great ancestor. And as he seized it, the whole scene vanished from his sight.

Α

Hours or years might have passed away as far as the sufferer was concerned, when Alroy again returned to selfconsciousness. His eyes slowly opened, he cast rouud a vacant stare, he was lying in the cave of Gethsemane. The moon had set, but the morn had not broken. single star glittered over the brow of the black moun tains. He faintly moved his limbs, he would have raised his hand to his bewildered brain, but found that it grasped a sceptre. The memory of the past returned to him. He tried to rise, and found that he was reposing in the arms of a human being. He turned his head -he met the anxious gaze of Jabaster.-Alroy.

VENICE.

If I were to assign the particular quality which conduces to that dreamy and voluptuous existence which men of high imagination experience in Venice, I should describe it as the feeling of abstraction, which is remarkable in that city, and peculiar to it. Venice is the only city which can yield the magical delights of solitude. All is still and silent. No rude sound disturbs your reveries; fancy, therefore, is not put to flight. No rude sound distracts your self-consciousness. This renders existence intense. We feel everything. And we feel this keenly in a city not only eminently beautiful, not only abounding in wonderful creations of art, but each step of which is hallowed ground, quick with associations, that in the more various nature, their nearer relation to ourselves, and perhaps their more picturesque character, exercise a greater influence over the imagination than the more antique story of Greece and Rome. We feel all this in a city too, which, although her lustre be indeed dimmed, can still count among her daughters maidens fairer than the orient pearls with which her warriors once loved to deck them. Poetry, Tradition, and Love-these are the Graces that have invested with an ever-charming cestus this Aphrodite of cities-Contarini Fleming.

VOL. VIII.-15

GREECE.

A country of promontories, and gulfs, and islands clustering in an azure sea, a country of wooded vales and purple mountains, wherein the cities are built on plains, covered with olive-woods, and at the base of an Acropolis, crowned with a temple or a tower. And there are quarries of white marble, and vines, and much wild honey. And wherever you move is some fair and elegant memorial of the poetic past, a lone pillar on the green and silent plain once echoing with the triumphant shouts of sacred games, the tomb of a hero, or the fane of a god. Clear is the sky, and fragrant is the air, and, at all seasons, the magical scenery of this land is colored with that mellow tint, and invested with that pensive character, which, in other countries, we conceive to be peculiar to autumn, and which beautifully associate with the recollections of the past. Enchanting Greece!

I quitted the Morea without regret. It is covered with Venetian memorials; no more to me a source of joy, and bringing back to my memory a country on which I no longer loved to dwell. I cast anchor in a small but secure harbor. I landed. I climbed a hill. From it I looked over a vast plain, covered with olivewood, and skirted by mountains. Some isolated hills, of every picturesque form, rose in the plain at a distance from the terminating range. On one of these I beheld a magnificent temple bathed in the sunset. At the foot of the craggy steep on which it rested was a walled city of considerable dimensions, in front of which rose a Doric temple of exquisite proportion, and apparently uninjured. The violet sunset threw over this scene a coloring becoming its loveliness, and, if possible, increasing its refined character. Independent of all associations, it was the most beautiful spectacle that had ever passed before a vision always musing on sweet sights; yet I could not forget that it was the bright capital of my youthful dreams, the fragrant city of the violet crown, the fair, the sparkling, the delicate Athens ! -Contarini Fleming.

JERUSALEM.

The broad moon lingers on the summit of Mount Olivet, but its beam has long left the garden of Gethsemane and the tomb of Absalom, the waters of Kedron, and the dark abyss of Jehoshaphat. Full falls its splendor, however, on the opposite city, vivid and defined in its silver blaze. A lofty wall, with turrets and towers and frequent gates, undulates with the unequal ground which it covers, as it encircles the lost capital of Jehovah. It is a city of hills, far more famous than those of Rome; for all Europe has heard of Sion and of Calvary, while the Arab and the Assyrian, and the tribes and nations beyond, are as ignorant of the Capitoline and Aventine Mounts as they are of the Malvern or the Chiltern Hills.

The broad steep of Sion crowned with the tower of David; nearer still, Mount Moriah, with the gorgeous temple of the God of Abraham, but built, alas! by the child of Hagar, and not by Sarah's chosen one; close to its cedars and its cypresses, its lofty spires and airy arches, the moonlight falls upon Bethesda's pool; farther on, entered by the gate of St. Stephen, the eye, though 'tis the noon of night, traces with ease the Street of Grief, a long winding ascent to a vast cupolaed pile that now covers Calvary-called the Street of Grief, because there the most illustrious of the human, as well as of the Hebrew race, the descendant of King David, and the divine son of the most favored of women, twice sank under that burden of suffering and shame which is now throughout all Christendom the emblem of triumph and of honor. Passing over groups and masses of houses built of stone, with terraced roofs, or surmounted with small domes, we reach the hill of Salem, where Melchisedek built his mystic citadel; and still remains the hill of Scopas, where Titus gazed upon Jerusalem on the eve of his final assault. Titus destroyed the temple. The religion of Judea has in turn subverted the fanes which were raised to his father and to himself in their imperial capital; and the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob is now worshipped before every altar in Rome.

Jerusalem by moonlight! "Tis a fine spectacle, apart from all its indissoluble associations of awe and beauty. The mitigating hour softens the austerity of a mountain landscape magnificent in outline, however harsh and severe in detail; and, while it retains all its sublimity, removes much of the savage sternness of the strange and unrivalled scene. A fortified city, almost surrounded by ravines, and rising in the centre of chains of far-spreading hills, occasionally offering, through their rocky glens, the gleams of a distant and richer land!

The moon has sunk behind the Mount of Olives, and the stars in the darker sky shine doubly bright over the sacred city. The all-pervading stillness is broken by a breeze, that seems to have travelled over the plains of Sharon from the sea. It wails among the tombs, and sighs among the cypress groves. The palm-tree trembles as it passes, as if it were a spirit of woe. Is it the breeze that has travelled over the plain of Sharon from the sea?

Or is it the haunting voice of prophets mourning over the city that they could not save? Their spirits surely would linger on the land where their Creator had designed to dwell, and over whose impending fall Omnipotence had shed human tears, from this mount! Who can but believe that, at the midnight hour, from the summit of the Ascension, the great departed of Israel assemble to gaze upon the battlements of their mystic city! There might be counted heroes and sages, who need shrink from no rivalry with the brightest and wisest of other lands; but the lawgiver of the time of the Pharaohs, whose laws are still obeyed; the monarch, whose reign has ceased for three thousand years, but whose wisdom is a proverb in all nations of the earth; the teacher, whose doctrines have modelled civilized Europe the greatest of legislators, the greatest of administrators, and the greatest of reformers-what race, extinct or living, can produce three such men as these!

The last light is extinguished in the village of Bethany. The wailing breeze has become a moaning wind; a white film spreads over the purple sky; the stars are