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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! Or rather, 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 blessings.

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 later days. They are as a fossil leaf, in which you observe the fibres, 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 for ever 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 fled?

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.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

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.

A traveller should be prepared to read the book of nature with the historical harmony. An ignorant or forgetful man sees nothing but the scene before him, when the historical student sees it peopled with great forms, sees it in grand moral lights and shades, surrounded by the many-colored atmosphere of the past, as well as the light of the day's sun that is shining upon it. When a man visits Altorf, he needs to be for the time thrown back into the past; but this is impossible, unless the past is in him as the fruit of his studies, taken into his being. The guide books will repeat to him the name of Tell and the facts in his history; the inscription will inform him that such and such great events took place amidst the scenes he is visiting; but this does not give him the past, does not make up that inward scenery with which his mind has need to have been familiar, in order that the place may call heroic times and interests into being. How much greater is the enjoyment of a mind that has the whole of such a drama as Schiller's William Tell fresh in memory, while wandering over the Canton Uri, than his that has but a few dry dates and names, or worse than all is dependent on the monuments, the guides, and the Handbooks!

A man visits Zurich; he goes into the Cathedral; what a loss to him, if for the first time he learns that Zwingle there preached, or knows nothing about the history of Zwingle, and the scenes of the reformation! He visits Einseidlen; seeks the shrine of the Virgin, sees the monks at worship; what a loss to him, if his studies in history have failed to people the scene to his own mind from the great life that for a time was there passing! A man crosses the Wengern Alp. If he has never read the tragedy of Manfred, there is a grand scenery created from the poet's mind, in respect of which he crosses before the Jungfrau with his eyes shut. A man passes into Athens and stands on the Acropolis. What a loss to him, if his studies have never made him familiar with the age of Pericles! Nay, there is a recollection of objects around him, that have absolutely no meaning, no story, no lesson, no language to his mind, if many a page of Grecian history be

not in his remembrance. A man wanders into Egypt, up and down the Nile, into old majestic Thebes, with its dim colossal ruins. What an inappreciable, irretrievable loss to him, if he never read Herodotus, or is destitute of a knowledge of the combined prophetic and actual history of that antique marvellous country, with its gigantic, monstrous types of thought and being! "Labor to distil and unite into thyself," says ancient Fuller, "the scattered perfections of several nations. Many weed foreign countries, bringing home Dutch drunkenness, Spanish pride, French wantonness, and Italian Atheism; as for the good herbs, Dutch industry, Spanish loyalty, French courtesy, and Italian frugality, these they leave behind them; others bring home just nothing; and because they singled not themselves from their countrymen, though some years beyond sea, were never out of England." This is the great folly of travelling without a foreign language, that it compels a stranger to keep company only with his own countrymen, so that he returns home with all his prejudices.

We are still in the magnificent pass of the St. Gothard, and it continues to present a character at once picturesque and beautiful, wild and savage. The gorges are tremendous, the bridges thrown across the torrent frequent and bold. Here and there, dark forests of fir cling to the mountains, and sometimes you see the savage jagged paths of recent avalanches. Now and then, there is a little chapel on the mountain's brow; the evening chime of bells comes ringing up the valley; you meet corded brown friars walking and women working on the roads. The sun is pouring through rifts in the clouds, and the dark blue sky opens.

I cannot help noting the variety and contrast of colors offered to the eye in such a scene; the azure of the sky, the violet mountains, of a hue as deep as the heart's ease, the grisly grey rocks, the black firs, the deep blue gorges, the pale verdure of the trees, the deeper delicious green of the grassy slopes and meadow patches, the white virgin snow, the dim mists, the silvery clouds, the opal of the morn, the golden lights of evening. What an intermingling of lovely hues and shades! At some distance below Wasen the mountains are singularly grand. Far down the

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