How dear a place that daughter really held in Cymbeline's heart, we see from his exclamation :

"My daughter! What of her? Renew thy strength :

I had rather thou shouldst live while nature will,

Than die ere I hear more. Strive, man, and speak!"

On this, Iachimo proceeds to recount the incidents of the wager, and of his visit to the Court of Britain, together with the details noted down in Imogen's chamber, that composed "the simular proof" which made" the noble Leonatus mad.'

Imagine Imogen's state of mind during the recital! Oh the shame, the agony with which she hears that her dear lord" has indeed had cause to think her false ! All is now clear as day. The mystery is solved; but too late, too late! She remembers the supposed treasure in the chest, although Iachimo does not speak of it. Then the lost bracelet! How dull has she been not to think before of how it might have been stolen from her! Worst misery of all, Posthumus has died in the belief of her guilt. No wonder he wished for her death! What bitter hopeless shame possesses her, even as though all were true that he had been told! Only in the great revealing of all mysteries

hereafter will Posthumus learn the truth. But till then she has to bear the burden of knowing with what thoughts of her he passed out of life.

Ah, dear friend, as I write, the agony of all these thoughts seems again to fill my mind, as it ever used to do when acting this scene upon the stage. I wonder if I ever looked what I felt! It is in such passages as these that Shakespeare surpasses all dramatic writers. He has faith in his interpreters, and does not encumber them with words. No words could express what then is passing in Imogen's soul. At such moments, Emerson has truly said, we only "live from a great depth of being.'

I cannot conceive what Imogen would have done had Posthumus been indeed dead. But I could conceive the strange bewildered rapture with which she sees him spring forward to interrupt Iachimo's further speech. He is not dead. He has heard her vindication;

Unable to bear his anguish longer, and forgetting her page's disguise, she springs forward to throw herself into his arms, with the words, "Peace, my lord; hear, hear!" But he will neither look nor hear, and casts the scornful page "-who, he thinks, is trifling with his grief-with violence away from him. Pisanio, who, next to Posthumus and Imogen, has been the most interested and wondering hearer of Ia chimo's story, says, as he stoops to raise Imogen from the ground:

"O gentlemen, help! Mine and your mistress! Oh, my Lord PosYou ne'er killed Imogen till now. Help! help!

thumus,

Mine honored lady!"

When she returns to consciousness Posthumus has scarce recovered from the bewilderment of his surprise, to find Imogen still alive of whose death he had thought himself guilty. But with what pangs and yearnings of the heart must he have heard her sweet reproach !

the kind glances with which Imogen would greet him. But a last sweet moment is yet to come for her, when she hears the story of Belarius, and learns that those from whom she had received such timely help and kindness are indeed, what she had then wished them to be, her brothers. When Cymbeline says to her, "O Imogen, you have lost by this a kingdom," how true to all her generous impulses is her rejoinder! A kingdom! What is so poor a thing as a kingdom in her account? "No, my lord; I have got two worlds by it!" And then, as when the heart is very full of happiness, we are afraid of giving way to emotion, or of trusting ourselves to speak of the joy we feel, she seeks relief in reminding them, half jestingly, as she places herself between them, of the past:

"Oh, my gentle brothers, Have we thus met? Oh, never say hereafter But I am truest speaker. You called me brother,

When I was but your sister; I you brothers, When ye were so indeed.

Cym.

Did you e'er meet?

Nor is Lucius forgotten; for when Cymbeline, in his exuberant happiness, bids his prisoners be joyful too, "for they shall taste our comfort," Imogen, as she still hangs upon the breast of Posthumus, turns to the noble Roman with the words, "My good master, I will yet do you service." They are the last she speaks; and here I might well leave her, with the picture of her in our minds which Shakespeare has drawn for us in the words of her delighted father:

"See,

Posthumus anchors upon Imogen ;
And she, like harmless lightning, throws her

and bad, happy: "Pardon's the word for all !" But you know how, in my letter on Portia, I said that I never left my characters when the scene closed in upon them, but always dreamed them over in my mind until the end. So it was with Imogen. Her sufferings are over. The "father cruel,'' made so by the " step-dame false, has returned to his old love and pride in her the love made doubly tender by remembrance of all that he has caused her to suffer. The husband-ah, what can measure his penitence, his self-abasement! That he had dared to doubt her purity, her honor-he who had known her inmost thoughts almost from childhood!

But Imogen-can she think of him as before? Yes! She is truly named the "divine Imogen;" at least, she has so much of the divine "quality of mercy in her, that she can blot from her memory all his doubts, all his want of faith, as if they had never been. Her love is infinite-"beyond beyond.' Hers is not a nature to do things by halves. She has forgotten as well as forgiven. But can Posthumus forgive himself? No! I believe, never. The more angel she proves herself in her loving self-forgetfulness, the blacker his temporary delusion will look in his own eyes. Imogen may surmise at times the thorn which pricks his conscience so sharply. Then she will quietly double the tender ways in which she delights to show her love and pride in him. But no spoken words will tell of this heartsecret between them.

