This simultaneous rise has been stimulated by the opening of the Suez Canal, the books of which show that the average of steamers passing through rose from 995 tons in 1871 to 2,146 in 1880. The total of vessels that passed through last year was a little over 4 million tons; and as the canal has reduced the voyage between Europe and the East by fully one-half, it is plain that but for this great work the steamers and men trading last year could only have carried two million tons. It is likewise worthy of remark that if Great Britain has the largest ships, she has also done more than any other country in the construction of docks and harbors. It is notorious that the docks of Southampton have created the trade of that port. We have only to look across the Channel, at the wretched port of Calais, to be reminded how much our neighbors have yet to do in this matter. Frenchmen may doubt it, but it is true, that if France were to restore Calais to England on condition of our building a harbor there, she would gain more every year than the market value of Calais as` it stands. Instead of bounties on French bottoms, instead of arsenals like Cherbourg and Toulon, France requires better ports for her merchant-shipping; and French statesmen could not do better than see what we have done on the Clyde, at Holyhead, Liverpool, and our other great ports. Capital is now abundant, the railways of the world are almost completed, and let us hope statesmen in all countries will now turn their NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXIV., No. 6

attention to improving the seaports, upon which depends the easy and secure flow of commerce.

Let us now turn to what may be termed the " vital statistics" of shipping-the death-rate, birth rate, and increase annually. These vary, just as among men; but the average life of a ship is only half that of mankind. Some are lost by the action of wind and waves, some by fire or collision, some are never heard of, and about one-eighth are broken up after long service. The ordinary life of a ship, allowing for all the above contingencies, is 18 years in the United States, 20 in France, 22 in Holland, 25 in Germany, 26 in Great Britain, 28 in Italy, and 30 in Norway. I am indebted to Mr. Kiaer, the Norwegian statist, for the following annual average of wrecks, for seven years, ending 1879 :

Assuming three voyages yearly for sailing vessels, and fifteen for steamers, it appears that a sailing vessel is lost once in seventy-two voyages, and a steamer once in 490 voyages; so that the latter has only one-seventh of the risk of the former. The fewest wrecks occur to Italian vessels, perhaps because (as is notorious) in all long voyages every sailor has a share in the ship. Norwegians have likewise a very low ratio of losses, which may arise from the fact that they are a nation of navigators; for Norway has almost a ton of shipping per inhabitant, or five times as much as our ratio in Great Britain.

Between vessels lost and broken up the annual death-rate of the world's shipping is 4 per cent, or 750,000 tons nominal. On the other hand, the birthrate is 5 per cent-the average of new vessels built being 950,000 tons. But this does not convey an exact idea of the increase of shipping, since the substitution of steamers for sailing-vessels gives an augmentation of 4 per cent in carrying power. The vessels lost or broken. up represent a carrying power of 1,200,

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same reason, if one half of the population of Dublin were to do like the Jersey people, go to sea, their death-rate would be just 10 per 1000, or I per cent. per annum less than the half who remained by the pestilential shores of the Liffey. If the sea levies a toll of 3 per 1000 annually, it shows, indeed, that there are dangers to which the landsman is not exposed, but by no means comparable with the extra harvest of death that neglect of sanitary measures inevitably entails in cities.

The shipping of the United Kingdom earns about 60 millions yearly, and employs 200,000 seamen, whose industry, therefore, is equivalent to £300 per man, as compared with £190 for each of our factory operatives. The net profit of the shipowners will hardly reach 10 millions; but we treat of the value of the industry, not the individual gains. And here it is necessary to distinguish that our sea-going navy earn's only 48 or 50 millions, the rest being the share that belongs to coast-trade. The freight earned by all flags, for seaborne merchandise, is a little over 100 millions, or 8 per cent of the value of same. On comparing the imports and exports of all nations (which are composed of the same merchandize), it will be found the difference is gradually diminishing, as freight becomes less the present average is 15 or 16 shillings a ton on all goods carried over sea, taking the world in globo. The toll which all nations pay us for the carrying trade is equal to nearly 4 per cent of the ex

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ported value of the earth's products and manufactures. Pessimists will still be heard to say that our shipowners are losing money, or making an insignificant profit; but, if that were the case, our merchant navy would not go on expanding, as it does, every year.

