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9. The reason is, not only that it means sky-blue, and therefore shows us how blue the sky was at the time, and the cause why the brook was of such a color; but the word cerule was also a beautiful word, beautiful for the sound, and expressive of a certain liquid yet neat softness, somewhat resembling the mixture of soft hissing, rumbling, and inward music of the brook.

10. So much for the agreeable sounds of which the sight of a common stone may remind us. Let us see now 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. 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."

11. Is not that beautiful? Can anything 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 abcde, suddenly raises his eyes to the firmament, and sees her there, the solitary star of his heaven.

12. 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' 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."

13. 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.

14. 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."

15. 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 draft.

16. Hear, too, what a great critic of art has to say of a stone: "A stone, when it is examined, will be found a mountain in miniature. The fineness of Nature's work is so great, that, into a single block, a foot or two in diameter, she can compress as many changes of form and structure, on a small scale, as she needs for her mountains on a large one; and, taking moss for forests, and grains of crystal for

crags, the surface of a stone, in by far the plurality of instances, is more interesting than the surface of an ordinary hill, more fantastic in form, and incomparably richer in color."

17. But, setting aside the poets and the artists, 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. 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.

18. But we must hasten to 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 anything else! 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!

19. 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 stones is granite, and granite (as far as we know) is the chief material of the earth itself, the bones of the world, the substance of our star.

20. 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!

LEIGH HUNT-adapted.

CIII. THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.

THIS

I.

HIS is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,—

The venturous bark that flings

On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings

In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,

And coral reefs lie bare,

Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

II.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl,

Wrecked is the ship of pearl!

And every chambered cell,

Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,-

Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

III.

Year after year beheld the silent toil

That spread his lustrous coil;

Still, as the spiral grew,

He left the past year's dwelling for the new,

Stole with soft step its shining archway through,

Built up its idle door,

Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Iv.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,

Child of the wandering sea,

Cast from her lap forlorn!

From thy dead lips a clearer note is borne
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!

While on mine ear it rings,

Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:

V.

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

O. W. HOLMES.

TH

CIV.-BRITISH RULE IN INDIA.

HE unhappy people of India, feeble and effeminate as they are from the softness of their climate, and subdued and broken as they have been by the knavery and strength of civilization, still occasionally start up in all the vigor and intelligence of insulted nature. To be governed at all, they must be governed with a rod of iron; and our empire in the East would, long since, have been lost to Great Britain, if civil skill and military prowess had not united their efforts to support an authority-which Heaven never gave-by means which it never can sanction.

2. Gentlemen, I think I can observe that you are touched with this way of considering the subject, and I can account for it. I have not been considering it through the cold medium of books, but have been speaking of man and his nature, and of human dominion, from what I have seen of them myself among reluctant nations submitting to our authority. I know what they feel, and how such feelings can alone be repressed. I have heard them in my youth from a naked savage, in the indignant character of a prince surrounded by his subjects, addressing the governor of a British colony, holding a bundle of sticks in his hand, as the notes of his unlettered eloquence.

3. "Who is it," said the jealous ruler over the desert, encroached upon by the restless foot of English adventure"who is it that causes this river to rise in the high mountains, and to empty itself into the ocean? Who is it that causes to blow the loud winds of winter, and that calms them again in summer? Who is it that rears up the shade of those lofty forests, and blasts them with the quick light

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