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is of the soul; and the features of the scene enjoy our devotion on account of the Spirit that looks out from them, and which they typify.

It is the clime of Art,-the temple of the sacrament of the material transfigured into the spiritual,-of the perpetual marriage of the formal with the divine. Life, thought, passion, manners, all things, partake of an aesthetic quality. An ethereal stream of ideal sentiment seems to float over the land and refract all perceptions, feelings, and objects into beautiful outlines and hues.

It is the land of Antiquity, the school of History, the home of the Past. No time is recorded when Italy stood not foremost in the annals; a scene where great things were thought and wrought. Etruscan, Roman, Pontifical, these civilizations have succeeded one another, and no later one has effaced the vestiges of that which preceded it. All now dwell together; and the face of the land is as a self-registering chronicle of all that has been felt and done upon its surface. Here, under the calm, grave eye of the Venerable Past, the Present moves modestly, and with self-distrust. Here you may stand in the religious presence of the Older Day, and imbibe a temper which is more than wisdom. The active, the striving, the destructive, we leave behind when we cross the mountains. Existence here is moral, consultative, intellectual. It seems like an Elysium, where life is fancied, and interests notional; the blissful future state of an existence gone by, where shadowy forms rehearse in silent show the deeds that once resounded, or elsewhere resound. It is a land where all is ruin; but where ruin itself is more splendid, more permanent, and more vital than the freshest perfections of other countries.

From "Art, Scenery, and Philosophy in Europe."

THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD.

ARNOLD GUYOT.

THE Comparison we have made between the Old World and the New, and the detailed study of the first, have enabled us, I think, to determine its true character, the character assigned to it by its physical nature. The character it owes to its more oceanic position, to the abundance of the waters, to a more tropical situation, to a more fertile soil, is the marked preponderance of vegetable life over animal life. A vigorous vegetation, abundant rather than delicate, immense forests, a soil everywhere irrigated, everywhere productive-these are the wealth of America. Nature has given her all the raw materials with liberality; has lavished upon her all useful gifts.

But our globe would be incomplete, if this element were alone represented, if this were the only world that existed. One of the two worlds

is by no means a repetition of the other; for the Author of all things is too rich in his conceptions ever to repeat himself in his works.

We know already a good number of the physical characteristics of the Old World, an unknown world to us no more. Nevertheless, it is well to recall them here, in order to group them in a single picture, and to deduce from them the essential and characteristic feature which distinguishes it from America.

The number of the continents, double that of the New World, their grouping in a more compact and solid mass, make it already and preeminently the continental world. It is a mighty oak, with stout and sturdy trunk, while America is the slender and flexible palm-tree, so dear to this continent. The Old World-if it is allowable to employ here comparisons of this nature-calls to mind the square and solid figure of man; America the lithe shape and delicate form of woman.

If America is distinguished by the simplicity of its interior structure, and by the consequent unity of character, the Old World, on the contrary, presents the variety of structure carried to its utmost limits. While America, as we have seen, is constructed upon one and the same plan in the two continents, the Old World has at least three, as many as its separate masses; one for Asia and Europe, one for Africa, a third for Australia; for, in spite of their resemblance in certain general features, common to them, as the law of the reliefs has taught us, each of these three continents has none the less its special structure, which is not the same in Australia as in Africa, nor in Africa as in Asia-Europe.

The great mass of Asia-Europe, which may be well called a single continent, of a triangular form, whose western point is Europe-AsiaEurope, by itself, forms already the pendant of the two Americas. Like the New World, it is divided into two parts by a long ridge of heights, of mountain chains, and of table lands, forming a line of the highest elevations, and the axis of this continent; the Himmalaya, the HindoKhu, the Caucasus, the Alps, the Pyrenees, are analogous to the long American Cordilleras.

This ridge also divides the Old World into two unequal parts, but is not placed on one of the edges of the continents, as in America. It is only a little out of the centre, so that it divides the whole surface into two opposite slopes, unequal certainly, but the narrower is nevertheless considerable. The northern slope is more vast: it contains all the great plains of the north, but it is less favored by the climate, and by the forms of the soil. The southern slope is less extended, but it enjoys a more beautiful climate; nature is richer there; it is more indented, more variously moulded; it possesses all those fine peninsulas, the two Indies, Arabia, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Spain, which form the wealth of Asia and Europe. Figure to yourselves the coasts of the Pacific, furnished with a series of peninsulas of this description, and you will

have an idea of the augmentation of wealth that would result to America from such an addition.

From "The Earth and Man."

VATHEK IN THE HALL OF EBLIS.

WILLIAM BECKFORD.