In conclusion, let me be permitted to recapitulate the points which the English people. should impress upon its mind, viz.:

1. That the increase of carrying-trade has been beneficial to mankind, and has been mainly promoted by Great Britain.

2. That steamers have 5 times the carrying-power, and 7 times less risk than sailing-vessels.

3. That British preponderance on sea increases every year, and that the shipbuilding trade is mainly in our hands. 4. That British sailors carry most merchandise per man, and that we can work cheaper than any other flag.

5. That maritime disasters are relatively diminishing every year, and that the ratio of British vessels lost is much below the general average.

These are facts almost unknown in England, although everything regarding this subject ought to be duly appreciated, for there are few things that ought to give us greater satisfaction than the knowledge that we possess the greatest merchant-navy that the world has yet seen, and that its power and efficiency, increasing year by year, are a lively emblem of the commerce, wealth, and farextending influence of Britain.-Contemporary Review.

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further still in this matter, and assert that besides the great names just mentioned there are something like half a dozen luminaries of lesser magnitude, any one of whom would put into the shade the Southeys, Moores, and Rogerses, who (with considerable courage and self-satisfaction) twinkled alongside Coleridge and Wordsworth in a firmament where also shone Keats, Shelley, and Byron. And, if we must indeed believe with Mr. Arnold (who, being a poet, ought to know) that poetry is now the drug" which the booksellers declare it to be, we cannot but admire the poets all the more for their courage, and especially for their generosity, in giving so much of what is so little required. "With a garden of roses to listen, it is a grudging nightingale," says the Eastern satirist, who will not sing; but he is a generous songster indeed who will pipe to the sands of Sahara. Ce qui fait que nous avons des poëtes, c'est que nous pouvons nous en passer," Joubert ought to have said, for clearly the better we can do without poets the more poets we have and the more abundant are their songs. But is it really true that we can do without them? We believe that a more searching inquiry into this matter would show that in this country at least, where the passion for the other fine arts is quite exotic, the popular passion for poetry is the genuine passion, and, though it will at times yield to other influences-such as those induced by sudden outbursts of scientific discovery, or by fashionable mimicries of foreign taste, or by commercial and speculative crazes, or by a tide of martial enthusiasm is really undying; and a sure sign of this is the fact that poetic genius cannot be silenced by the temporary coldness of the popular ear, but will express itself whether it find listeners or not. This is what gives a special interest to the fact that two such volumes as those of Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Rossetti have appeared almost simultaneously at a period when poetry is said to be an unmarketable commodity. For variety of poetical gifts-for imagination, for pathos, for humor, and for music-Mr. Tennyson's latest volume can only be characterized as marvellous ; and before we have ceased wondering at it, and long before we have been able to

do it full justice, we get this volume from Mr. Rossetti, which, if not so absolutely various as Mr. Tennyson's, inasmuch as humor is not attempted, is certainly as rich in poetic beauties, and even more phenomenal as a product of a time such as ours; for the supernatural element of poetry (as fundamental an element as the humorous, and much rarer in modern times) finds here an expression as genuine, as unadulterated with the self-conscious knowingness of a scientific age, as if the poems had been written in the time of Shakespeare, or even in the time of Roger Bacon. Here, perhaps, is Mr. Rossetti's distinctive and most prominent place in the literature of our time. What other people try to do and fail to do give a poetic embodiment to the eerie" mood of Nature as she lies dreaming of man's destiny Mr. Rossetti does with much apparent ease that he scarcely seems to try at all. That his sister, however, should show much of the same peculiar gift was perhaps to be expected.

