PART II. ON THE MOUNTAINS.-CARLYLE. THOMAS CARLYLE was born in Dumfriesshire in 1795, and has gradually risen to the highest rank as an English author. His writings are numerous, and embrace history, criticism, biography, &c. The following extract is from "Sartor Resartus." 1. A PECULIAR feeling it is that will rise in the traveller when, turning some hill-range in his desert road, he descries lying far below, embosomed among its groves and green natural bulwarks, and all diminished to a toy-box, the fair town, where so many souls, as it were seen and yet unseen, are driving their multifarious traffic. Its white steeple is then truly a starward pointing finger; the canopy of blue smoke seems like a sort of life-breath: for always, of its own unity, the soul gives unity to whatsoever it looks on with love; thus does the little dwellingplace of men, in itself a congeries of houses and huts, become for us an individual, almost a person. But what thousand other thoughts unite thereto, if the place has to ourselves been the arena of joyous or mournful experiences; if perhaps the cradle we were rocked in still stands there, if our loving ones still dwell there, if our buried ones there slumber!" Does he, as the wounded eagle is said to make for its own eyrie, and indeed military deserters, and all hunted outcast creatures, turn, as if by instinct, in the direction of their birthland,-fly first, in this extremity, towards his native village; but reflecting that there no help awaits him, take only one wistful look from the distance, and then wend elsewhither ? : 2. Little happier seems to be his next flight into the wilds of Nature; as if in her mother-bosom he would seek healing. So at least we incline to interpret the following notice, separated from the former by some considerable space, wherein, however, is nothing noteworthy : "Mountains were not new to him; but rarely are mountains seen in such combined majesty and grace as here. The rocks are of that sort called primitive by the mineralogists, which always arrange themselves in masses of a rugged, gigantic character; which ruggedness, however, is here tempered by a singular airiness of form and softness of environment: in a climate favourable to vegetation, the gray cliff, itself covered with lichens, shoots up through a garment of foliage or verdure; and white, bright cottages, tree-shaded, cluster round the everlasting granite. In fine vicissitude, beauty alternates with grandeur; you ride through stony hollows, along strait passes, traversed by torrents, overhung by high walls of rock; now winding amid broken shaggy chasms, and huge fragments; now suddenly emerging into some emerald valley, where the streamlet collects itself into a lake, and man has again found a fair dwelling, and it seems as if peace had established herself in the bosom of strength. Now the valley closes in abruptly, intersected by a huge mountain mass, the stony waterworn ascent of which is not to be accomplished on horseback. Arrived aloft, he finds himself again lifted into the evening sunset light, and cannot but pause and gaze round him some moments there. An upland irregular expanse of wold, where valleys in complex branchings are suddenly or slowly arranging their descent towards every quarter of the sky. The mountain ranges are beneath your feet, and folded together only the loftier summits look down here and there as on a second plain; lakes also lie clear and earnest in their solitude. No trace of man now visible; unless indeed it were he who fashioned that little visible link of highway, here, as would scem, scaling the inaccessible, to unite province with province. But sunwards, lo you! how it towers sheer up, a world of mountains, the diadem and centre of the mountain region! A hundred and a hundred savage peaks, in the last light of day; all glowing, of gold and amethyst, like giant spirits of the wilderness; there in their silence, in their solitude, even as on the night when Noah's Deluge first dried! Beautiful, nay solemn, was the sudden aspect to our wanderer. He gazed over those stupendous masses with wonder, almost with longing desire; never till this hour had he known nature, that she was one that she was his mother and divine. And as the ruddy glow was fading into clearness in the sky, and the sun had now departed, a murmur of eternity and immensity, of death and of life, stole through his soul; and he felt as if death and life were one, as if the earth were not dead, as if the splendour, and his munion. spirit of the earth had its throne in that own spirit were therewith holding com MEN OF ENGLAND.-CAMPBELL. MEN of England! who inherit Rights that cost your sires their blood! By the foes ye've fought uncounted, Yet remember, England gathers Glow not in your hearts the same. What are monuments of bravery, Trophied temples, arch, and tomb? Pageants!-let the world revere us Bared in Freedom's holy cause. Yours are Hampden's, Russell's glory, Worth a thousand Agincourts! We're the sons of sires that baffled They defied the field and scaffold, LOWLY AMBITION, ALL my ambition is, I own, To profit and to please unknown; Like streams supplied from springs below, ANCIENT JERUSALEM. (From "The Life and Words of Christ," by Cunningham Geikie, D.D.) : 1. JERUSALEM was thus, pre-eminently, a mountain city, surrounded on all sides by hills, and with hills, famous and sacred beyond all others, as its own site. The road from Nazareth entered the new lower town, by the Damascus gate, and passed through the most stirring business street-in the bottom of the Valley of the Cheesemakers, or the Tyropo'on a deep and narrow hollow between Mounts Zion and Moriah, then crowded with the narrow lanes which serve for streets in Eastern cities. In the new town, under the shadow of the two hills, were the shops of the braziers; the clothes' bazaar, and the square where the authorities received announcements of the new moon, and gave the public feasts that followed, monthly. In the Tyropo'on, the streets ran, in terraces, up the steep sides of the hill, side lanes climbing here and there, to the top, past the bazaar of the butchers, and that of the wool-dealers, to the upper street, where Ismael Ben Camithi, the high priest at the time, having gone out on the great Day of Atonement, to speak with a heathen, a fleck of spittle fell on his clothes from the lips of the uncircumcised, and defiled him, so that he could not perform the services of the day, and had to get his brother to take his place. rose In 2. On the west of the Tyropo'on, on the top of Mount Zion, rose the old, or upper city, known also as the City of David. it were the shops of the goldsmiths, and the houses of the priests who lived in Jerusalem. The Wall of David ran along its north side, opening through the gate Gennath, to Akra, or the lower town. High above this wall, which was over fifty feet in height, the three famous castles Hippikus, Phasaelus, and Mariamne-built by Herod the Great, and then fresh from the builder's hands. Of these, Hippikus, stern and massive, towered 120 feet above the wall, at its north-west corner: a great square of huge stones, in successive stories, the upper one surmounted by battlements and turrets. Close by, and in a line with it, rose Phasaelus, the splendid memorial to Herod's brother Phasael, who had beaten out his brains against the walls of his dungeon when a prisoner of the Parthians. It, also, was square, for sixty feet of its height above the wall, but from amidst the breast. works and bulwarks of this lower fortress rose a second tower |