimmer from a considerable distance, that all the light comes to ourselves in one single ray. Nevertheless that ray is but a minute portion of the wide faint sphere of candle-light given forth in all directions.

Even thus shine the stars in space, heaven's luminaries-radiant, burning, dazzling, if scen near at hand, but at our vast distance all the light seeming to be narrowed down to one slim shaft of brightness. A ray, we call it. That ray is but a slip out of the vast sphere of radiance which spreads away through countless billions of billions of miles, on every side, from the star.

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'A main difficulty,' writes Miss Clerke, 'in getting star-light to disclose its secrets is that there is so little of it.' So little of it that we can get hold of. Any amount lavished abroad through space; but a very minute portion at a time entering the pupil of a human eye to imprint upon the mirror at the back a picture of that distant sun. There lies the difficulty; and, as Miss Clerke adds, Hence the absolute necessity in stellar spectroscopy for large telescopes. The collecting nets have to be widely extended to gather in a commodity so scarce.'

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Did you ever think before of a telescope as of a net to fish in stray star-beams for the astronomer's use? That is literally what it has to do. Millions of stars are ever sending out their billions of tiny light-vibrations each second of time, and the rays reach our eyes as we stand looking up at a clear night sky; but, except in the case of a few thousands of stars at most, the images formed by those rays upon the retina are too dim to cause any sense of sight. The brain receives no message telling of their existence.

Now the purpose of a telescope is to make visible stars brighter, and invisible stars visible. It grasps many more star-rays than the small human eye can compass-in other words, a very much larger slice of the sphere of star-light-and it brings that increased amount within reach of the eye.

Two kinds of telescopes are commonly used, the Refractor and the Reflector.

In a Refractor the star-rays reach first a large object-glass, through which they pass, and by which, as they pass, they are caused to converge, narrowing, to a focus. From this point they widen slightly on their way to the eye-piece, and after passing the eye-piece, by which they are once more straightened into parallel rays, they reach the eye. Hence the eye actually sees as much of the star-light as if its pupil were the full size of the object-glass; and the power of such an instrument depends upon the size of that glass. Refractors have been made with objectglasses thirty inches across, which, for the observer, means looking at a star with an eye-pupil two feet and a half in diameter. There are difficulties as to increasing the size of the glass beyond a certain degree.

A Reflector follows a different plan. When it is pointed at a star, the rays fall direct through the tube upon a highly-polished mirror, so shaped that rays of light reflected thence are caused to converge to a focus, from which focus, again, they widen

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