The Solitude of the Forest.

THERE are striking peculiarities about the solitude of the forest. These solitudes are very numerous. Vast woods of magnolias and rhododendrons, on the untraversed flanks of the Himalayan range, outspread an immeasurable wilderness of blossoms, and conceal in their fragrant solitude the mysteries of immemorial ages of nature. The great reaches of pine and fir on the Apennine and Alpine sides, of Norway spruce and Russian larch occupying the uncleared north of Europe, their billowy tops rolling in the summer breeze, their branches whistling to the icy blast, hide the unprofaned retreats of the primeval world, in whose ancient gloom man is as much alone as though transported to another planet. Maurice de Guérin describes a scene of awful loneliness he witnessed in a French wood. "A tremendous north wind roars over the forest and makes it give forth deep groans. The trees bow under the furious blows of the gale. We see through the branches the clouds which fly swiftly in black and strange masses, seeming to skim the summits of the trees. This vast, dark, swimming veil occasionally lets a ray of the sun dart through a rent into the bosom of the forest. These sudden flashes of light give to the appalling depths in the shadow something haggard and strange, like a smile on the lips of a corpse.' Enormous tropical forests in Africa, superb with pomp of palms and baobabs, of rosewood, ebony, teak, tamarinds and acacias, brilliant with oriental exuberance of colored flower, fruit and vine, have never echoed stroke of axe, step or voice of humanity, in their recesses. The aboriginal woods of western North America seem as if they might harbor a million anchorites, not one of whom should be within a day's journey of any other. The traveller who pauses in the gigantic cedar-groves of Mariposa, penetrated by the spirit of unspeakable seclusion and rest that reigns there, feels as if he had reached the heart of solitude, where the genius of antiquity is enthroned on a couch of gray repose.

But all other forests are trifling, every other solitude on earth, except that of the sea, is small when compared with the tract of colossal vegetation which covers the South American basin between the Orinoco and the Amazon. In one part of this green wilderness a circle may be drawn, eleven hundred miles in diameter, the whole area of which is virgin forest, presenting impenetrable masses of interwoven climbers and flowery festoons, impenetrable walls of huge trunks in actual contact, showing what stupendous room, yet unimproved, God has made for the multiplication of men and their homes; showing that Malthus and his theory were born in undue time. At night, when the beasts of prey are abroad, the noise is as though hell were holding carnival there. at noon, the sultry stillness, almost palpable, is broken only when some hoary giant, undermined by age, crashes in columnar death. The grandeur and solemnity of this verdant temple fill the mind with awe. The gloom and loneliness are so depressing that it is a relief to emerge from under the sombre roof, once more to see the blue sky, once more to feel the clear sunshine.

The Solitude of the Mountain.

But

on the summits of We leave the warm

A far different solitude is found mountains, in the upper veins of air. valley below, with its snugly shielded villages and the busy stir of labor and merriment. Over many a weary height we climb, at each stage of ascent leaving more of the domestic world behind. Few hearts or eyes follow our progress. As our diminishing forms are traced from beneath gradually ascending, we find everything stunted and bleak; we pass the line of perpetual snow; we reach the zone of shrubless desolation, where not a leaf nor a bird is to be seen the shepherds and their flocks have disappeared in the dim deeps, and a little cloud is our only comrade, as, still mounting, we finally pause on the summit and gaze. The world lies unfurled below; its forests, patches of carpeting; its rivers, silver threads;

its inhabitants, annihilated; its noise inaudible. We are alone on the top. Mists, dismal and heavy with loads of darkness and hail, drift by. The moon, rapidly hidden and shown by the clouds, hangs in the empty air and glares at us on a level with our eyes. Uplifted thus amidst the uncompanionable concave, a crushing sense of loneliness, of orphanage and want, possesses the soul, and makes it sigh for a humbler station, hedged with the works of society, warm with the embrace of love, brightened by the smiles of friends.

The Solitude of the Ruin.

