the word, till I was held up to him one cloudless day on the broad buckler of the ocean. I suppose one might have the same feeling in the desert. I remember getting something like it years ago, when I climbed alone to the top of a mountain, and lay face up on the hot gray moss, striving to get a notion of how an Arab might feel.

6. In a New England winter, too, when everything is gagged with snow, as if some gigantic physical geographer were taking a cast of the earth's face in plaster, the bare knob of a hill will introduce you to the sun as a comparative stranger. But at sea you may be alone with him day after day, and almost all day long. I never understood before that nothing short of full daylight can give the supremest sense of solitude.

7. Darkness will not do so, for the imagination peoples it with more shapes than ever were poured from the frozen loins of the populous North. The sun, I sometimes think, is a little grouty at sea, especially at high noon, feeling that he wastes his beams on those fruitless furrows. It is otherwise with the moon. She "comforts the night," as Chapman finely says, and I always found her a companionable creature.

8. In the ocean horizon I took untiring delight. It is the true magic-circle of expectation and conjecture, almost as good as a wishing-ring. What will rise over that edge we sail toward daily and never overtake? A sail? an island? the new shore of the Old World? Something rose every day, which I need not have gone so far to see, but at whose levee I was a much more faithful courtier than on shore.

9. A cloudless sunrise in mid-ocean is beyond comparison for simple grandeur. It is like Dante's style, bare and perfect. Naked sun meets naked sea, the true classic of Nature. There may be more sentiment in morning on shore, the shivering fairy-jewelry of dew, the silver point-lace of sparkling hoar-frost, but there is also more complexity, more of the romantic.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

LXXIX.-DEATH OF SAMSON.

Scene-In Gaza.

I.

CCASIONS drew me early to this city;

OCCAS

And, as the gates I entered with sunrise,

The morning trumpets festival proclaimed

Through each high street: little I had despatched,
When all abroad was rumored that this day

Samson should be brought forth, to show the people
Proof of his mighty strength in feats and games;
I sorrowed at his captive state, but minded
Not to be absent at that spectacle.

II.

The building was a spacious theater

Half-round, on two main pillars vaulted high,
With seats, where all the lords, and each degree
Of sort, might sit in order to behold;

The other side was open, where the throng
On banks and scaffolds under sky might stand;
I among these, aloof, obscurely stood.

III.

The feast and noon grew high, and sacrifice

Had filled their hearts with mirth, high cheer, and wine,
When to their sports they turned. Immediately

Was Samson as a public servant brought,
In their state livery clad; before him pipes
And timbrels, on each side went armëd guards,
Both horse and foot; before him and behind
Archers and slingers, cataphracts* and spears.
At sight of him the people with a shout
Rifted the air, clamoring their god with praise,
Who had made their dreadful enemy their thrall.

IV.

He, patient, but undaunted, where they led him,
Came to the place; and what was set before him,

* Men and horses both in armor.

Which without help of eye might be essayed,
To heave, pull, draw, or break, he still performed
All with incredible, stupendous force,
None daring to appear antagonist.

V.

At length, for intermission sake, they led him
Between the pillars; he his guide requested,
As over-tired, to let him lean awhile

With both his arms on those two massy pillars,
That to the arched roof gave main support.

VI.

He, unsuspicious, led him; which when Samson
Felt in his arms, with head awhile inclined,
And eyes fast fixed he stood, as one who prayed,
Or some great matter in his mind revolved;

At last, with head erect, thus cried aloud:

66

Hitherto, lords, what your commands imposed

I have performed, as reason was, obeying,
Not without wonder or delight beheld:
Now, of my own accord, such other trial

I mean to show you of my strength, yet greater,
As with amaze shall strike all who behold."

VII.

This uttered, straining all his nerves, he bowed;
As with the force of winds and waters pent,
When mountains tremble, those two massy pillars
With horrible convulsion to and fro

He tugged, he shook, till down they came, and drew
The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder,
Upon the heads of all who sat beneath,—

Lords, ladies, captains, counselors, or priests,
Their choice nobility and flower, not only
Of this but each Philistian city round,
Met from all parts to solemnize this feast.
Samson, with these immixed, inevitably
Pulled down the same destruction on himself;
The vulgar only 'scaped who stood without.

MILTON.

WAS

LXXX.-TRACES OF OCEAN.

AS it the sound of the distant surf that was in mine ears, or the low moan of the breeze, as it crept through the neighboring wood? Oh, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent since time first began-where has it not been uttered? There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless desert, where no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand, and the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But once again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. It is his sands that the winds heap up; and it is the skeleton remains of his vassals-shells and fish, and the stony coral-that the rocks underneath. enclose.

2. There is silence on the tall mountain-peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where the panting lungs labor to inhale the thin bleak air; where no insect murmurs and no bird flies, and where the eye wanders over multitudinous hill-tops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests that sweep on to the distant horizon, and along long hollow valleys where the great rivers begin. And yet once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. The elegies of his more ancient denizens we find sculptured on the crags, where they jut from beneath the ice and the mist-wreath; and his later beaches, stage beyond stage, terrace the descending slopes.

3. Where has the great destroyer not been-the devourer of continents, the blue foaming dragon-whose vocation it is to eat up the land? His ice-floes have alike furrowed the flat steppes of Siberia and the rocky flanks of Schehallion; and his nummulites and fish lie imbedded in great stones of the pyramids, hewn in the times of the Pharaohs, and in rocky folds of Lebanon still untouched by the tool. 4. So long as Ocean exists there must be disintegration, dilapidation, change; and should the time ever arrive when

the elevatory agencies, motionless and chill, shall sleep within their profound depths to awaken no more, and should the sea still continue to impel its currents and to roll its waves, every continent and island would at length disappear, and again, as of old, "when the fountains of the great deep were broken up,"

"A shoreless ocean tumble round the globe."

HUGH MILLER.

LXXXI. THE MOUNTAIN WANDERER'S

RETURN.

I.

HE soul cannot survive alone,

THE

And hate will die, like other things;

I felt an ebbing in my rage,

I hungered for the sound of one,

Just one familiar word,—

Yearned but to hear my fellow speak,

Or sound of woman's mellow tone,

As beats the wild, imprisoned bird,

That long nor kind nor mate has heard,
With bleeding wings

And panting beak

Against its iron cage.

II.

I saw a low-roofed rancho lie,
Far, far below, at set of sun,
Along the foot-hills crisp and dun-
A lone sweet star in lower sky;
Saw children sporting to and fro,
The busy housewife come and go,

And white cows come at her command,

And none looked larger than my hand.

Then worn and torn, and tanned and brown,
And heedless all, I hastened down,

A wanderer wandering long and late,

I stood before the rustic gate.