BOOKS.

TIIE LILY AND TUE BEE.* Mn. WARREN'S prose poem in commemoration of the Great Exhi- bition resembles its theme in the variety and vastness of its sub- jects, and in a sort of overpowering effect upon the mind. The visitor who turned his attention from the novelty and singularity of the edifice and the gratified throng of human life which filled it, to the observation of the things there assembled, could take in but a little of what he saw, and have a distinct impression of less. To learn or master any branch of the various " arts and mysteries" whose results were spread out before him, would involve a sys- tematic steadiness of application that might be applied more profitably elsewhere. The direct instruction from the Exhibi- tion was .pretty much limited to the pursuits in which the visitor might be engaged, or of which at least he had some practical knowledge ; and this special use, though limited to individuals in the singular, is extensive and vast in the aggre- gate. Its indirect use is of another kind. It may be said without hyperbole, that it has brought the ends of the earth together ; that it has held up the mirror of truth to many peoples, showing them their industrial deficiencies as well as their excellencies, and grati- fying their pride as well as reflecting their inferiorities. The " hu- manizing effects" have been made the most of. Whatever the in- direct results of manufactures and trade may be, their primal ob- ject is the lower motive of gain ; and though a liberal curiosity is a good thing, it is but curiosity after all. The animating spirit of the Hebrew year of jubilee, of the Olympic games, and of the Christian. pilgrimages to Rome, were loftier in their nature, and probably not less beneficial in their worldly results, if we look at things according to circumstances and a scale. " Yixere fortes ante Agamemnona multi"; but they had not a daily press. In grasping the Great Exhibition and the topics it suggests, Mr. Warren perhaps too much avoids the everyday and earthy. The object of its princely originator—the application of science to art and utility, and hence the moral of high and apparently ab- stract science—the excellence of various nations in productive in- dustry—the peaceful moral pointed by the various productions of different countries—the free-trade moral that every nation should follow the course which nature intimates—and the pleasing won- der of the visitors—form some of the more apt topics. The Crystal Palace and its opening suggest to Mr. Warren's mind remote and incidental things. He begins with the assemblages at the tower of Babel, and in front of the golden image which Nebuchadnezzar the Xing set up in the plain of Dura ; whence he points the moral of the opening service by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the manifest superiority of Hyde Park in 1851. The author then runs rapidly over the various nations that have contributed to the Exhibi- tion, or may be presumed to have assembled there; occasionally parading with this proper topic the less polite one of the power and conquests of the British crown,—as the sight of Welling- ton suggests his various victories, and Gibraltar inspires any- thing but a compliment to Spain. The author then plunges in medics res ; sketching various individual visitors as repre- sentatives of classes, and selecting the greatest professors of all the sciences, who were or might have been there ; the men suggesting an allusion to their discoveries,—though there, as elsewhere, Mr. Warren often puts a word for a thought, the label rather than the essence. Select objects of exhibition likewise supply him with themes,—as the.Koh-i-Noor; the glass-hive; fossil remains; the working of a bee, elaborately commented on, furnishing one half of the book's title.

The day thus passes in the Crystal Palace. Night comes and the rhapsodist is left alone. But his unwearied spirit calls up spectres of the past. There are Newton, Laplace, Galileo, and other philosophers, all come to the world's great exhibition, while the author describes and reviews their characters and discoveries. Alexander, Cacsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Alfred, are also there to meditate and comment; and as they vanish with the morning, the author sees a lily, which gives rise to an episode, forming the other half of the title of "The Lily and the Bee " ; and the work closes with a peroration.

Extensive as these subjects are, many have been passed un- noticed in the enumeration. The work, in fact, is over-crowded with topics,. and their .proper development is consequently impos- sible. This not only gives a fragmentary but a confused character to the book; and when the reader has discovered the drift of the writer's scheme, the execution is often unsatisfactory from being incomplete. No doubt, the reader who is well acquainted with Mr. Warren's topics may by his own imagination fill up the picture which is dimly *etched ; but it is the business of an artist to finish his own work, not vaguely to indicate form and colour and let each person complete it for himself in his own way. It is like putting off a congregation with a text instead of the sermon, or giving a bill of fare instead of the dinner.

