boasted lever of Archimedes to move the earth, or indicate the spot upon which we must stand could we do it, they have put into our hands tools of matchless power by which we can study the remotest worlds; and they have furnished us with an intellectual plummet by which we can sound the depths of the earth, and count the cycles of its endurance. In his hour of presumption and ignorance man has tried to do more than this; but though he was not permitted to reach the heavens with his cloud-capt tower of stone, and has tried in vain to navigate the aërial ocean, it was given him to ascend into the Empyrean by chains of thought which no lightning could fuse, and no comet strike; and though he has not been allowed to grasp with an arm of flesh the products of other worlds, or tread upon the pavement of gigantic planets, he has been enabled to scan, with more than an eagle's eye, the mighty creations in the bosom of space to march intellectually over the mosaics of sidereal systems, and to follow the adventurous Phaethon in a chariot which can never be overturned.

IV.-MOUNTAINS.

(WILLIAM HOWITT.)

William Howitt was born at Heanor in Derbyshire in 1795. He excels as a poet, as a descriptive writer, and as a novelist. Mrs. Howitt has been associated with him in some of his publications.

THANKS be to God for mountains! The variety which they impart to the glorious bosom of our planet were no small advantage; the beauty which they spread out to our vision in their woods and waters, their crags and slopes, their clouds and atmospheric hues, were a splendid gift; the sublimity which they pour into our deepest souls from their majestic aspects, the poetry which breathes from their streams, and dells, and airy heights, from the sweet abodes, the garbs and manners of their inhabitants,—the songs and legends which have awoke in them, were a proud heritage to imaginative minds. But what are all these when the thought comes, that without mountains the spirit of man

must have bowed to the brutal and the base, and probably have sunk to the monotonous level of the unvaried plain?

When I turn my eyes upon the map of the world, and behold how wonderfully the countries where our faith was nurtured, where our liberties were generated, where our philosophy and literature, the fountains of our intellectual grace and beauty, sprang up, were as distinctly walled out by God's hand with mountain ramparts, from the eruptions and interruptions of barbarism, as if at the especial prayer of the early fathers of man's destinies, I am lost in an exalting admiration. Look at the bold barriers of Palestine! See how the infant liberties of Greece were sheltered from the vast tribes of the uncivilized north by the heights of Hæmus and Rhodope! Behold how the Alps describe their magnificent crescent, inclining their opposite extremities to the Adriatic and Tyrrhene Seas, locking up Italy from the Gallic and Teutonian hordes till the power and spirit of Rome had reached their maturity, and she had opened the wide forest of Europe to the light, spread far her laws and language, and planted the seeds of many mighty nations!

Thanks to God for mountains! Their colossal firmness seems almost to break the current of time itself. The geologist in them searches for traces of the earlier world; and it is there, too, that man, resisting the revolutions of lower regions, retains through innumerable years his habits and his rights. While a multitude of changes has remoulded the people of Europe-while languages, and laws, and dynasties, and creeds, have passed over it, like shadows over the landscape-the children of the Celt and the Goth, who fled to the mountains a thousand years ago, are found there now, and show us, in face and figure, in language and garb, what their fathers were; show us a fine contrast with the modern tribes dwelling below and around them; and show us, moreover, how adverse is the spirit of the mountain to mutability, and that there the fiery heart of Freedom is found for

ever.

V.-INVENTIVE GENIUS AND LABOUR.

(ELIHU BURRITT.)

Elllu Burritt, an "American scholar, journalist, lecturer, and blacksmith," was born in Connecticut in 1811. His life has been one of extraordinary diligence and perseverance. He is best known in this country as the advocate of a great "Peace League," or "League of Universal Brotherhood," having for its aim the prevention of war, and the arrangement of all international disputes by quiet means.

THE physical necessity of mental activity, in every practical sense, confers upon the mind the power to determine our stature, strength, and longevity; to multiply our organs of sense, and increase their capacity, in some cases, to thirty million times their natural power. This capacity of the mind is not a mere prospective possibility; it is a fact, a tried, practical fact; and the human mind is more busy than ever in extending this prerogative.

