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till the dilating soul, enrapt, transfused into the mighty vision passing,—there, as in her natural form, swelled vast to heaven.

Awake, my soul! not only passive praise thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, mute thanks and secret ecstasy! Awake, voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn!

Thou first and chief, sole sovran of the vale! O, struggling with 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, O wake, and utter praise !-Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth? Who filled thy countenance with rosy light? Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?

And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad! who called you forth from night and utter death; from dark and icy caverns called you forth, 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 let the billows stiffen, and have rest?"

Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow adown enormous ravines slope amain-torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice, and stopped at once amid their maddest plunge! motionless torrents! silent cataracts !-who made you glorious as the gates of heaven, beneath the keen, full moon? Who bade the sun clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet !— God!- -Let the torrents, like a shout of nations, answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God !-God! Sing, ye meadowstreams, with gladsome voice! ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they, too, have a voice, yon piles of snow, and in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!

Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost! Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest! Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain-storm! Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds! Ye signs and wonders of the element ! Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise!

Once more, hoar mount, with thy sky-pointing peaks, oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard, shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene into the depth of clouds that veil thy breast-thou too, again, stupendous mountain!

thou, that, as I raise my head, awhile bowed low in adoration, upward from thy base slow travelling, with dim eyes suffused with tears, solemnly seemest, like a vapoury cloud, to rise before me,-rise, O ever, rise! 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 yon rising sun, earth, with her thousand voices, praises God!

XXXIV.-LINES ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE.

Wordsworth.

FIVE years have passed; five summers, with the length of five long winters; and again I hear these waters, rolling from their mountain-springs, with a sweet inland murmur. Once again do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, which, on a wild secluded scene, impress thoughts of more deep seclusion, and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose here, under this dark sycamore, and view these plots of cottage ground, these orchard-tufts, which, at this season, with their unripe fruits, are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves among the woods and copses, nor disturb the wild green landscape. Once again I see these hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms, green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke sent up in silence from among the trees, with some uncertain notice, as might seem, of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, or of some hermit's cave, where, by his fire, the hermit sits alone.

Though absent long, these forms of beauty have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man's eye; but oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din of towns and cities, I have owed to them, in hours of weariness, sensations sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, and passing even into my purer mind with tranquil restoration-feelings, too, of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, as may have had no trivial influence on that best portion of a good man's life-his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, to them I may have owed another gift of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, is lightened;-that serene and blessed mood in which the affections gently lead us on, until the breath of this corporeal frame, and even the motion of our

human blood, almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul; while, with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

If this be but a vain belief-yet, oh! how oft, in darkness, and amid the many shapes of joyless daylight, when the fretful stir unprofitable, and the fever of the world, have hung upon the beatings of my heart, how oft in spirit have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye!-thou wanderer through the woods; how often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, with many recognitions dim and faint, and somewhat of a sad perplexity, the picture of the mind revives again; while here I stand, not only with the sense of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts that in this moment there is life and food for future years. And so I dare to hope, though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when . like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides of the deep rivers and the lonely streams-wherever nature led; more like a man flying from something that he dreads, than one who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (the coarser pleasures of my boyish days, and their glad animal movements all gone by) to me was all in all. I cannot paint what then I was. The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, the mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, their colours, and their forms, were then to me an appetite; a feeling and a love, that had no need of a remoter charm by thought supplied, or any interest unborrowed from the eye. That time is past, and all its aching joys are now no more, and all its dizzy raptures. Not for this faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts have followed-for such loss, I would believe, abundant recompense. For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue. And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man; a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things. Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows, and the woods, and mountains, and of all that we behold from this green earth; of all the mighty world of eye and ear, both what they half create,

and what perceive; well pleased to recognise, in nature and the language of the sense, the anchor of my purest thoughtsthe nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart-and soul of all my moral being.

XXXV.-ADDRESS TO THE OCEAN.-Byron.

THERE is a pleasure in the pathless woods; there is a rapture on the lonely shore; there is society, where none intrudesby the deep Sea, and music in its roar. I love not Man

the less, but Nature more, from these our interviews; in which I steal from all I may be, or have been before, to mingle with the Universe-and feel what I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Roll on! thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; man marks the earth with ruin-his control stops with the shore: upon the watery plain the wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain a shadow of man's ravage-save his own, when, for a moment, like a drop of rain, he sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown! His steps are not upon thy paths; thy fields are not a spoil for him; thou dost arise and shake him from thee: the vile strength he wields for earth's destruction thou dost all despise, spurning him from thy bosom to the skies: and send'st him, shivering, in thy playful spray, and howling, to his Gods, where haply lies his petty hope in some near port or bay; then dashest him again to earth-there let him lay! -The armaments which thunderstrike the walls of rockbuilt cities, bidding nations quake, and monarchs tremble in their capitals; the oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make their clay creator the vain title take of lord of thee, and arbiter of war,--these are thy toys; and, as the snowy flake, they melt into thy yeast of waves-which mar alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar. Thy shores are empires, changed in all, save thee: Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? Thy waters wasted them while they were free, and many a tyrant since; their shores obey the stranger, slave, or savage; their decay has dried up realms to deserts:—not so thou, unchangeable, save to thy wild waves' play; time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow-such as Creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form glasses itself in tempests; in all time,-calm or convulsed; in breeze,

or gale, or storm; icing the pole, or in the torrid clime darkheaving-boundless, endless, and sublime; the image of Eternity, the throne of the Invisible: even from out thy slime the monsters of the deep are made; each zone obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless-alone!

XXXVI. THE HOSTAGE. DAMON AND PYTHIAS.-J. C. Mangan. THEY seize in the tyrant of Syracuse' halls a youth with a dagger in's vest: he is bound by the tyrant's behest: the tyrant beholds him-rage blanches his cheek: "Why hiddest yon dagger, conspirator? Speak!"-"To pierce to the heart such as thou !"- "Wretch! Death on the cross is thy doom even now!"—" It is well," spake the youth; "I am harnessed for death, and I sue not thy sternness to spare; yet would I be granted one prayer:-three days would I ask, till my sister be wed: as a hostage, I leave thee my friend in my stead; if I be found false to my truth, nail him to thy cross without respite or ruth!"-Then smiled with a dark exultation the king, and he spake, after brief meditation:-"I grant thee three days' preparation; but see thou outstay not the term I allow, else by the high thrones of Olympus I vow that if thou shalt go scathless and free, the best blood of thy friend shall be forfeit for thee!"

And Pythias repairs to his friend-"I am doomed to atone for my daring emprize, by Death in its shamefullest guise; but the monarch three days ere I perish allows, till I give a loved sister away to her spouse; thou, therefore, my hostage must be, till I come the third day, and again set thee free." And Damon in silence embraces his friend, and he gives himself up to the despot; while Pythias makes use of his respite:and ere the third morning in orient is burning, behold the devoted already returning to save his friend ere it be later, by dying himself the vile death of a traitor!

But the rain, the wild rain, dashes earthwards in floods, upswelling the deluging fountains; strong torrents rush down from the mountains, and lo! as he reaches the deep river's border the bridgeworks give way in terrific disorder; and the waves, with a roaring like thunder, sweep o'er the rent wrecks of the arches, and under. To and fro by the brink of that river he wanders;-in vain he looks out through the offingthe fiends of the tempest are scoffing his outcries for aid;— from the opposite strand no pinnace puts off to convey him to land; and, made mad by the stormy commotion, the river

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