John Wesley. The incidents of history and the objects of nature derive much of their impressiveness from the circumstances surrounding both. Contrast is essential to grand effects. The massacre at Bethlehem gathers blackness from the infant age of the victims; and the frantic leap of Niagara contrasts finely with the oily smoothness of the river above the Fall. The voyager near "earth's central line"-the region of perpetual sun and frequent calm, where the surface of the sea is unbroken with a billow, yet the bulk of the ocean moves together like some monster labouring under an oppressive load "in torrid clime Dark heaving, boundless, endless, and sublime;" marks the huge sweltering gambols of the whale, and hears the loud hiss and rush of the jet he projects into the air best in the cool gray and death-like stillness of the early dawn. The level and the quiet of all around convey the most vivid and instantaneous impressions to the watcher's eye and ear; and "There is that leviathan!" (Psa. civ, 26,) bursts from the lips with an assurance and a rapture which its unwieldy pas seuls would not awaken amid the stirring activities of day and the distraction of stormier scenes and wilder moods. And having traversed under a burning summer sun the length of some Swiss valley, and encountered in your fatiguing march, knapsack on shoulder and staff in hand, the varieties of midwinter temperature by the mer de glace, and the heat of the dog-days in deep, serene, and sheltered nooks, where air to breathe seems almost as great a rarity as wind to blow, where the fumes of the rank vegetation and the wild flowers are stifling and unhealthy, what think you is the fittest time and place to hear the thunder of the avalanche, and trace and tremble at its fall? It is just at that cool hour when, refreshed at your hostelry, your sense of weariness is removed, but sufficient languor remains to tame down your mind into harmony with the scene, and you wander out some half-mile from your temporary home, like the orphan patriarch of old, to meditate at eventide. The sun has just set over the Jungfrau or Schreckhorn, and, liberal of its cosmetics, has laid its red upon the dead cheek of the everlasting snow. There is not a breeze stirring. The brief twilight is just about to close in night. The wing of the last loitering bee has been folded in its hive. The beetle has droned his sonorous vesper-hymn. All is silence, uninterrupted by a sound, except perchance at distant intervals the faint bleat of the goat on the rock high overhead, or the whistle of some shepherd-pipe in the hand of the rustic returning from his labour: "For here the patriarchal days Are not a pastoral fable; pipes in the liberal air Then on the startled ear, that has been learning wisdom at the feet of silence, bursts a crack, like the sharp instantaneous report of a rifle, followed and drowned on the moment by a confused rustle, hoarse rumble, and afterward a heavy thunderous sound of fall and concussion, comparable to nothing so much as the cadence of ten thousand woolpacks dropped together upon a boarden floor. The danger is not near, but the vibrations of the air and the almost breathless hush of the evening make it seem so. A mountain of snow and commingled ice has fallen down some gorge that debouches into our valley, and a spray of snowy particles, which rises cloudwise into the darkening sky, shows the scene and the nature of the ruinous visitation. The tranquillity of the hour makes the crash more loud, the devastation more appalling. Amid lightning, tempest, and thunder, the chief effect had been lost the avalanche had been unnoticed-the crown of majesty had fallen unheeded from the monarch mountain's head. A phenomenon with like effect, appealing to a different sense, will show itself in other scenes. As the traveller approaches Rome from the south, leaving Naples with its charms and its cheats, its lazzaroni and its liveliness, its exquisite sky and sea, with its execrable superstition, dirt, and frivolty behind; but notwithstanding all its drawbacks, where "Simply to feel that we breathe, that we live, Is worth all the joys that life elsewhere can give," and passing the sounding sea and the dismal marsh, lofty Terracina and lowly Fondi, at length tops the range that encloses the Campagna southward, what object is it chiefly arrests the eye? In that great ocean of a plain, a hundred miles by fifty, the seeming crater of some gigantic volcano, with its sulphur streams and its noisome stenches, like a bark upon the waters, floats imperial Rome, the object most conspicuous in the eternal city the wondrous cupola, which speaks her the queen of architectural grandeur, resting like a diadem upon her brow, and bearing no remote resemblance to the tiara of her pontiff ruler;— nothing besides can arrest the gaze. The eye takes in, in its sweep, the mountain line of the northern and eastern horizon, Soracte, empurpled by distance, with its sister ridges on the right, the silver sea with Ostia on the left. It marks the ruins that here and there stud the plain-the tombs, the towns, the towers, the arches, and the aqueducts, the long reaches of which last stretch in picturesque continuity here and there, like a caravan of mules winding over the sierras of Granada. We stand on the brow of Albano, sheltering ourselves from the midday sun under the shade of some broad plane-tree, or luxuriant elm, or embowering vine, and see-we cannot but see-the tomb of Pompey, the ruins of Bovillæ, Frattochie, Torre di Mezza Via, perhaps even Metella's tomb, and catch glimpses now and then of the unequalled Via Appia, its geometrical rectitude in striking contrast with the serpentining Tiber; but above all, and beyond all, we look upon that group in the centre of the picture, that lone mother of dead empires, "the Niobe of nations"-Rome. All objects besides are unattractive; the mountains too distant, the ruins too bare, the wild flowers of this huge prairie too minute and commonplace for special attention; all things near the soil, too, quiver in the dazzling light and burning heat of noon; but high above the undulating |