With pure content. So much we are,
          Who are no more .... could I explain!
     Ah, the calm sea-coast! Think, how far
          Across the world came land and main,
     Endeavouring each to find and reach
          The other,— well, and they attain

     Here! And just here, where they unite,
          The point of contact seems to be
     The point of severance. Left and right,
          Here lies the land, and there the sea.
     They meet from far: they touch: yet are
          Still one and one eternally,

     With skill that touch between— that touch
          That joins and yet divides— the shore.
     Oh soul to soul, dear Love, 'tis much!
          Loves utmost gain'd can give no more.
     And yet . .; Well, no! 'tis better so.
          Earth still (be glad!) holds Heaven in store.

               THREE REFUGEES.
I HAVE known in my time three remarkable
Refugees, all of whom are now gone to that
"perpetuum exilium" mentioned by Horace, in
the dismal black coach that we all ride in sooner
or later.

     At palace or at cottage gate.
     The Postman Death knocks soon or late.

The histories of two of these refugees were
pathetic, and need some infusion of human tears
in my ink. Let me narrate in all simplicity and
truth; and, first, let me briefly describe the
sorrows and vicissitudes of my earliest Refugee
friend, poor little Mein Herr Krumpholtz, once
upon a time flourishing writing-master in the
city of Berlin.

Mein Herr Krumpholtz was a very little refugee
— a small unfortunate hump-backed writing-
master— a mere sketch of a man. Nature seemed
never to have finished him, but in a pet with
her want of success, to have struck the modelling
clay into a dumpy lump, and left only the
brain and heart complete. Those two organs in
the little writing-master, however, were of the
finest construction, and could think and feel as
well as the heart and brain of the biggest tyrannical
Goliath of Gath that ever jostled his way
through the world and bullied the human race
into submission. Some small men are intolerably
vain (how gracious are the compensations
of nature!), wear stays, and scent themselves,
are intolerable and insolent to bigger men,
and affect excruciating boots; but so was not
Krumpholtz; he was one of your abject, crushed
little men; one of (as it were) Nature's younger
sons— her male Cinderellas— born under an ill
star, born to the sensitive misery of feeling
forgotten and despised, so that early in life's
battle they lose heart, and falling to the
rear, turn mere sutlers and drudges to the
great victorious army. The only instrument he
played on was that much despised one "the
second fiddle," and even on that he played
"second fiddle B," not " second fiddle A." In
fact, whether you met him in the streets, or at
a party, or at the " Restaurant à la Cagmaggerie,"
or wherever it was, the little flaxen German
seemed perpetually apologising to the
universe for having had the audacity and presumption
to exist at all. Now, as it is hard sometimes
even to respect men who respect
themselves, it is simply impossible to respect a man
who does not respect himself. The result that
might have been supposed to arise from this
behaviour did arise, and poor little Herr Krumpholtz
was jostled, shoved, elbowed, cuffed, and
turned into the gutter, by every one who was
richer, more clever, more pushing, or harder-
hearted.

He was an amiable clever little man, too,
wrote the finest Italian hand, and ciphered like
an angel— a recording angel— but he could seldom
get employment, and when he did get
any, he lost it directly. He was a little dapper
flaxen man, with short common-place legs, a
snub nose, towy hair, large moony spectacles,
and invisible flaxen eyebrows. His poor little
chest was of a dish-cover shape, and he carried
about him an undying odour of bad sardines
and stale tobacco. Yet he was a poet and
a scholar; had written sonnets to Upland;
lines " To the memory of Korner; " finally a
satire, signed "The Ghost of Blucher," which
was much read— by the Berlin police — and in
gratitude for which he obtained three years board
and lodging from, the King of Prussia, in the
unpleasant fortress of Spandau.

Krumpholtz had been twice in love; once
desperately, with blue-eyed Fraulein Goldstein,
the pretty daughter of a Berlin wine-merchant,,
who eventually jilted him, and married a rich
dyer in Lindenbaum-street.

Just before the revolution broke out,
Krumpholtz was beginning to recover this blow,
and to do pretty well as a thriving writing-
master. Unfortunately, bad designing men
flattered Krumpholtz, and persuaded him that
he was a great revolutionary orator— a small
Brutus, with the heart of Cato, and the brain of
Danton. There was no doubt then among honest
people, nor is there now, that Germany wants
liberty, and freedom from effete aristocracy, and
pipeclay martinetism; but true liberty is no
child of murder or sin, nor did a rain of blood
ever, since the world began, make two blades
of corn grow where one only grew before.

Perched like a tomtit on an oak, Krumpholtz
strutted on the tables of revolutionary clubs,
and croaked out prophecies and rhapsodies
against tyranny, slandered that very indifferent
hero Frederick the Great, and, in fact, did all he
could to bring himself under the executioner's
swinging sword. One night the club he
belonged to — "The Red Mountain"— was
surprised by the police, and Krumpholtz escaped
by putting on a woman's cloak and getting on
the tiles.

The remembrance of this night, I suppose,
rather soured him, for he was very fierce and cruel
at the barricades of the ensuing week, and assisted
in that terrible and ghastly procession by torchlight
when the dead bodies, piled in carts,
were driven by the mob under the balcony on
which the king stood. Krumpholtz yelled with