SO

We have before now expressed our opinion of the ballad of "Sister Helen," which appeared in Mr. Rossetti's previous volume. It is mere critical coxcombry that asserts its superiority by lavishing praise on the great names of the past and refusing to do common justice to contemporaries, and we have never shrunk from saying that, as a tragedy having for vis matrix the forces of earth and hell and heaven combined, Sister Helen" is to be ranked with those supreme efforts of human imagination which are a possession for all time-just as we have not shrunk from saying that a poem of a different kind of imaginative power, such as Rizpah," shows a mastery over the eternal sources of pity and terror which not the greatest masters have excelled.

After we have given a few extracts from the first poem in this volume (the ballad of Rose Mary'), we shall certainly feel surprised if the reader does not agree with us that it is by far the greatest romantic ballad that has appeared in this country since the publication of Sister Helen," which itself had had no equal since " Christabel."

The story is this: The knight Sir James of Heronhaye, affianced to Rose Mary, had determined to start at break

of day for the shrine of Holy Cross, in order (as he gave out to his affianced and her mother) to make a "heavy shrift" before the wedding day. This news had disturbed Rose Mary and seriously alarmed her mother, who knew that

On his road, as the rumor 's rife, An ambush waits to take his life. He needs will go, and will go alone; Where the peril lurks may not be known; But in this glass all things are shown. This "glass" is the mysterious Berylstone, around which the entire tragic action revolves.

Now the mother was skilled in the necromancy brought over from Palestine, and was, moreover, the present owner of this Beryl-stone, in which any action, however distant, could be seen as in a mirror, and where foreshadowings of Fate could be read, but only by the pure eyes of maidenhood, for on it were engraved, in a tongue long dead, the "None sees here but the pure words alone. Rose Mary's mother had often employed her daughter to read the prophetic stone, and it was determined that in it Rose Mary should now look, in order to save her lover from the un

known peril which threatened him. The description of the Beryl is exceedingly fine :

The lady unbound her jewelled zone
And drew from her robe the Beryl-stone.
Shaped it was to a shadowy sphere,-
World of our world, the sun's compeer,
That bears and buries the toiling year.

With shuddering light 'twas stirred and strewn
Like the cloud-nest of the wading moon:
Freaked it was as the bubble's ball,
Rainbow-hued through a misty pall
Like the middle light of the waterfall.

Shadows dwelt in its teeming girth

Of the known and unknown things of earth;
The cloud above and the wave around,-
The central fire at the sphere's heart bound,
Like doomsday prisoned underground.

A thousand years it lay in the sea
With a treasure wrecked from Thessaly;
Deep it lay 'mid the coiled sea-wrack;
But the ocean-spirits found the track :
A soul was lost to win it back.

In the kind of imagination informing
this description (which culminates in the
last two lines here quoted) Mr. Rossetti
has had but one equal in nineteenth
century literature
S. T. Coleridge.
The workings, mysterious and imperi-

ous, of the unseen powers who govern, while they appear not to govern, all that is seen, were never more grandly indicated than here, while the color is as rich as anything in Keats.

Although Rose Mary had so often during her girlhood acted as reader of the prophetic pictures passing beneath the stone's polished surface, her heart beat violently as she now leaned over her mother's lap and gazed into the magic sphere, and her soul was full of misgivings, which her mother perceived, but could not explain. Rose Mary, however, told what she saw : "Stretched aloft and adown I see Two roads that part in waste-country: The glen lies deep and the ridge stands tall; What's great below is above seen small, And the hillside is the valley-wall."

Stream-bank, daughter, or moor and moss,
Both roads will take to Holy Cross.
The hills are a weary waste to wage;
But what of the valley-road's presage?
That way must tend his pilgrimage.
"As 'twere the turning leaves of a book,
The road runs past me as I look ;

Or it is even as though mine eye
Should watch calm waters filled with sky
While lights and clouds and wings went by."
They'll scarce lie close till he draws near.
"In every covert seek a spear;
"The stream has spread to a river now;
The stiff blue sedge is deep in the slough,
But the banks are bare of shrub or bough."