FINALLY we come to the solitude of ruins, - relics of the past, the dolorous dials Time in his passage has raised to count his triumphs and measure his progress by. A ruin is forlorn and pathetic wherever seen, in an isle of African Nilus, or in a forest of American Yucatan. The traveller falls into a pensive mood, as, leaning against the stony masses of Meroe, whose glory the barbarian overthrew and the sands buried, he scans the fading marks of the life that once flourished there but is there no more. The same experience comes over him when his steed wearily penetrates the rank grass among the mounds of Copan and Palenque, the riddle of whose forgotten civilization baffles every guesser who inspects its remains, where the luxuriant vegetation has overgrown tombs and temples, here and there a palm, in its resistless upshoot, cleaving altar and image, column and skull. The Sphinx, that strange emblematic creature, half beast, half humanity, sixty-two feet in height, a hundred and forty feet long, still tarries amidst the mute desolation whence the whole race and civilization that set it there have vanished. Between its protruded paws originally stood a temple in which sacrifices were offered. The temple has crumbled in pieces. The sands have drifted over the feet and high up the sides of the mysterious monster, on all whose solemn features decay has laid its fingers. Yet the pilgrim is awed as he looks on the colossal repose, the patient

majesty of those features, and feels the pathetic insignificance of his own duration, in contrast with the unknown ages and events that have sped by that postured enigma. Yes, a ruin, whether mantled rich with ivy or swept bare by the blast, a feudal castle, crumbling on the cliff, the snake in its keep and the owl in its turret ; or a triumphal pillar, thrown down and broken, its inscription obliterated, its history in the maw of oblivion, wears the mien of solitude, breathes the sentiment of decay, and is a touching thing to see. Ruins symbolize the wishes and fate of man; the weakness of his works, the fleetingness of his existence. Who can visit Thebes, in whose crowded crypts, as he enters, a flight of bats chokes him with the dust of disintegrating priests and kings, see the sheep nibbling herbage between the fallen cromlechs of Stonehenge, or confront a dilapidated stronghold of the Middle Age, where the fox looks out of the window and the thistle nods on the wall, without thinking of these things? They feelingly persuade him what he is.

And how thickly these gray preachers are scattered over the world, preaching their silent sermons of evanescence, wisdom, peace! Tyre was situated of old at the entry of the sea, the beautiful mistress of the earth, haughty in her purple garments, the tiara of commerce on her brow. Now the dust has been scraped from her till she has become a blistered rock, whereon the solitary fisher spreads his nets; and along all her coasts, to Sidon and Tarshish, the booming billows, as freightless they rise and fall, seem to ask, "Where are the ships of Tyre? Where are the ships of Tyre?" A few tattered huts stand among shapeless masses of masonry where glorious Carthage stood; the houses of a few husbandmen, where voluptuous Corinth once lifted her splendid array of marble palaces and golden towers. Many a nation, proud and populous in the elder days of history, like Elephanta or Memphis, is now merely a tom and a shadowy name. Pompeii and Herculaneum are empty sepulchres, which that fatal flight before the storm of ashes and lava cheated of their occupants: the traveller sees poppies blooming in the streets where the chariots once flashed;

unbidden tears come as he lingers where the veil has been ripped from the statue of Isis, or pauses where the fire is extinct on the altar of Vesta. Etruria is one stupendous grave, teeming with an empire's dust. The muffled abode of millions of men mingled for ages on ages with the mould of the globe, it yields no admonishing reverberation as we tread over it, unless we meditate and listen; then, indeed, the mystic soil, borrowing the tongues of time and destiny, makes every particle of air in the solitude vocal with pathetic tidings. As the mild effulgence of lunar light mitigates the ruinous austerity of the Coliseum, look up and recall the time when the buzz of a hundred nations ran round those mighty walls; and, by contrast, how vacant and how dreary the desolation is! Roaming among the remnants of Moorish grandeur in widowed Granada, strolling through the chambers of Alhambra, admiring the delicious proportions with enjoyment subdued by pity, the air seems charged with tearful sighs, and along the lonely halls the spirit of tradition and sympathy wails in the tones of an Æolian harp, “Ah, woe is me, Alhama, for a thousand years!" When we reflect that tigers foray in the palaceyard of Persepolis, and camels browse in Babylon on the site of Belshazzar's throne,—when, in imagination, at Baalbec, we march down majestic avenues lettered with decay, see lizards overrunning the altars of the Temple of the Sun, and in the sculptured friezes, here the nests of obscene birds, there the webs of spiders, when we survey the extent and noble forms of the ruins of Pæstum-amongstthe-Roses, or of Tadmor-in-the-Wilderness, forming a scene more exquisitely mournful than earth otherwhere affords, what heart of man will not fill with regret and presages, and own the unfathomable power of that natural solitude which crumbling art fills with the lost history of our race?