erous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the undistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet and give to the reckless 5 waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon 10 the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.

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MOUNTAINS.

(From Modern Painters, Vol. IV., 1856.)

Inferior hills ordinarily interrupt, in some degree, the richness of the valleys at their feet; the grey downs of southern England, and treeless coteaux of central France, and grey swells of Scottish moor, whatever peculiar charm they may possess in themselves, are at least destitute of those which 20 belong to the woods and fields of the lowlands. But the great mountains lift the lowlands on their sides. Let the reader imagine, first, the appearance of the most varied plain of some richly cultivated country; let him imagine it dark with graceful woods and soft with deepest pastures; let him fill 25 the space of it, to the utmost horizon, with innumerable and changeful incidents of scenery and life, leading pleasant streamlets through its meadows, strewing clusters of cottages beside their banks, tracing sweet footpaths through its avenues, and animating its fields with happy flocks and slow 30 wandering spots of cattle: and when he has wearied himself with endless imagining, and left no space without some loveliness of its own, let him conceive all this great plain, with its

infinite treasures of natural beauty and happy human life, gathered up in God's hands from one edge of the horizon to the other, like a woven garment; and shaken into deep, falling folds, as the robes droop from a king's shoulders; all its 5 bright rivers leaping into cataracts along the hollows of its fall; and all its forests rearing themselves aslant against its slopes, as a rider rears himself back when his horse plunges; and all its villages nestling themselves into the new windings of its glens; and all its pastures thrown into steep waves of 10 greensward, dashed with dew along the edges of their folds, and sweeping down into endless slopes, with a cloud here and there lying quietly, half on the grass, half in the air; and he will have as yet, in all this lifted world, only the foundation of one of the great Alps. And whatever is lovely in the 15 lowland scenery becomes lovelier in this change: the trees which grew heavily and stiffly from the level line of plain assume strange curves of strength and grace as they bend themselves against the mountain side; they breathe more freely and toss their branches more carelessly, as each climbs 20 higher, looking to the clear light above the topmost leaves of its brother tree; the flowers which on the arable plain fell before the plough now find out for themselves unapproachable places, where year by year they gather into happier fellowship and fear no evil; and the streams which in the level 25 land crept in dark eddies by unwholesome banks now move in showers of silver, and are clothed with rainbows, and bring health and life wherever the glance of their waves can reach.

LEAVES MOTIONLESS.

(From Modern Painters, Vol. V., 1860.)

Leaves motionless. The strong pines wave above them, and the weak grasses tremble beside them; but the blue stars 30 rest upon the earth with a peace as of heaven; and far along the ridges of iron rock, moveless as they, the rubied crests of Alpine rose flush in the low rays of morning. Nor these yet the stillest leaves. Others there are, subdued to a deeper

quietness, the mute slaves of the earth, to whom we owe, perhaps, thanks and tenderness the most profound of all we have to render for the leaf-ministries.

It is strange to think of the gradually diminished power and withdrawn freedom among the orders of leaves-from 5 the sweep of the chestnut and gadding of the vine, down to the close-shrinking trefoil and contented daisy, pressed on earth; and, at last, to the leaves that are not merely close to earth but themselves a part of it, fastened down to it by their sides, here and there only a wrinkled edge rising from 10 the granite crystals. We have found beauty in the tree yielding fruit and in the herb yielding seed. How of the herb yielding no seed, the fruitless, flowerless lichen of the rock?

Lichen and mosses (though these last in their luxuriance 15 are deep and rich as herbage, yet both for the most part humblest of the green things that live), how of these? Meek creatures! the first mercy of the earth, veiling with hushed softness its dintless rocks; creatures full of pity, covering with strange and tender honor the scarred disgrace of ruin, 20 laying quiet finger on the trembling stones to teach them rest. No words that I know of will say what these mosses are. None are delicate enough, none perfect enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green; the starred divisions of rubied 25 bloom fine-filmed as if the Rock Spirits could spin porphyry as we do glass; the traceries of intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, arborescent, burnished through every fibre into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweet-30 est offices of grace. They will not be gathered, like the flowers, for chaplet or love-token; but of these the wild bird will make its nest, and the wearied child his pillow.

And, as the earth's first mercy, so they are its last gift to us. When all other service is vain, from plant and tree, the 35 soft mosses and gray lichen take up their watch by the headstone. The woods, the blossoms, the gift-bearing grasses have done their parts for a time, but these do service forever.

Trees for the builder's yard, flowers for the bride's chamber, corn for the granary, moss for the grave.

Yet, as in one sense the humblest, in another they are the most honored, of the earth-children. Unfading as motion5 less, the worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in lowliness, they neither blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To them, slow-fingered, constant-hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark, eternal tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-pencilled, iris-dyed, the tender framing of their 10 endless imagery. Sharing the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance; and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the parched meadow the drooping of its cowslip-gold, far above, among the mountains, 15 the silver lichen-spots rest, star-like, on the stone, and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.

It has been asked of me, very justly, why I have hitherto written to you of things you were little likely to care for, in words which it was difficult for you to understand. I have 30 no fear but that you will one day understand all my poor words the saddest of them perhaps too well. But I have great fear that you may never come to understand these written above, which are part of a king's love-song, in one

sweet May, of many long since gone. I fear that for you the wild winter's rain may never pass, the flowers never appear on the earth; that for you no bird may ever sing; for you no perfect Love arise and fulfil your life in peace. "And why not for us as for others?" Will you answer me so, and take 5 my fear for you as an insult? Nay, it is no insult; nor am I happier than you. For me the birds do not sing, nor ever will. But they would for you, if you cared to have it so. When I told you that you would never understand that lovesong, I meant only that you would not desire to understand it. 10 Are you again indignant with me? Do you think, though you should labor and grieve and be trodden down in dishonor, all your days, at least you can keep that one joy of Love and that one honor of Home? Had you, indeed, kept that, you had kept all. But no men yet, in the history of 15 the race, have lost it so piteously. In many a country and many an age, women have been compelled to labor for their husbands' wealth or bread; but never until now were they so homeless as to say, like the poor Samaritan, "I have no husband." Women of every country and people have sustained 20 without complaint the labor of fellowship; for the women of the latter days in England it has been reserved to claim the privilege of isolation.

This, then, is the end of your universal education and civilization, and contempt of the ignorance of the Middle 25 Ages and of their chivalry. Not only do you declare yourselves too indolent to labor for daughters and wives, and too poor to support them but you have made the neglected and distracted creatures hold it for an honor to be independent of you and shriek for some hold of the mattock for themselves. 30 Believe it or not, as you may, there has not been so low a level of thought reached by any race since they grew to be male and female out of star-fish or chickweed or whatever else they have been made from by natural selection-according to modern science.

That modern science, also, economic and of other kinds, has reached its climax at last. For it seems to be the appointed function of the nineteenth century to exhibit in all

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