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Not as before, involuntary prayer

And passive adoration.

Hand and voice

Awake, awake! and thou, my heart, awake!
Green fields, and icy cliffs! all join my hymn !
And thou, O silent mountain, sole and bare,
O blacker than the darkness, all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars,

Or when they climb the sky, or when they sink,
Companion of the morning star at dawn,
Thyself earth's rosy star, and of the dawn
Co-herald wake, oh wake, and utter praise!
Who sank thy sunless pillars in the earth?
Who filled thy countenance with rosy light?
Who made thee father of perpetual streams?
And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad,
Who called you forth from night and utter death?
From darkness let you loose, and icy dens,
Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks
For ever shattered, and the same for ever?
Who gave you your invulnerable life,

Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy,
Unceasing thunder and eternal foam?-

And who commanded and the silence came,
"Here shall the billows stiffen and have rest?"
Ye ice-falls! ye that from yon dizzy heights
Adown enormous ravines steeply slope,-
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty noise,
And stopped at once amidst their maddest plunge,
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who både the Sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who with lovely flowers
Of living blue spread garlands at your feet?
God! God! the torrents like a shout of nations
Utter; the ice-plain bursts, and answers, God!-
God! sing the meadow streams with gladsome voice,
And pine groves with their soft and soul-like sound.
The silent snow-mass, loosening, thunders, God!
Ye dreadless flowers, that fringe the eternal frost!
Ye wild goats, bounding by the eagle's nest!
Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain blast!
Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds,
Ye signs and wonders of the elements,

Utter forth God! and fill the hills with praise!
And thou, oh silent form, alone and bare,
Whom as I lift again my head, bowed low
In adoration, I again behold,

And to thy summit upward from thy base
Sweep slowly, with dim eyes suffused with tears,→
Awake thou mountain form! Rise like a cloud,
Rise, like a cloud of incense, from the earth!
Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills,
Thou dread Ambassador from earth to heaven,
Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell the rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, calls on GOD.

LESSON LVIII.

Maternal affection.-SCRAP BOOK.

WOMAN'S charms are certainly many and powerful. The expanding rose just bursting into beauty has an irresistible bewitchingness;-the blooming bride led triumphantly to the hymenéal altar awakens admiration and interest, and the blush of her cheek fills with delight;-but the charm of maternity is more sublime than all these. Heaven has imprinted in the mother's face something beyond this world, something which claims kindred with the skies,—the angelic smile, the tender look, the waking, watchful eye, which keeps its fond vigil over her slumbering babe.

These are objects which neither the pencil nor the chisel can touch, which poetry fails to exalt, which the most eloquent tongue in vain would eulogize, and on which all description becomes ineffective. In the heart of man lies this lovely picture; it lives in his sympathies; it reigns in his affections; his eye looks round in vain for such another object on earth.

Maternity, extatic sound! so twined round our hearts, that they must cease to throb ere we forget it! 'tis our first love; 'tis part of our religion. Nature has set the mother apon such a pinnacle, that our infant eyes and arms are, first, uplifted to it; we cling to it in manhood; we almost worship it in old age. He who can enter an apartment, and behold the tender babe feeding on its mother's beautynourished by the tide of life which flows through her generous veins, without a panting bosom and a grateful eye, is

no man, but a monster. He who can approach the cradle of sleeping innocence without thinking that "Of such is the kingdom of heaven!" or see the fond parent hang over its beauties, and half retain her breath lest she should break its slumbers, without a veneration beyond all common feeling, is to be avoided in every intercourse of life, and is fit only for the shadow of darkness and the solitude of the desert.

LESSON LIX.

The last days of Herculaneum.-SCRAP BOOK.

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A GREAT city situated amidst all that nature could create of beauty and of profusion, or art collect of science and magnificence-the growth of many ages-the residence of enlightened multitudes-the scene of splendor, and festivity, and happiness-in one moment withered as by a spell -its palaces, its streets, its temples, its gardens, glowing with eternal spring,' and its inhabitants in the full enjoyment of all life's blessings, obliterated from their very place in creation, not by war or famine, or disease, or any of the natural causes of destruction to which earth had been accustomed—but in a single night, as if by magic, and amid the conflagration, as it were, of nature itself, presented a subject on which the wildest imagination might grow weary without even equalling the grand and terrible reality. The eruption of Vesuvius, by which Herculaneum and Pompeii were overwhelmed, has been chiefly described to us in the letters of Pliny the younger to Tacitus, giving an account of his uncle's fate, and the situation of the writer and his mother. The elder Pliny had just returned from the bath, and was retired to his study, when a small speck or cloud, which seemed to ascend from Mount Vesuvius, attracted his attention. This cloud gradually increased, and at length assumed the shape of a pine tree, the trunk of earth and vapor, and the leaves, "red cinders." Pliny ordered his galley, and, urged by his philosophic spirit, went forward to inspect the phenomenon. In a short time, however, philosophy gave way to humanity, and he zealously and adventurously employed his galley in saving the inhabitants of the various beautiful villas which studded that enchanting coast. Amongst others, he went to the assistance of his friend Pomponianus, who was then at Stabiæ. The storm of fire, and the tempest of the earth, increased; and the