Let us look in upon man while engaged in the very act of adding to his natural strength these gigantic faculties. See him yonder, bending over his stone mortar, and pounding, and thumping, and sweating, to pulverize his flinty grain into a more esculent form. He stops and looks a moment into the precipitous torrent thundering down its rocky channel. There! A thought has struck him. He begins to whistle; he whittles some, for he learned to whittle soon after he learned to breathe. He gears together, some horizontally, and others perpendicularly, a score of little wooden wheels. He sets them agoing, and claps his hands in triumph to see what they would do if a thousand times larger.

Look at him again. How proudly he stands, with folded arms, looking at the huge things that are working for him! He has made that wild, raging torrent as tame as his horse. He has taught it to walk backward and forward. He has given it hands, and put the crank of his big wheel into them, and made it turn his ponderous grindstone. What a taskmaster! Look at him again! He is standing on the ocean beach, watching the crested billows, as they move in martial squadrons over the deep. He has conceived, or

heard, that richer productions, more delicious fruits and flowers, may be found on yonder invisible shore. In an instant his mind sympathizes with the yearnings of his physical nature.

See! there is a new thought in his eye. He remembers how he first saddled the horse; he now bits and saddles the mountain wave. Not satisfied with taming this proud element, he breaks another into his service. Remembering his mill-dam, he constructs a floating dam of canvas in the air, to harness the winds to his ocean-waggon. Thus, with his water-horse and air-horse harnessed in tandem, he drives across the wilderness of waters with a team that would inake old Neptune hide his diminished head for envy, and sink his clumsy chariot beneath the waves.

See now! he wants something else; his appetite for something better than he has, grows upon what he feeds on. The fact is, he has plodded about in his one-horse waggon till he is disgusted with his poor capacity of locomotion. The wings of Mercury, modern eagles and paper kites, are all too impracticable for models. He settles down upon the persuasion that he can make a great IRON HORSE, with bones of steel and muscles of brass, that will run against time with Mercury, or any other winged messenger of Jove -the daring man!

He brings out his huge leviathan hexapede upon the track. How the giant creature struts forth from his stable, panting to be gone! His great heart is a furnace of glowing coals; his lymphatic blood is boiling in his veins; the strength of a thousand horses is nerving his iron sinews. But his master reins him in with one finger, till the whole of some western village, men, women, children, and half their horned cattle, sheep, poultry, wheat, cheese, and potatoes, have been stowed away in that long train of waggons he has harnessed to his foaming steam-horse.

And now he shouts, interrogatively, “ALL RIGHT?” and, applying a burning goad to the huge creature, away it thunders over the iron road, breathing forth fire and smoke in its indignant haste to outstrip the wind. More terrible than the war-horse in Scripture, clothed with louder thunder, and emitting a cloud of flame and burning coals from

his iron nostrils, he dashes on through dark mountain passes, over jutting precipices, and deep ravines. His tread shakes the earth like a travelling Niagara, and the sound of his chariot-wheels warns the people of distant towns that he is coming.

VI.-DUTY OF FORGIVENESS.

(SAMUEL JOHNSON.)

Samuel Johnson, LL.D., was born at Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1709, and died in 1784. His name occupies a foremost place among the literary men who distinguished the eighteenth century.

A WISE man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain. He that willingly suffers the corrosions of inveterate hatred, and gives up his days and nights to the gloom of malice and perturbations of stratagem, cannot surely be said to consult his ease. Resentment is a union of sorrow with malignity, a combination of a passion which all endeavour to avoid with a passion which all concur to detest. The man who retires to meditate mischief, and to exasperate his own rage; whose thoughts are employed only on means of distress and contrivances of ruin; whose mind never pauses from the remembrance of his own sufferings, but to indulge some hope of enjoying the calamities of another, may justly be numbered among the most miserable of human beings, among those who are guilty without reward, who have neither the gladness of prosperity nor the calm of innocence.

Whoever considers the weakness both of himself and others, will not long want persuasives to forgiveness. We know not to what degree of malignity any injury is to be imputed; or how much its guilt, if we were to inspect the mind of him that committed it, would be extenuated by mistake, precipitance, or negligence; we cannot be certain how much more we feel than was intended to be inflicted, or how much we increase the mischief to ourselves by voluntary aggravations. We may charge to design the effects of accident; we may think the blow violent only