In her brothers Imogen has none but sweet and happy memories. These two worlds are an immense and unlooked-for gain to her life; they fill it with new thoughts, new sympathies. She has their future to look forward to, their can see how present to help. One their unsophisticated natures will go forth to her; how the tender memory added charm to the grace and attracof the "rare boy" Fidele will give an tiveness of the sweet sister-tie; how, in their quiet hours alone, they will repeat the incidents of the cave-life. Imogen will never tell them the whole of her sorrow there. She fears they would not forgive Posthumus. We can suppose, too, how, in this so new life to them, the young princes would be for

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Then, too, the old soldier Belarius, the tried retainer and friend Pisanio! What a group of loving hearts about the happy princess! Caius Lucius also, in Rome, carrying in his memory tender thoughts of his once 'kind, duteous page Fidele, together with the admiring respect he feels for the noble Imogen, princess of Britain. And Iachimo! The time is to come when his repentance will flow from a still deeper source. When at the Court of Britain, he could not fail to hear of all the misery which he had wrought upon the noble lovers. With his own ears he heard the despair of Posthumus on learning the truthhis agony, his self-accusations, at the thought that he had taken away the life of the maligned princess. But even bitterer pangs of remorse than he then felt will assail Iachimo and never leave him-for we find he is capable of feeling them-when he learns that before very long the young noble life is quenched through what he brought upon it. For quenched, I believe, it is.

Happiness hides for a time injuries which are past healing. The blow which was inflicted by the first sentence in that cruel letter went to the heart with too fatal force. Then followed, on this crushing blow, the wandering, hopeless days and nights, without shelter, without food even up to the point of famine. Was this delicately nutured creature one to go through her terrible ordeal un

scathed? We see that when food and shelter came, they came too late. The heart-sickness is upon her: "I am sick still-heart-sick. Upon this follows the fearful sight of, as she supposes, her husband's headless body. Well may she say that she is. "nothing; or if not, nothing to be were better. When happiness, even such as she had never known before, comes to her, it comes, like the food and shelter, too late.

"

Tremblingly, gradually, and oh, how reluctantly! the hearts to whom that life is so precious will see the sweet smile which greets them grow fainter, will hear the loved voice grow feebler! The wise physician Cornelius will tax his utmost skill, but he will find the hurt is too deep for mortal leech-craft. The

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piece of tender air very gently, but very surely, will fade out like an exhalation of the dawn. Her loved ones will watch it with straining eyes, until it

THERE is one sad matter that in descriptions of privation is apt to be left out by the survivors, but which, when it takes place, affects them more than all the rest-namely, the necessity that

sometimes arises for the sacrifice of one or two individuals to furnish sustenance for the rest. By some persons, even in the sharpest pangs of starvation, this last shift is never resorted to. They are

ready enough, since cruel Fate demands it, to take their chance by lot with the others as to who shall die, that his fellows may live, but they themselves steadily decline to keep life in them by such means. It is to the credit of human nature that there have been many examples of this fortitude, for unless one has tried what starvation is, it is impossible to understand the passionate voracity with which the most unaccustomed, and finally the most loathsome, things are devoured. While admiring, therefore, the courage that withstands so dreadful a temptation, we must not be uncharitable to the poor wretches who, tried beyond their powers of endurance, at last give way to it. The readiness with which, from greed, we metaphorically" devour one another is, indeed, much more hateful, because it is not compulsory, than the unnatural extremities to which hunger drives us.

As John Lery, in his terrible story of the famine on board the Le Jacques observes : None can know who has not experienced it, what it is to rage with hunger." The most horrible sensations accompany it; "not only were the bodies of our people," he says, debilitated, but their dispositions became morose, irritable, and ferocious, till after a while they began to look at one another with a malignant eye❞—which is the preface to the terrible proposal is question. The pangs of thirst are even more dreadful, but, what is very curious, the young do not suffer from that so much as their elders.

On board the Pandora, for example, a young midshipman sold his miserable allowance of water for two days, for one allowance of bread; and the ship's boys were the first to find relief from their ravenous appetite in chewing their leathern jackets and shoes, or in sucking the horn plates of the ship's lanterns. Long before this," the sweepings of the bread-room, though full of maggots, had been carefully collected together, and made into dough, as black and bitter as soot, and all the parrots and monkeys which they had on board had been devoured. The last device this unhappy crew hit upon, while any strength was left in them, was to hunt on board their water-logged and almost motionless

vessel for mice, "for which many lay watching, like cats, all night. A single mouse was more prized than an ox on shore. The surgeon having been so successful as to catch two, was offered (of course in vain) a complete suit of new clothes for them, and after the master had cut off the feet of a large rat, which were left (as offal) outside the cabin door, he returned to collect and broil them on the coals, declaring that they were more savory than the best game. ""*

The last things Lery remembers eating on board Le Jacques were the claws and beak of his favorite parrot; the bird had been sacrificed long ago, though with hesitation as well as regret, "since two or three nuts would have kept it alive without water.'