wretched inhabitants were obliged, by the continual rocking of their houses, to rush out into the fields with pillows tied down by napkins upon their heads, as their sole defence against the shower of stones which fell on them. This, in the course of nature, was in the middle of the day; but a deeper darkness than that of a winter night had closed around the ill-fated inmates of Herculaneum. This artificial darkness continued for three days and nights, and when, at length, the sun again appeared over the spot where _Herculaneum stood, his rays fell upon an ocean of lava! There was neither tree, nor shrub, nor field, nor house, nor living creature; nor visible remnant of what human hands had reared there was nothing to be seen, but one black extended surface still streaming with mephitic vapor, and heaved into calcined waves by the operation of fire and the undulations of the earthquake! Pliny was found dead upon the seashore, stretched upon a cloth which had been spread for him, where it was conjectured he had perished early, his corpulent and apoplectic habit rendering him an easy prey to the suffocating atmosphere.

LESSON LX.

New mode of fishing.-SCRAP BOOK.

SEVERAL years ago, a farmer, who resided in the immediate neighborhood of Lochmaben, Dumfriesshire, kept a gander, who had not only a great trick of wandering himself, but also delighted in piloting forth his cackling harem, to weary themselves in circumnavigating their native lake, or in straying amidst forbidden fields on the opposite shore. Wishing to check this vagrant habit, he one day seized the gander just as he was about to spring into his favorite element, and tying a large fish-hook to his leg, to which was attached part of a dead frog, he suffered him to proceed upon his voyage of discovery. As had been anticipated, this bait soon caught the eye of a greedy pike, which swallowing the deadly hook, not only arrested the progress of the astonished gander, but forced him to perform half a dozen somersets on the surface of the water! For some time the struggle was most amusing-the fish pulling, and the bird screaming with all its might-the one attempting to fly, and the other to swim, from the invisible enemy-the gander the one mo

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ment losing and the next regaining his centre of gravity, and casting between whiles many a rueful look at his snowwhite fleet of geese and goslings, who cackled forth their sympathy for their afflicted commodore. At length victory declared in favor of the feathered angler, who, bearing away for the nearest shore, landed on the smooth green grass_one of the finest pikes ever caught in the Castle-loch. This adventure is said to have cured the gander of his propensity for wandering; but on this point we are inclined to be a little skeptical-particularly as we lately heard, that, at the Reservoir near Glasgow, the country people are in the habit of employing ducks in this novel mode of fishing. We cannot, to be sure, vouch for this last fact; but, in the days of yore, hawks were taught to bring down woodcocks and muirfowl, and why might not a similar course of training enable ducks to bring up pikes and perches?

LESSON LXI.

A Winter Scene.-BRYANT.

BUT Winter has yet brighter scenes;-he boasts
Splendors beyond what gorgeous Summer knows,
Or Autumn, with his many fruits and woods

All flushed with many hues. Come, when the rains
Have glazed the snow and clothed the trees with ice,
When the slant sun of February pours

Into the bowers a flood of light. Approach!
The incrusted surface shall upbear thy steps,
And the broad, arching portals of the grove
Welcome thy entering. Look, the massy trunks
Are cased in the pure crystal; branch and twig
Shine in the lucid covering; each light rod,
Nodding and twinkling in the stirring breeze,
Is studded with its trembling water-drops,
Still streaming, as they move, with colored light.
But round the parent stem the long, low boughs
Bend in a glittering ring, and arbors hide
The glassy floor. O! you might deem the spot
The spacious cavern of some virgin mine,

Deep in the womb of Earth, where the gems grow,
And diamonds put forth radiant rods, and bud
With amethyst and topaz, and the place

Lit up, most royally, with the

pure beam

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