these ruins, and the camels seem to swell their dimensions, when, reposing between fragments of masonry, they exhibit only their russet heads and their protuberant backs.

In Egypt ruins assume a different character; there, in a small space, are frequently comprised various styles of architecture and various kinds of recollections. The pillars in the ancient Egyp tian style rise by the side of the elegant Corinthian column; a fabric of the Tuscan order stands contiguous to an Arabic tower, a monument of the pastoral age near a structure of the Roman period. Fragments of the Sphinx, the Anubis, with broken statues and obelisks, are rolled into the Nile and buried in the earth amid rice-grounds, bean-fields, and plains of clover. Sometimes, in the overflowing of the river, these ruins have the appearance of a large fleet on the water; sometimes clouds, pouring like waves over the sides of the ruins, seem to cut them in halves; the jackal, mounted on a vacant pedestal, stretches forth his wolf-like head behind the bust of a Pan with a ram's head; the antelope, the ostrich, the ibis, the jerboa,1 leap among the rubbish, while the sultana-hen stands motionless upon them, like a hieroglyphic bird of granite and porphyry.

The vale of Tempe, the woods of Olympus, the hills of Attica and of the Peloponnesus, are everywhere bestrewed with the ruins of Greece. There the mosses, the creeping plants, and the rock-flowers, flourish in abundance. A flaunting garland of jessamine entwines an antique Venus, as if to replace her cestus; a beard of white moss hangs from the chin of Hebe; the poppy shoots up on the leaves of the book of Mnemosyne, a lovely emblem of the past renown and the present oblivion of these regions. The waves of the Ægean Sea, which only advance to subside beneath crumbling porticos; Philomela chanting her plaintive notes; Alcyon heaving his sighs; Cadmus rolling his rings around an altar; the swan building her nest in the lap of a Leda, all these accidents, produced, as it were, by the Graces, pour a magic spell over these poetic ruins. You would say that

1 An animal about the size of a rat, with two very short fore-legs, and two long hind-legs resembling a kangaroo, and a long tail tufted at the extremity. There are various species of the jerboa, that are natives of Egypt, Siberia, the Cape, India, &c. &c.

a divine breath yet animates the dust of the temples of Apollo and the Muses, and the whole landscape bathed in the sea resembles a beautiful picture of Apelles, consecrated to Neptune and suspended over his shores.

CHAPTER V.

RUINS OF CHRISTIAN MONUMENTS.

THE ruins of Christian monuments have not an equal degree of elegance, but in other respects will sustain a comparison with the ruins of Rome and Greece. The finest of this kind that we know of are to be found in England, principally toward the north, near the lakes of Cumberland, on the mountains of Scotland, and even in the Orkney Islands. The walls of the choir, the pointed arches of the window, the sculptured vaultings, the pilasters of the cloisters, and some fragments of the towers, are the portions that have most effectually withstood the ravages of time.

In the Grecian orders, the vaults and the arches follow in a parallel direction the curves of the sky; so that on the gray hangings of the clouds or in a darkened landscape they are lost in the grounds. In the Gothic style, the points universally form a contrast with the circular arches of the sky and the curvatures of the horizon. The Gothic being, moreover, entirely composed of voids, the more readily admits of the decoration of herbage and flowers than the fulness of the Grecian orders. The clustered columns, the domes carved into foliage or scooped out in the form of a fruit-basket, afford so many receptacles into which the winds carry with the dust the seeds of vegetation. The house-leek fixes itself in the mortar; the mosses cover some rugged parts with their elastic coating; the thistle projects its brown burrs from the embrasure of a window; and the ivy, creeping along the northern cloisters, falls in festoons over the arches.

No kind of ruin produces a more picturesque effect than these

relics. Under a cloudy sky, amid wind and storm, on the coast of that sea whose tempests were sung by Ossian, their Gothic architecture has something grand and sombre, like the God of Sinai of whom they remind you. Seated on a shattered altar in the Orkneys, the traveller is astonished at the dreariness of those places: a raging sea, sudden fogs, vales where rises the sepulchral stone, streams flowing through wild heaths, a few reddish pine-trees scattered over a naked desert studded with patches of snow, such are the only objects which present themselves to his view. The wind circulates among the ruins, and their innumerable crevices are so many tubes which heave a thousand sighs. The organ of old did not lament so much in these religious edifices. Long grasses wave in the apertures of the domes, and beyond these apertures you behold the flitting clouds and the soaring sea-eagle. Sometimes, mistaking her course, a ship, hidden by her swelling sails, like a spirit of the waters curtained by his wings, ploughs the black bosom of ocean. Bending under the northern blast, she seems to bow as she advances, and to kiss the seas that wash the relics of the temple of God.

