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HE greatest work of man, except the wall of China. . . The pyramidal form may have been chosen for a fabric, intended to co-extend its duration with that of the world;

its gradual diminution gave it such stability as defeated all the common attacks of the elements, and could scarcely be overthrown by earthquakes themselves, the least resistable of natural violence. A concussion that should shatter the Pyramid would threaten the dissolution of the Continent.

Of the Chinese wall, it is easy to assign the motive. It secured a wealthy and timorous nation from the incursions of barbarians, whose unskilfulness in arts made it easier for them to supply their wants by rapine than by industry, and who, from time to time, poured in upon the habitations of peaceful commerce, as vultures descend upon domestic fowl. Their celerity and fierceness made the wall necessary, and their ignorance made it efficacious.

But for the Pyramids no reason has ever been given adequate to the cost and labour of the work. The narrowness of the chambers proves that it could afford no retreat from enemies, and treasures might have been deposited at far less expense with equal security. It seems to have been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must be always appeased by some employment. Those who have already all that they can enjoy must enlarge their desires. He that has built for use till use is supplied, must begin to build for vanity, and extend his plan to the utmost power of human performance, that he may not be soon reduced to form another wish.

This mighty structure is a monument of the insufficiency of human enjoyments. A king, whose power is unlimited, and whose treasures surmount all real and imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of a Pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasures, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life, by seeing thousands labouring without end, and one stone, for no purpose, laid on another. Whoever thou art, that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratification, survey the Pyramids, and confess thy folly.

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WONDERFUL mountain of Blaavin,
How oft since our parting hour

You have roar'd with the wintry torrents,
You have gloom'd through the thunder-shower!
But by this time the lichens are creeping
Grey-green o'er your rocks and your stones,
And each hot afternoon is steeping
Your bulk in its sultriest bronze.
O sweet is the Spring wind, Blaavin,
When it loosens your torrents' flow,

When with one little touch of a sunny hand

It unclasps your cloak of snow.

O sweet is the Spring wind, Blaavin,

And sweet it was to me

For before the bell of the snowdrop

Or the pink of the apple tree

Long before your first Spring torrent
Came down with a flash and a whirl,
In the breast of its happy mother
There nestled my little girl.

O Blaavin, rocky Blaavin,

It was with the strangest start

That I felt, at the little querulous cry,
The new pulse awake in my heart;

A pulse that will live and beat, Blaavin,

Till, standing around my bed,

While the chirrup of birds is heard out in the dawn,

The watchers whisper, He's dead!

O another heart is mine, Blaavin,

Sin' this time seven year,

For Life is brighter by a charm,
Death darker by a fear.
O Blaavin, rocky Blaavin,

How I long to be with you again,
To see lash'd gulf and gully
Smoke white in the windy rain-

To see in the scarlet sunrise

The mist-wreaths perish with heat,

The wet rock slide with a trickling gleam
Right down to the cataracts' feet;

While toward the crimson islands,

Where the sea-birds flutter and skirl,

A cormorant flaps o'er a sleek ocean floor
Of tremulous mother-of-pearl.

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GOD IN NATURE

(Melvill.)

HERE may be a kind of poetical or Arcadian divinity drawn from the brightness of sunshine, and the rich enamel of flowers, and the deep dark blue of a sleeping lake. And, taking the glowing landscape as their page of theology, men may sketch to themselves God unlimited in His benevolence. But when the sunshine is succeeded by the darkness, and the flowers are withered, and the waters wrought into madness, can they find in the wrath and devastation that assurance of God's love, which they derived, unhesitatingly, from the calm and the beauty? The matter of fact we hold to be, that natural theology, at the best, is a system of uncertainties, a balancing of opposites. I should draw different conclusions from the genial breathings of one day, and the desolating simoom of the next. And though, when I had thrown me down on an Alpine summit, and looked forth on the clusterings of the grand and the lovely, canopied with an azure that was full of glory, a hope that my Creator loved me might have been gathered from scenery teeming with impresses of kindness, and apparently sending out from waving forests, and gushing fountains, and smiling villages, the anthem of an acknowledgment that God is infinitely beneficent; yet if, on a sudden, there passed around me the rushings of the hurricane, and there came up from the vallies the shrieks of an affrighted peasantry, and the torrents went down in their strength, sweeping away the labour of man's hands, and the corn and the wood which had crowned the fields as a diadem; oh, the confidence which had been given me, by an exhibition which appeared eloquent, of the benevolence of Godhead, would yield to horror and trepidation, whilst the Eternal One seemed walking before me, the tempest His voice, and the lightning His glance, and a fierce devastation in His every footprint!

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