So much for the agreeable sounds of which the sight of a common stone may remind us (for we have not chosen to go so far back as the poetry of Orpheus, who is said to have made the materials of stone walls answer to his lyre, and dance themselves into shape without troubling the mason). We shall come to grander echoes by and by. Let us see, meanwhile, how pleasant the sight itself may be rendered. Mr. Wordsworth shall do it for us in his exquisite little poem on the fair maiden who died by the river Dove. Our volume is not at hand; but we remember the passage we more particularly allude to. It is where he compares his modest, artless, and sequestered beauty with

"A violet by a mossy stone,

Half hidden from the eye;

Fair as the star, when only one
Is shining in the sky."

Is not that beautiful? Can any thing express a lovelier loneliness than the violet half hidden by the mossy stone, the delicate blue-eyed flower against the country green? And then the loving imagination of this fine poet, exalting the object of his earthly worship to her divine birthplace and future abode, suddenly raises. his eyes to the firmament, and sees her there, the solitary star of his heaven.

But Stone does not want even moss to render him interesting. Here is another stone, and another solitary evening star, as beautifully introduced as the others, but for a different purpose. It is in the opening words of Mr. Keats's poem of "Hyperion," where he

describes the dethroned monarch of the gods sitting in his exile:

"Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,

Far sunken from the healthy breath of Morn,
Far from the fiery Noon and Eve's one star,
Sate gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone."

Quiet as a stone! Nothing certainly can be more quiet than that. Not a syllable or a sigh will a stone utter, though you watch and bear him company for a whole week on the most desolate moor in Cumberland. Thus silent, thus unmoved, thus insensible to whatever circumstances might be taking place, or spectators might think of him, was the soul-stunned old patriarch of the gods. We may picture to ourselves a large or a small stone, as we please,-Stone-henge, or a pebble. The simplicity and grandeur of truth do not care which. The silence is the thing, its intensity, its unalterableness.

Our friend Pebble is here in grand company, and you may think him (though we hope not) unduly bettered by it. But see what Shakspeare will do for him in his hardest shape, and in no finer company than a peasant's :

"Weariness

Can snore upon the flint, when restive sloth
Finds the down pillow hard."

Sleeping on hard stone would have been words strong enough for a common poet; or perhaps he would have said "resting" or "profoundly reposing," or that he could have made his "bed of the bare floor; and the last saying would not have been the worst:

but Shakspeare must have the very strongest words and really profoundest expressions, and he finds them in the homeliest and most primitive. He does not mince the matter, but goes to the root of both sleep and stone, can snore upon the flint. We see the fellow hard at it, bent upon it; deeply drinking of the forgetful draught.

To conclude our quotations from the poets, we will give another line or two from Shakspeare, not inapplicable to our proposed speculations in general, and still less so to the one in hand.

Green, a minor poet, author of the "Spleen," effusion full of wit and good sense,

an

gives pleasant advice to the sick who want exercise, and who are frightened with hypochondria:

"Fling but a stone, the giant dies."

And this reminds us of a pleasant story connected with the flinging of stones, in one of the Italian novels. Two waggish painters persuade a simple brother of theirs, that there is a plant which renders the finder of it invisible; and they all set out to look for it. They pretend suddenly to miss him, as if he had gone away; and to his great joy, while throwing stones about in his absence, give him great knocks in the ribs, and horrible bruises; he hugging himself all the while at these manifest proofs of his success, and the little suspicion which they have of it. It is amusing to picture him to one's fancy, growing happier as the blows grow worse, rubbing his sore knuckles with delight, and hardly able to ejaculate a triumphant "Hah!" at some excessive thump in the back.

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But, setting aside the wonders of the poets and the novelists, Pebble, in his own person and by his own family alliances, includes wonders far beyond the most wonderful things they have imagined. Wrongly is Flint compared with the miser. You cannot, to be sure, skin him: but you can melt him; ay, make him absolutely flow into a liquid, -flow, too, for use and beauty, and become light unto your eyes, goblets to your table, and a mirror to your beloved. Bring two friends of his about him, called Potash and Soda, and Flint runs into melting tenderness, and is no longer Flint he is Glass. You look through him; you drink out of him; he furnishes you beautiful and transparent shutters against the rain and cold; you shave by him; protect pictures with him, and watches, and books; are assisted by him in a thousand curious philosophies; are helped over the sea by him; and he makes your cathedral windows divine, and enables your mistress to wear your portrait in her bosom.

But we must hasten to close our article, and bring his most precious riches down in a shower surpassing the rainbow. Stone is the humble relation, nay, the stock and parent, of Precious Stone! Ruby, Emerald, and Sapphire are of his family!of the family of the Flints; and Flint is more in them than any thing else! That the habitations and secret bosoms of the precious metals are stone, is also true; but it is little compared with this. Precious stone, for the most part, is stone itself, is flint, with some wonderful circumstance of addition, nobody knows what; but, without the flint, the preciousness would not be. Here is wealth and

honor for the poor Pebble! Look at him, and think what splendors issue from his loins:

"Fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,

Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price,
As one of them, indifferently rated,
Might serve, in peril of calamity,

To ransom great kings from captivity."

MARLOWE.

"Sparkling diamonds" are not properly in our list of pebbles; for diamond, the most brilliant mystery of all, is a charcoal!

What now remains for stone, thus filling the coffers of wealth, glorifying the crowns of sultans, and adding beams to beauty itself? One thing greater than all. The oldest and stoniest of stone is granite, and granite (as far as we know) is the chief material of the earth the bones of the world, the substance of our

itself,

star.

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Honored, therefore, be thou, thou small pebble lying in the lane; and, whenever any one looks at thee, may he think of the beautiful and noble world he lives in, and all of which it is capable!