A VOICE announced to the caliph, Nouronihar, the four princes, and the princess, the awful and irrevocable decree. Their hearts immediately took fire, and they, at once, lost the most precious gift of heaven-HOPE. These unhappy beings recoiled, with looks of the most furious distraction. Vathek beheld in the eyes of Nouronihar nothing but rage and vengeance; nor could she discern' aught in his, but aversion and despair. The two princes who were friends, and, till that moment, had preserved their attachment, shrunk back, gnashing their teeth with mutual and unchangeable hatred. Kalilah and his sister made reciprocal gestures of imprecation; all testified their horror for each other by the most ghastly convulsions, and screams that could not be smothered. All severally plunged themselves into the accursed multitude, there to wander in an eternity of unabating anguish.

Such was, and such should be, the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious deeds! Such shall be the chastisement of that blind curiosity, which would transgress those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge; and such the dreadful disappointment of that restless ambition, which, aiming at discoveries reserved for beings of a supernatural order, perceives not, through its infatuated pride, that the condition of man upon earth is to behumble and ignorant.

Thus the caliph Vathek, who, for the sake of empty pomp and forbidden power, had sullied himself with a thousand crimes, became a prey to grief without end, and remorse without mitigation; whilst the humble, the despised Gulchenrouz passed whole ages in undisturbed tranquillity, and in the pure happiness of childhood.

From "Vathek."

THE DRAMATIC AGE.

HENRY REED.

THE large luminary of Spenser's imagination had scarce mounted high enough above the horizon to kindle all it touched, when there arose the still more glorious shape of Shakspeare's genius, radiant like Milton's seraph-" another morn risen on mid-noon." This was the wonderful dramatic era in English letters. Within about fifty years, beginning in the latter part of the sixteenth century, there was a con

course of dramatic authors, the like of which is seen nowhere else in literary history. The central figure is Shakspeare, towering above them all; but there were there Ben Jonson, and Beaumont, and Fletcher, and Ford, and a multitude of whom a poet has said,

"They stood around

The throne of Shakspeare, sturdy, but unclean."

It is scarce possible, it seems to me, to mistake that this abundant development of dramatic poetry was characteristic of times distinguished by the admirable union of action and contemplation in many of the illustrious men who flourished then; for instance, Sir Philip Sydney devoting himself to the effort of raising English poetry to its true estate, kindling his heart with the old ballads, or drawing the gentle Spenser forth from the hermitage of his modesty; at the same time sharing in affairs of state, in knights' deeds of arms, and on the field of battle meeting an early death, memorable with its last deed of charity, when, putting away the cup of water from his own lips, burning with the thirst of a bleeding death, he gave it to a wounded soldier with the words, "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine:" or Raleigh preserving his love of letters throughout his whole varied career, at court, in camp, or tempest-tost in his adventures on the ocean. It seems to me that an age thus characterized by the combination of thought and deed in its representative men, had its most congenial literature in the drama-that form of poetry which Lord Bacon has described as "history made visible."

From "English Literature."

CULTURE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

HENRY REED.

We are living at a period when the language has attained a high degree of excellence, both in prose and verse,-when it has developed largely, for all the uses of language, its power and its beauty. It is one of the noblest languages that the earth has ever sounded with; it is our endowment, our inheritance, our trust. It associates us with the wise and good of olden times, and it couples us with the kindred peoples of many distant regions. It is our duty, therefore, to cultivate, to cherish, and to keep it from corruption. Especially is this a duty for Us, who are spreading that language over such vast territory; and not only that, but having such growing facilities of intercommunication, that the language is perpetually speeding from one portion of the land to another with wondrous rapidity, equally favorable to the diffusion of either purity or corruption of speech, but, certainly, calculated to break down narrow and false provincialisms of speech.

In the culture and preservation of a language, there are two principles, deep-seated in the philosophy of language, which should be borne in mind. One is, that every living language has a power of growth, of expansion, of development; in other words, its life-that which makes it a living language, having within itself a power to supply the growing wants and improvements of a living people that uses it. If, by any system of rules, restraint is put on this genuine and healthful freedom, on this genial movement, the native vigor of the language is weakened. From "English Literature."

BYRON'S TOMB.

WASHINGTON IRVING.

BYRON'S tomb is in an old gray country church, venerable with the lapse of centuries. He lies buried beneath the pavement, at one end of the principal aisle. A light falls on the spot through the stained glass of a gothic window, and a tablet on the adjacent wall announces the family vault of the Byrons. It had been the wayward intention of the poet to be entombed, with his faithful dog, in the monument erected by him in the garden of Newstead Abbey. His executors showed better judgment and feeling, in consigning his ashes to the family sepulchre, to mingle with those of his mother and his kindred. Here,

"After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well.

Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further!"

How nearly did his dying hour realize the wish made by him but a few years previously in one of his fitful moods of melancholy and misanthropy :

"When time, or soon or late, shall bring

The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead,

Oblivion may thy languid wing

Wave gently o'er my dying bed!

No band of friends or heirs be there,
To weep or wish the coming blow:

No maiden with dishevelled hair,

To feel, or feign decorous woe.

But silent let me sink to earth,

With no officious mourners near;
I would not mar one hour of mirth,
Nor startle friendship with a fear."

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