This bare outline of the story can only suggest and not fully explain the grounds of our objection to Hertha. Our objection is, that it surrounds questions, which can only be satisfactorily solved by the application of very definite ideas to specific facts, with a cloudy kind of eloquence and flighty romance. Take, for example, the question whether it will not be well for women to study and practise medicine. It can only tend to retard the admission that women may pursue such a career with success, for a distinguished authoress to imply that they may be suitably prepared for effective activity by lectures on such a very nebulous thesis as this – ‘The consciousness of thought ought to be a living observation and will’, or to associate the attendance of women by the sick-bed, not with the hard drudgery of real practice, but with the vicissitudes of a love-story. Women have not to prove that they can be emotional, and rhapsodic, and spiritualistic; every one believes that already. They have to prove that they are capable of accurate thought, severe study, and continuous self-command. But we say all this with reluctance, and should prefer noticing the many just and pathetic observations that Miss Bremer puts into the mouth of her heroine. We can only mention, and have not space to quote, a passage where Hertha complains of the ignorance in which women are left of Natural Science. ‘In my youth,’ she concludes, ‘I used to look at the rocks, the trees, the grass, and all objects of nature, with unspeakable longing, wishing to know something about their kinds, their life, and their purpose. But the want of knowledge, the want of opportunity to acquire it, has caused nature to be to me a sealed book, and still to this moment it is to me a tantalizing, enticing, and ever-retreating wave, rather than a life-giving fountain which I can enjoy, and enjoying, thank the Creator.’

Translations and Translators

A clergyman (of the Charles Honeyman species) once told us that he never set about preparing his sermons till Saturday evening, for he ‘trusted to Providence’. A similar kind of trust, we suppose, must be prevalent among translators, for many of them are evidently relying on some power which

Can teach all people to translate,

Though out of languages in which

They understand no part of speech –