MOUNTAINS.

E. M. MORSE.

OUNTAINS! who was your Builder?

MOUR

Who laid your awful foundations in the central fires, and piled your rocks and snow-capped summits among the clouds? Who placed you in the gardens of the world, like noble altars, on which to offer the sacrificial gifts of many nations? Who reared your rocky walls in the barren desert, like towering pyramids, like monumental mounds, like giants' graves, like dismantled piles of royal ruins, telling a mournful tale of glory, once bright, but now fled forever, as flee the dreams of a midsummer's night? Who gave you a home in the islands of the sea, - those emeralds that gleam among the waves, those stars of ocean that mock the beauty of the stars of night?

2. Mountains! I know who built you. It was GOD! His name is written on your foreheads. He laid your corner-stones on that glorious morning when the orchestra of Heaven sounded the anthem of creation. He clothed your high, imperial forms in royal robes. He gave you a snowy garment, and wove for you a cloudy vail of crimson and gold. He crowned you with a diadem of icy jewels; pearls from the arctic seas; gems from the frosty pole. Mountains! ye are glorious. Ye stretch your granite arms away toward the vales of the undiscovered: ye have a longing for immortality.

3. But, Mountains! ye long in vain. I called you glorious, and truly ye are; but your glory is like that of the starry heavens, it shall pass away at the trumpet-blast of the angel of the Most High. And yet ye are worthy of a high and eloquent eulogium. Ye were the lovers of

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the daughters of the gods; ye are the lovers of the daugh

ters of Liberty and Religion now; and in your old and feeble age the children of the skies shall honor your bald heads. The clouds of heaven - those shadows of Olympian' power, those spectral phantoms of dead Titans 2kiss your summits, as guardian angels kiss the brow of infant nobleness. On your sacred rocks I see the footprints of the Creator; I see the blazing fires of Sinai, and hear its awful voice; I see the tears of Calvary,* and listen to its mighty groans.

4. Mountains! ye are proud and haughty things. Ye hurl defiance at the storm, the lightning, and the wind; ye look down with deep disdain upon the thunder-cloud; ye scorn the devastating tempest; ye despise the works of puny man; ye shake your rock-ribbed sides with giant laughter, when the great earthquake passes by. Ye stand as giant sentinels, and seem to say to the boisterous billows," Thus far shalt thou come, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed!"

5. Mountains! ye are growing old. Your ribs of granite are getting weak and rotten; your muscles are losing their fatness; your hoarse voices are heard only at distant intervals; your volcanic heart throbs feebly; and your lava-blood is thickening, as the winters of many ages gather their chilling snows around your venerable forms. The brazen sunlight laughs in your old and wrinkled faces ; the pitying moonlight nestles in your hoary locks; and the silvery starlight rests upon you like the halo of inspiration that crowned the heads of dying patriarchs and prophets. Mountains! ye must die. Old Father Time, that sexton of earth, has dug you a deep, dark tomb; and in silence ye shall sleep after sea and shore shall have been pressed by the feet of the apocalyptic angel, through the long watches of an eternal night.

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1. PROUD

LESSON XCVII.

THE ALPS.

WILLIS GAYLORD CLARK.

OUD monuments of God! sublime ye stand Among the wonders of His mighty hand;

With summits soaring in the upper sky,

Where the broad day looks down with burning eye;
Where gorgeous clouds in solemn pomp repose,
Flinging rich shadows on eternal snows:
Piles of triumphant dust, ye stand alone,
And hold, in kingly state, a peerless throne!

2. Like olden conquerors, on high ye rear
The regal ensign and the glittering spear:
Round icy spires the mists, in wreaths unrolled,
Float ever near, in purple or in gold;
And voiceful torrents, sternly rolling there,
Fill with wild music the unpillared air.

What garden or what hall, on earth beneath,

Thrills to such tones as o'er the mountains breathe?

3. There, through long ages past, those summits shone
When morning radiance on their state was thrown;
There, when the summer-day's career was done,
Played the last glory of the sinking sun;
There, sprinkling luster o'er the cataract's shade,
The chastened moon her glittering rainbow made;
And, blent with pictured stars, her luster lay
Where to still vales the free streams leaped away.

4. Where are the thronging hosts of other days,
Whose banners floated o'er the Alpine ways;

Who, through their high defiles, to battle wound,
While deadly ordnance stirred the hights around?
Gone, like the dream that melts at early morn
When the lark's anthem through the sky is borne ;
Gone, like the wrecks that sink in ocean's spray;
And chill Oblivion murmurs,-"Where are they?"

5. Yet " Alps on Alps" still rise; the lofty home
Of storms and eagles, where their pinions roam :
Still round their peaks the magic colors lie,
Of morn and eve, imprinted on the sky;

And still, while kings and thrones shall fade and fall,
And empty crowns lie dim upon the pall,-
Still shall their glaciers flash, their torrents roar,
Till kingdoms fail, and nations rise no more.

LESSON XCVIII.

DESIRE TO BE REMEMBERED.

FORGOTTEN! How harshly that word grates upon the

ear! With what icy coldness it falls on the heart! How we shrink from the thought, that, ere long, all memory of us will have faded from the minds of men; that there will be a time, when, of all who love us now, or who ever will love us, not one will be left to tell that we existed; when, of those who may dwell in the places we now occupy, not one will recognize a vestige of any thing we ever did, or that we ever lived!

2. TO BE FORGOTTEN!-oh! fearful thought! It is this which makes us linger when we say farewell; it is this which nerves the heart and strengthens the arm when the

horrid din of war shuts out the memory of dear associations; and this wrings the life-blood from that heart, and causes the arm to fall powerless. It is this which bears up against discouragements those who would mount to Fame's highest pinnacle, there to inscribe a name which shall live long after they themselves have passed away. A NAME! what a slight token of remembrance for the giant minds of earth to bequeath! A NAME! when the form, the countenance, shall have a place in the memory of none !

3. We all love to cherish the thought that we shall not be forgotten, that we shall not be dead to others, when the warm pulsations of our hearts have ceased; that "dumb forgetfulness" will not bind our memories in the chains of silence. We can all designate some in our immediate presence, in whose surviving thoughts our love, ourselves, would gladly dwell. Assured of this, and who would not

"Leave the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind"?

But it may not be. When our eyes are stamped with the seal of death, some few faithful ones will mourn our loss, some bitter tears be shed over our graves, and, in a little while, we shall be forgotten.

4. There are those, however, and not a few, who have won an earthly immortality by their thoughts and deeds. To these, though their forms have faded from the eye of Time, and their monuments been fanned to dust by his wing,- to these it has never been said, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther." They live, love, and are loved, as when the earth was gladdened by their actual presence. We have felt their spirits breathing into and mingling with ours, when the world looked dark, and all has become bright again.