On these unknown shores have passed away the men who adored that Wisdom which walked beneath the waves. Sometimes in their sacred solemnities they marched in procession along the beach, singing, with the Psalmist, How vast is this sea which stretcheth wide its arms! At others, seated in the cave of Fingal on the brink of ocean, they imagined they heard that voice from on high which said to Job, Who shut up the sea with doors when it brake forth as issuing out of the womb? At night, when the tempests of winter swept the earth, when the monastery was enveloped in clouds of spray, the peaceful cenobites, retiring within their cells, slept amid the howling of the storm, congratulating themselves on having embarked in that vessel of the Lord which will never perish.

Sacred relics of Christian monuments, ye remind us not, like so many other ruins of blood, of injustice and of violence! ye relate only a peaceful history, or at most the mysterious sufferings of the Son of man! And ye holy hermits, who, to secure a place in happier regions, exiled yourselves to the ices of the pole,

1 Ps. ciii.

2 Job xxxviii. 8.

ye now enjoy the fruit of your sacrifices; and if, among angels, as among men, there are inhabited plains and desert tracts, in like manner as ye buried your virtues in the solitudes of the earth, so ye have doubtless chosen the celestial solitudes, therein to conceal your ineffable felicity!

CHAPTER VI.

MORAL HARMONIES.

Popular Devotions.

WE now take leave of the physical harmonies of religious monuments and the scenes of nature, and enter upon the moral harmonies of Christianity. The first to be considered are those popular devotions which consist in certain opinions and practices of the multitude which are neither enjoined nor absolutely prohibited by the Church. They are, in fact, but harmonies of religion and of nature. When the common people fancy that they hear the voices of the dead in the winds, when they talk of nocturnal apparitions, when they undertake pilgrimages to obtain relief from their afflictions, it is evident that these opinions are only affecting relations between certain scenes of nature, certain sacred doctrines, and the sorrows of our hearts. Hence it follows that the more of these popular devotions a religion embraces, the more poetical it must be; since poetry is founded on the emotions of the soul and the accidents of nature rendered mysterious by the intervention of religious ideas.

We should indeed be deserving of pity, if, subjecting every thing to the rules of reason, we rigorously condemned these notions which assist the common people to endure the woes of life and teach them a morality which the best laws will never give.1 It is good, and it is something beautiful at the same time, that

1 The object of the author in this chapter is not to examine the philosophical or theological accuracy of certain popular actions and practices, but merely to

all our actions should be full of God, and that we should be in cessantly surrounded by his miracles.

The vulgar are wiser than philosophers. Every fountain, every cross beside a road, every sigh of the wind at night, brings with it a prodigy. For him who possesses faith, nature is a continual wonder. Is he afflicted? he looks at his little picture or medal, and finds relief. Is he anxious once more to behold a relative, a friend? he makes a vow, seizes the pilgrim's staff, climbs the Alps or the Pyrenees, visits Our Lady of Loretto, or St. James in Galicia; on his knees he implores the saint to restore to him a son, (a poor sailor, wandering, perhaps, on the high seas,) to prolong the life of a parent or of a virtuous wife. His heart is lightened. He sets out on his return to his cottage: laden with shells, he makes the hamlets resound with his joy, and celebrates, in simple strains, the beneficence of the blessed Virgin, the mother of God. Everybody wishes to have something belonging to the pilgrim. How many ailments have been cured merely by a blessed ribbon! The pilgrim at length reaches home, and the first person that greets him on his arrival is his wife after a happy delivery, a son returned home, or a father restored to health.

Happy, thrice happy they who possess faith! They cannot smile, without thinking that they will rejoice in the eternal smiles of Heaven; they cannot weep, without thinking that the time of their sorrowing will soon be over. Their tears are not lost religion collects them in her urn, and presents them to the Most High. The steps of the true believer are never solitary; a good angel

:

show the superiority of convictions that have a religious basis over sentiments of infidelity. The general principle which he wishes to establish is well expressed in the following passage of Paley's Moral Philosophy, p. 391:

"Whilst the infidel mocks at the superstition of the vulgar, insults over their credulous fear, their childish errors and fantastic rites, it does not occur to him to observe that the most preposterous device by which the weakest devotee ever believed he was securing the happiness of a future life is more rational than unconcern about it. Upon this subject nothing is so absurd as indifference, no folly so contemptible as thoughtlessness and levity."

It must be admitted, however, that the phraseology of our author has not the precision and perspicuity which are desirable in treating such a subject. The invocation of the Blessed Virgin, pilgrimages, the devotional use of holy pictures and other objects blessed by the Church, &c., are not to be ranked among things which she "neither enjoins nor absolutely prohibits;" for such practices are at least approved and encouraged by her. T.