over many broad regions, summit of a lofty mountain, and thence survey the great ocean over plains, and forests, and undulating tracts of hills, and blue remote promontories, and farseen islands, than to look forth on the same vast expanse from the level champaign, a single field's breadth from the shore. It can indeed be in part conceived from either point how truly sublime an object that ocean is, -- how the voyager may sail over it day after day, and yet see no land rise on the dim horizon, how its numberless waves roll, and its great currents ceaselessly flow, and its restless tides ever rise and fall,— how the lights of heaven are mirrored on its solitary surface, solitary, though the navies of a world be there, and how, where plummet-line never sounded, and where life and light alike cease, it reposes with marble-like density, and more than Egyptian blackness, on the regions of a night on which there dawns no morning. But the larger view inspires the profounder feeling. The emotion is less overpowering, the conception less vivid, when from the humble flat we see but a band of water rising to where the sky rests, over a narrow selvage of land, than when, far beyond an ample breadth of foreground, and along an extended line of coast, and streaked with promontories and mottled with islands, and then spreading on and away in an ample plain of diluted blue, to the far horizon, we see the great ocean in its true character, wide and vast as human ken can descry. And such is the sublime prospect presented to the geologist, as he turns him towards the shoreless ocean of the upper eternity. The mere theologian views that boundless expanse from a flat, and there lies in front of him but the narrow strip of the existing creation,a green selvage of a field's breadth, fretted thick by the tombs of dead men ; while to the eye purged and strengthened by the euphrasy of science, the many vast regions of other creations, -promontory beyond promontory, island beyond island, — stretch out in sublime succession into that boundless ocean of eternity, whose sumless, irreducible area their vast extent fails to lessen by a single handbreadth, that awful, inconceivable eternity, God's past lifetime in its relation to God's finite creatures, with relation to the infinite I AM himself, the indivisible element of the eternal now. And there are thoughts which arise in connection with the ampler prospect, and analogies, its legitimate produce, that have assuredly no tendency. to confine man's aspirations, or cramp his cogitative energies, within the narrow precincts of mediocre unbelief. What mean the peculiar place and standing of our species in the great geologic week? There are tombs everywhere: each succeeding region, as the eye glances upwards towards the infinite abyss, is roughened with graves; the pages on which the history of the past is written are all tombstones; the inscriptions, epitaphs we read the characters of the departed inhabitants in their sepulchral remains. And all these unreasoning creatures of the bygone periods - these humbler pieces of workmanship produced early in the week died, as became their natures, without intelligence or hope. They perished ignorant of the past, and unanticipative of the future, knowing not of the days that had gone before, nor recking of the days that were to come after. But not such the character of the last born of God's creatures, - the babe that came into being late on the Saturday evening, and that now whines and murmurs away its time of extreme infancy during the sober hours of preparation for the morrow. Already have the quick eyes of the child looked abroac upon all the past, and already has it noted why the passing time should be a time of sedulous diligence and expectancy. The work-day week draws fast to its close, and to-morrow is the Sabbath! CHAPTER XVIII. Sister (.) The Pen-y-a-mile Train and its Passengers. Aunt Jonathan. - London by Night. St. Paul's; the City as seen from the Dome. - The Lord Mayor's Coach. - Westminster Abbey. The Gothic Architecture a less exquisite Production of the Human Mind than the Grecian. - Poets' Corner. The Mission of the Poets. The Tombs of the Kings. - The Monument of James Watt. A humble Coffee-house and its Frequenters. The Woes of Genius in London. - Old 110, Thames-street. — The Tower. The Thames Tunnel. - Longings of the True Londoner for Rural Life and the Country; their Influence on Literature. The British Museum; its splendid Collection of Fossil Remains. - Human Skeleton of Guadaloupe. - The Egyptian Room. - Domesticities of the Ancient Egyptians. - Cycle of Reproduction. - The Mummies. I MUST again take the liberty, as on a former occasion, of ante-dating a portion