The mode of composition is either direct prose, or prose arranged in irregular fashion so as to look like verse to the eye. The style may vary in pitch, sometimes higher and sometimes lower, but it is always characterized by that Ossianic manner which substitutes inflation for solid power and is neither prose nor poetry. Mr. Warren may demur to our selection of his model, and rather point to Queen Ifab. But though Shelley's metre was so far unusual in -English, that he often. employed a sort of lyric measure is blank * The Lily and the Bee. An Apologue of the Crystal Palace. By Samuel Fauna, r.u.s. Published by Blackwood and Sons. verlsg,' still the metre itself was re5ular afte there was both the music and the spirit o • o‘;

• The appropriate is '615. 000l bids us put even an ornament in its ilacre.7rfit"selatle '

Lily.and the Bee strike' 141 .! re- late to the subject of 4 another theme. To Pass Nip es and tiati '1391) view, can be done vrithoatisineh y under-gra.thinte who gets a subject large enodgh to hook on. Thesesket,clies of the different classes of viistors area da appropriate to the place; they cannot be transplanted, WWei real character im- parts more of reality to the style. 'a,. (5

• "A Queen and Prin ne .

"A unit unperveived, I sink into the stream again !—Nave, tran- sept, aisles and galleries, pacing unfired : insatiate! . '—Amazing spectacle! 'Touchstone of character! capacity! and know- ledge!

• "Spectacle, now lost in the spectators : then spectators, in the spectacle!

"Bich: poor: gentle: simple: wise : young: old learned: ignorant: thoughtful: thoughtless : haughty: 'humble : frivolous : pro- found : -"Every grade of intellect : every shade of eharacter ! . "Here is a voluble- smatterer : suddenly discomfited by the chance question of a curious child : and rather than own ignorance, will .tell him

falsely - -

"There a bustling piece of earth : one of the earth, earthy : testing every- thing by money value.

-

"Hero is a stale bundle of prejudices, hard bound together : to whom everything here is topsy-turvy, and discoloured, seen through jaundiced eyes.

" Here comes one serenely unconscious that he is a fool.

" There is one suddenly startled by a suspicion that he knows scarcely anything. "Here is one listening, with seeming lively interest, and assenting ges- tures, to a scientific explanation, of which he comprehends nothing; but ap- pearances must be kept up. "There is one falsely thinking himself the observed of observers; trying to look unconscious, and distinguished.

" Here is one that will not see a timid poor relation, or an humble friend ; as fashionable folk are near.

