You may not be quite so fond of castles as I am, and therefore may not venture to explore the dark and damp recesses of Kenilworth-to clamber along its desolated walls, and to climb the broken staircases of its mutilated towers; but as you stand on the level ground you will find abundantly sufficient to interest you; and you may possibly draw a useful moral from the

scene.

Illustrious ruin, hoary Kenilworth!

I view thy noble relics with a sigh:

Thy grandeur and thy greatness are departed!
Thy tenants have forsaken thee, and hid
Their faces in the dust! and thou art left
A mouldering monument, whereon I read,
Not only their brief tenor, but mine own.

ICELAND.

"Here Winter holds his unrejoicing court,
And through his airy hall the loud misrule
Of driving tempest is for ever heard:

Here the grim tyrant meditates his wrath ;

Here arms his winds with all-subduing frost,

Moulds his fierce hail, and treasures up his snows."

HAVE you the slightest desire to die two deaths at the same time? if so, you will meet with every accommodation by climbing Mount Hecla, in Iceland, where the air is below freezing-point, and the earth is as hot as a baker's oven. Two deaths

did I say! you may certainly die half a dozen ways or more at the same moment: you may be frozen to death, and frightened to death; you may be roasted, baked, boiled, suffocated, and dashed to pieces. Never, surely, was such a confused concentration of opposite things found elsewhere. At one spot you require to be clothed in fur, and will see nothing but ice and snow; at another you will be scorched if you are dressed as lightly as a Caffre at the Cape of Good Hope. Here you have mist and smoke, hail and snow, mingled with boiling springs and flames of fire; and rocks of ice half covered with burning lava and smoking cinders. If you are fond of fireworks, it is the very place for you; you may have them to your heart's content. If you like skating, you may keep on your skates all the year round; nor need you ever move about from

one climate to another for the benefit of your health, for you have all the climates of the earth in one focus.

I have seen fifty mountains more picturesque than Mount Hecla; nor is its height very considerable, being somewhat less than a mile from the level of the sea; but its exposed situation renders it an object of greater attention than the mountains around. The territory near it has been so ravaged and desolated by succeeding irruptions, that it is an inhospitable and abandoned desert.

No herbage is found for the space of five or six miles round; though the soil once produced vegetation, it is now covered over for the most part with lava and loose stones. Scattered round the place are holes of all sizes; some resemble draw-wells, and others, for aught I know, may

be miles in depth. The rocks are mostly reduced to pumice-stone, and broken or cracked in every direction by the fire which has tormented them. What adds to the difficulty of ascending Mount Hecla is the violent gusts of wind, which, if the traveller did not immediately fall on the earth for protection, might blow him against the rocks, or into an unfathomable hole, or from the edge of a precipice. It is often as light on the top of the mountain at midnight as at noon-day.

In short, every extreme is here to be met with ; as though the beautiful order of creation, which regulates the return of day and night, light and darkness, heat and cold, summer and winter, had been destroyed. Abrupt rocks, pointed cliffs, groups of fantastic hills, craters, lava, pumice-stones, ice, falls of water,