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In the Dolphin sloop, where the crew were one hundred and sixteen days in a state of famine," they lived for twenty days on a daily allowance of an inch and a half square of the leather lining of a pair of breeches, and on the grass growing on the deck, which the captain (one Bradshaw of New York) asserts to have been from four to five inches long. Who can wonder that in such agonies the very last extremity was resorted to, and that lots were at last drawn, the shortest to mark the victim, and the shortest but one the executioner ?'' Sometimes, in such cases, even the rudest justice is dispensed with, and, by the law of the stronger, the boys on board are sacrificed; and more than once, in the sad stories of shipwreck, one finds the captain beseeching, with desperate energy, for four-and-twenty hours' delay, which is some cases has saved them from their destined fate.

From the reticence which, as I have already said, is naturally observed respecting this matter, there is a general idea that cannibalism in shipwreck is very rare. It is, or rather was (for the chances of the sufferers being picked up are now, of course, far greater than

* In spite of some very particular inquiries. I have never been able to discover whether the sight of eatable but unaccustomed objects " with causes, as we say, "the mouth to water starving men. The spectacle of a cook's shop of course would do so, but would that of a butcher's shop? The sufferers forget and cannot tell me ; the savans know nothing about it.

they were formerly), by no means rare -though only on ship-board. Sufferers from starvation on land are much more loath to give way to this last temptation. My conviction is that this arises from two causes: first, that the keenness of the air at sea makes the pangs of hunger more insupportable; and secondly, that the influence of public opinion is weaker. With "water, water all around, and not a drop to drink, men seem to themselves to be alone in the world; to have no other fellow-creatures save those who are undergoing the same calamity, and to be therefore less responsible for their actions. On land, though no though no other human beings are visible, they may be so, any moment: on the mountain top, or from out of the wood, there may appear some fellow-creature with assistance, and also with reproach; Why could you not wait an hour longer before committing this terrible crime?" if, indeed, that can be called a crime which to some natures at least is compulsory.

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There is a terrible story, admirably told (I think by Henry Kingsley), of the escape of three convicts in Australia, two of whom were driven to eat their fellow in the bush; but such shocking extremities are almost never resorted to save at sea. Among the immense number of narratives of privation which it has fallen to my lot to read for a certain purpose, I find only one case in which this most terrible occurrence happened on land. It took place after the wreck of the Nottingham Galley.

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This vessel, of ten guns and fourteen men, commanded by Captain John Dean, in sailing from England to Boston in the winter of 1710, was cast away on a rock called Boon Island, off Massachusetts Bay. When she struck, she labored so violently and the waves ran so high that there was no standing on deck, while the weather was so thick that the rock was invisible. Upon this," says the captain, "I immediately called all hands down to the cabin, where we continued a few minutes, earnestly supplicating the mercy of Providence. One of the men presently went out on the bowsprit, and reported "something black" ahead, which he volunteered to investigate if accompanied by some other swimmer. Three men thus ven

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tured, only to be swallowed up by the darkness; but as by this time the ship had almost broken up--" her decks opening, and her back breaking, so that the stern was nearly under water" there was no choice but to take the same course. "I therefore stripped off most of my clothes, and moving gradually forward [on the bowsprit] between every sea, at last quitted it, and cast myself forward with all my strength." Conceive what a leap in the dark," in every sense, this must have been ! The rock being very slippery, he could get no hold of it when he reached it, but, miserably lacerated, was thrown on and off it with every wash of the sea; the rest of the crew were exposed to the same peril, but still, through the mercy of heaven, we all escaped with our lives." On the rock they found the three men who had preceded them, and having all met together, we returned humble thanks for our deliverance.' The good or evil that happens to us is comparative, otherwise we might well say that these poor souls were thankful for small mercies. The rock, which was but one hundred yards long and fifty broad, afforded no shelter on its leeward side; it was so craggy that they could not walk to keep themselves warm; and the weather was extremely cold, with rain and snow. With daylight came little cheer, since it only disclosed the miseries of their position. From the wreck there were cast ashore some planks and sails, but no provision save some small fragments cheese, which we picked up among the rock-weed." They had a steel and flint, and also a drill with a very swift motion," but having nothing in their possession which had not been long soaked in water, their utmost endeavors to procure a light were unsuccessful, and after eight days of failure the attempt was abandoned. "All night we crowded upon one another under canvas, so as to preserve our mutual heat."

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of

The only hope of the castaways, unless they should be discovered by some passing sail, was to build a boat from the material of the wreck; but in the mean time they could not live on hope. The cook died, exclaiming, "I am starved to death," and his body was placed "in a convenient place" for the