reward of it, revenues that might have supported thousands have been devoted exclusively to the luxury and splendour of a single family! So went the war-worshipping era of our world. At present it may be hoped, if poetry is not rising, war at least is at a discount.

CHAPTER LII.

LEGENDS OF THE PASS.-COWPER'S MEMORIA TECHNICA.

AFTER the gorge of the Devil's Bridge, you plunge down the precipitous valley, by well constructed zigzags, erossing and recrossing the Reuss repeatedly, till you come to the savage defile of Schellinen, where for several miles the ravine, is so deep and narrow, that the cliffs seem to arch the heavens, and shut out the light. The Reuss meanwhile keeps such a roaring din, making in the short space of four leagues a fall of 2500 feet, almost in a perpetual cataract, that the people have called this part of the way the Krachenthal, or crashing valley.

The noise and the accompaniments are savage enough. The mountains seem ready to tumble into the bed of the river. “We tremble," said my companion under the influence of the scenery of the Gemmi, "lest the mountains should crush us; what must be that state of despair in men's hearts, which can call on the mountains to fall on them and bury them, rather than meet the face of God?"

There are curious legends in this part of the valley. Enormous fragments of rock are strewn around, as if they might have fallen here from the conflict of Titans, or angels, when they plucked the seated hills with all their load to throw at each other. One of them, almost a mountain by itself, nearly in the road, goes by the name of Teufelstein, or Devil's Stone, having been dropped, it is said, by the overworked demon, in attempting to get it across the St. Gothard pass. The legend runs that he set out to convey this crag across the valley for a wager, but let it slip, and lost the game. The manner in which the tra veller gazes upon this rock, in consequence even of this foolish

legend, the peculiar interest he feels in it, is a curious example of the power of imaginative association, the craving of the mind for some intelligent moral or meaning. In all things possible you must have a human or a supernatural interest. The principle is universal. A child in the nursery would not be half so much interested by a simple engraving of a house, ever so well done, with merely the announcement, This is a house, as when you come to say, This is the house that Jack built; then what an interest! Then how the imagination peoples it! There is Jack, the malt, the cat, the rat, the priest, the milk-maid, and this is the cozy house, where all the wonders of the linked story had their existence. What a place of interest! Just so with the Devil's Crag. Ridiculous as the legend is, no man can pass that stone, without being interested in it, and perhaps seeing his disappointed Infernal Majesty in idea, with sail broad vans in the air above him, sweating like a day labourer, and ineffectually struggling to float beneath the weight. The common legends concerning the Devil do almost always represent him as outwitted, foiled, and cheated, instead of being successful in his villany;—it is a good sign and prediction, for he must go down.

At Wasen I found a comfortable, excellent inn, a good, cheerful happy family, and a kind, hospitable host. They seemed well to do in the world, and were Romanists, as are most of the people of the Canton Uri. I went to bed thinking of the Capuchin's promise of bad weather, and glad that I had seen the St. Gothard pass in bright day. In the morning the Friar's prediction was as yet unfulfilled. Again the morning was fair, though the clouds were clinging to the mountains up and down the valley, sometimes in long ridges, sometimes in thick fleecy volumes, now surrounding the base half way down, now revealing only the lofty peaks, and now swept from the whole face of the gorge, and admitting the bright sun to fill it. At this moment, on the edge of the mountain top beside us, so lofty and perpendicular that it seems ready to fall, the sun is struggling with the fleecy masses of cloud glowing like silver, and the trees upon the verge of the cliff seem on fire as in a burning focus, while all around is gray mist.

Or rather,

We are now coming into a region trodden of old by great på triots, and consecrated at this day, to liberty, in history. We are getting upon the borders of the country of William Tell; we must not look at the scenery alone, for grand as it is, the great thoughts and struggles of freedom are grander. In truth, a man ought not to travel through such a region without a fresh memory of connected localities and incidents. How much a man needs to know, to make a good traveller! how much he needs to remember, and how vividly! The Poet Cowper, in one of his beautiful letters, recommends pedestrianizing as good for the memory. "I have," says he, "though not a good memory in general, yet a good local memory, and can recollect, by the help of a tree, or a stile, what you said on that particular spot. For this reason I purpose, when the summer is come, to walk with a book in my pocket; what I read at my fire-side, I forget, but what I read under a hedge, or at the side of a pond, that pond and that hedge will always bring to my remembrance."