of my tour: I did not proceed direct to London from Olney; but as I have nothing interesting to record of my journeyings in the interval, I shall pursue the thread of my narrative as if I had. For the sake of variety, I had taken the penny-a-mile train; and derived some amusement from the droll humors of my travelling companions, a humbler, coarser, freer, and, withal, merrier section of the people, than the second-class travellers, whose acquaintance, in at least my railway peregrinations, I had chiefly cultivated hitherto. We had not the happiness of producing any very good jokes among us; but there were many laudable attempts; and, though the wit was only tolerable, the laughter was hearty. There was an old American lady of the company, fresh from Yankee-land, who was grievously teased for the general benefit; but aunt Jonathan, though only indif ferently furnished with teeth, had an effective tongue; and Mister Bull, in most of the bouts, came off but second best. The American, too, though the play proved now and then somewhat of a horse character, was evidently conscious that her country lost no ho or by her, and seemed rather gratified than otherwise. There were from five-and-twenty to thirty passengers in the van; among the rest, a goodly proportion of town-bred females, who mingled in the fun at least as freely as was becoming, and were smart, when they could, on the American; and immediately beside the old lady there sat a silent, ruddy country girl, who seemed travelling to London to take service in some family. The old lady had just received a hit from a smart female, to whom she deigned no reply; but, turn ing round to the country girl, she patted her on the shoulder, and tendered her a profusion of thanks for some nameless obligation which, she said, she owed to her. "La! to me, ma'am?" said the girl.-"Yes, to you, my pretty dear," said the American: "it is quite cheering to find one modest Englishwoman among so few." The men laughed outrageously; the females did not like the joke half so well, and bridled up. And thus the war went on. The weather had been unpromising, the night fell exceedingly dark and foul, there were long wearisome stoppages at almost every station, within an hour of midnight, and a full hour and a half beyond the specified time of arrival, ere we entered the great city. I took my place in an omnibus, beside a half-open window, and away the vehicle trundled for the Strand. and it was The night was extremely dreary; the rain felt in torrents; and the lamps, flickering and flaring in the wind, threw dismal gleams over the half-flooded streets and the wet pavement, revealing the pyramidal rain-drops as they danced by myriads. in the pools, or splashed against the smooth slippery flagstones. The better shops were all shut, and there were but few lights in the windows: sober, reputable London seemed to have gone to its bed in the hope of better weather in the morning; but here and there, as we hurried past the opening of some lane or alley, I could mark a dazzling glare of light streaming out into the rain from some low cellar, and see forlorn figures of ill-dressed men and draggled women flitting about in a style which indicated that London not sober and not reputable was still engaged in drinking hard drams. Some of the objects we passed presented in the uncertain light a ghostly-like wildness, which impressed me all the more, that I could but guess at their real character. And the guesses, in some instances, were sufficiently wide of the mark. I passed in New Road a singu larly picturesque community of statues, which, in the uncertain light, seemed a parliament of spectres, held in the rain and the wind, to discuss the merits of the "Interment in Towns" Commission, somewhat in the style the two ghosts discussed, in poor Ferguson's days, in the Greyfriars' churchyard, the proposed investment of the Scotch Hospital funds in the Three per Cents. But I found in the morning that the picturesque parliament of ghosts were merely the chance-grouped figures of a stone-cutter's yard. The next most striking object I saw were the long ranges of pillars in Regent-street. They bore about them an air that I in vain looked for by day, of doleful, tomb-like grandeur, as the columns came in sight, one after one, in the thickening fog, and the lamps threw their paley gleams along the endless architrave. Then came Charing Cross, with its white jetting fountains, sadly disturbed in their play by the wind, and its gloomy, shade-like equestrians. And then I reached a quiet lodging-house in Hungerford-street, and tumbled, a little after midnight, into a comfortable bed. The morning arose as gloomily as the evening had closed; and the |