" Yonder is a statesman gliding about. alone Watchful : thoughtful: cautious : pondering national characters: habits : capabilities : localities: wants: superfluities: rival systems of poliey,, their -frnits and workings': imaginingnew combinations : speculating on remote consequences. " here one abhorring. England, and her institutions : hoping he sees her approaching downfall, their subversion? " Yonder walks one who has committed, or is meditating, great crime ; and hoping that his heavy eye may here be attracted, and hie mind dazzled into a moment's forgetfulness ; but it is in vain. " There is a philosopher, to whose attuned ear the spectacle speaks myriad-tongued : telling of patient sagacity : long relied, at length—or sud- denly—triumphant : of centuries of misdirected, abortive toil : of pain, sat: fering, privation : of one sowing what.another shall reap : " Here is a philanthropist—thinking of blood-stained slavery. " Of millions, dealt with as though they were the veryheasts that perish: bought : sold : scourged : slain: as if their Maker had. not, seen them, nor heard their groans, nor treasured their tears : nor set' them down against the appointed Reckoning. " Here is one, little thinking that he will suddenly fall, dead tomorrow : having much on hand, both of business and pleasure. ' " There is one tottering under the weight of ninety years : to whom the grasshopper is a burden : leaning on the arms of dutiful and lusty youth : gazing with glazed eye : silent with Wise wbrider. Here sits a laughing child, upon a gleaming cannon. " Yonder is a blind nian, sightless amidst surrounding splendours : but there is one telling hint tenderly that he stands beside. the statue of Milton." Some of the men of science are interesting, not only for their science, but because Mr. Warren allows himself space to develop them. "Yonder are the twin sons of Science, .Le Wavier and Adamw—a noble pair,. in noble rivalry : England and France ! Speaking modestly of their sublime discovery, though one which would have gladdened the heart of Newton— "—Uranus, saith one,—discovered by the father of our living Herschel, at once doubled the boundaries of the' solar *yule& ; arid, at a distance of eighteen hundred and twenty-two millions of miles, is observed somewhat disturbed in performing its journey: the twe astronomers, separately bent on discovering the cause, by a rare application of transcendent science, suc- ceed at length in detecting the attractive influence of a remote unseen orb—a new planet : Neptune—as far beyond Uranus as he beyond Saturn! at thirty times our own distance from the Han : two thonitand eight hundred and fifty millions of miles off: moreover not only pointing out where a planet would ere long be. found, but weighing the mass of the predicted mys- terious visitor—numbering the years of his revolution, and telling the di- mensions of his stupendous orbit. " Behold, at length The Intruder! attended now by-Satellite, gleaming— in cold, shadowy, remote splendour—and graciously visible, first, to the eyes of the patient twins of astronomic science—Neptune, now just five years old !- " Yonder is Bessel, the Prussian astronomer, discoverer, at length, of the distance of a fixed star !—sixty-three billions of miles off !----nearly seven hundred thousand times our own distance from the sun—which is ninety-five millions three hundred thousand miles away! And this utterly inconceivable distance exactly measured, by means of a common yard-mea- sure!—And there is another telling an incredulous wonderer that we have weighed The Sun ! and his planets—even Neptune !—ay, down to the pound-weight avoirdupois—and even,—for the fastidiously exact,—down to GRAINS :—and they are standing before an instrument which can weigh to the ten-thousandth part of that grain!— " There is the French Foucault : who has shown to our very eyes, and since this marvellous palace was opened, the earth moving on its axis! creating a now motion in the pendulum, independent of that actual one given to it by the earth, at the point of suspension." This is the close of The Lily and the Bee, when morning has come and the rhapsodist has finished his address "to the flower. " —Go then, Thou grand One of the Present, grandly into the Past.

And for the Future Leave no trace behind, but in the Mind, -Enriched, expanded, and sublimed. Only a noble Memory, r".

Be thou, to sensuous eye, se, g thou hadst not Tn.

Let the phtee that-larovorthee-now,

to iinow thee alarnevel %It 313 ,tassifinnam al avitia noltaulia stIT" JAilLeti &egress gniw, icain,:whera sitroW Aka itiwatoielitert Isitithe Watidering:windsblow.freelroletithil MOS A404614_18' ELaid! mqiWhe gloaming Wonder efthe World/ TIL old., to 9LIT - 7 ' Let *odd-wide .pilgtimit coins, •,if 10 5.1111fi Olb 10 113nsbivs Ina. time hereafter, -ante thieileeigrea,istivis :11-)111 bon ,runiinunt: This little work', r try( snail. This-precious stone set in the silver sea, aristwit This,blessed. plot, this-earth, this realm, thisilligteildrioil w9i7 " ;:,! [Alio ,bihrrolin To that green spot:. -And, pointing to their sons, all grown irieredUknitFilayY,n) fa)Bilxnt Here It stood." Plasy So be it. The great should paSsliiVO'Wge climai let,tteir greatilesi; even though nature wrchitii".a.iiii:Aoi a longer defe. The hero shOuld fall in -the. moment of viitery.9: the high-nettled racer be shot when his course is run ; the Crystal- Talace)Vieetish when its function: is fulfilled,—not strugglU'enVile'. 0,40-en which experimentalists may try a encc010.,41,4 the " winter garden" for invalids, throngliAOa_nbases and private jobbery, till:the. 1?FtaaF„ read t, that.Ttai*le contrast to its palmy days and does WIIW;