But suppose the gentle Poet wishes to recall the passages in some other part of the country. It would certainly be somewhat clumsy to have to carry about with you a pond or a hedge as a memoria technica; it would be less inconvenient to carry your whole library. And besides, what art shall there be to quicken the memory in knowledges already forgotten? The memory is a most perverse faculty; it treasures up things we could wish to forget, and forgets things we could wish to retain; but there is one chain, that no man can escape, except he goes to Jesus Christ, and that is, the memory of his own sins. To many a man, to all men "in their sins" the art of forgetting, could it but last for ever, would be the greatest of all bless ings.

What an affecting page in the history of an individual mind is presented in those melancholy remorseful stanzas, said to have been written in a blank leaf of the Pleasures of Memory. They trace the human being; they present a more universal experience of our fallen nature by far than the more agreeable, but more superficial recollections of childhood and of latter days. They are as a fossil leaf, in which you observe the fi

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bres, that characterized a whole living family of the vegetable creation. So do these stanzas read the experience of our species, not indeed, always so clearly acknowledged, even to one's own consciousness, but always existing, though sometimes like sympathetic letters, to be only revealed when brought to the fire.

"Pleasures of memory! O supremely blest,

And justly proud beyond a poet's praise,
If the pure confines of thy tranquil breast
Contain indeed the subject of thy lays!
By me how envied, for to me,

The herald still of misery,

Memory makes her influence known

By sighs and tears and grief alone.

I greet her as the fiend, to whom belong

The vulture's ravening beak, the raven's funeral song.
Alone, at midnight's haunted hour,

When nature woos repose in vain,
Remembrance wakes her penal power,
The tyrant of the burning brain.
She tells of time misspent, of comfort lost,
Of fair occasions gone forever by,

Of hopes too fondly nursed, too rudely crost,
Of many a cause to wish, yet fear to die.
For what, except the instinctive fear
Lest she survive, detains me here,
When all the life of life is filed?

What but the deep inherent dread,

Lest she beyond the grave resume her reign,

And realize the hell, that priests and beldams feign."

How painfully impressive is this! The penal power of remembrance is a terrible reality. It has driven many a mind to thoughts of suicide. But why think of suicide to escape from memory, when the penal power of memory is only a prophecy of the future? It is to be earnestly hoped that the self-tortured unknown individual, who traced from bitter unavailing experience the gloomy lines just quoted, may have sought and found in Christ that deliverance from the death of sin and the fear of death, with which only the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world, can bless the soul.

ASSOCIATIONS.-CANTON URI, AND THE MEMORIES OF TELL.

How infinite are the moral and spiritual relations even of material things! Indeed, what subject is there, says Edmund Burke, that does not branch into infinity? A world that has been the habitation of intelligent creatures, becomes connected in every part with the story and the influences of their existence. Nature herself sympathizes with them, is invested with the significance of their immortality, travaileth in bondage beneath their sins and burdens, and acquires the language both of their history and destiny. Point after point, feature after feature, landscape after landscape, the whole world of land, and every rood of sea, may become, in the course of ages, indissolubly linked with some great transaction, and with a crowd of the soul's experiences, in such wise, that ever, as long as the globe lasts, it shall be, as it were, an organ, the keys of which are always sounding their intelligent notes of guilty and sad, or innocent and joyous meaning. All thought is eternal, and if the soul have forgotten it, material nature will sometimes bring it up. The wicked may be silent in the grave, but the grave shall not be silent in regard to the wicked. The actors of a life of heroism and goodness pass away, but the earth always speaks of them.

Such is the eternal, indestructible power of association. Fearfully and wonderfully are we made, and strangely linked with the world that we inhabit. So, according to the multitude and nobleness of a man's associations, especially of a moral character, will be the depth and thoughtfulness of his delight in looking upon nature. There is a scenery in the mind, connected with that in nature, and appropriate to it, somewhat as the other parts of a piece of music are connected with the air, and dependent upon it. A man might be able to whistle the air alone, and might have enjoyment in singing it, but if he is ignorant of the other parts, his pleasure cannot equal that of a musical mind, in which all the parts come linked together in one full and perfect harmony.