The following sentences wind up an account of the festival of the Greek Fire at Easter, in which more than 200 lives were lost the preceding year :

'It is almost too much to expect that so many ministers of peace can assemble without finding some occasion for strife, and in that year a tribe of wild Bedouins became the subject of discord. These men, it seems, led an Arab life in some of the desert tracts bordering on the neighborhood of Jerusalem, but were not connected with any of the great ruling tribes. Some whim, or notion of policy, had induced them to embrace Christianity; but they were grossly ignorant of the rudiments of their adopted faith, and, having no priests with them in their desert, they had as little knowledge of religious ceremonies as of religion itself; they were not even capable of conducting themselves in a place of worship with ordinary decorum, but would interrupt the service with scandalous cries and warlike shouts. Such is the account the Latins give of them, but I have never heard the other side of the question. These wild fellows, notwithstanding their entire ignorance of all religion, are yet claimed by the Greeks, not only as proselytes who have embraced Christianity generally, but as converts to the particular doctrines and practice of their church. The people thus alleged to have concurred in the great schism of the Eastern Empire are never, I believe, within the walls of a church, or even of any building at all, except upon this occasion of Easter; and as they then never fail to find a row of some kind going on by the side of the Sepulchre, they fancy, it seems, that the ceremonies there enacted are funeral games, of a martial character, held in honor of a deceased chieftain-and that a Christian festival is a peculiar kind of battle fought between walls, and without cavalry.'p. 225.

We must make room for one more most characteristic sketch from the chapter on Jerusalem :

roughly bundled in, that his neck was twisted by the fall-so twisted, that if the sharp malady of life were still upon him, the old man would have shrieked, and groaned, and the lines of his face would have quivered with pain: the lines of his face were not moved, and the old man lay still and heedless-so well cured of that tedious life-ache, that nothing could hurt him now. His clay was itself again-cool, firm, and tough. The pilgrim had found great rest. I threw the accustomed handful of the holy soil upon his patient face— and then, and in less than a minute, the earth closed coldly round him.

"I did not say "Alas!"-(nobody ever does that I know of, though the word is so frequently written.) I thought the old man had got rather well out of the scrape of being alive and poor.'-p. 230.

'As long as you are journeying in the interior of the desert you have no particular point to make for as your resting-place. The endless sands yield nothing but small stunted shrubs-even these fail after the first two or three days, and from that time you pass over broad plains-you pass over newly-reared hills-you pass through the valleys that the storm of the last week has dug; and the hills and the valleys are sand, sand, sand, still sand, and only sand, and sand, and sand again. The earth is so samely, that your eyes turn towards heaven-towards heaven, I mean, in the sense of sky. You look to the sun, for he is your task-master, and by him you know the measure of the work that you have done, and 'I saw the burial of a pilgrim; he was a the measure of the work that remains for you Greek-miserably poor, and very old: he had to do; he comes when you strike your tent in just crawled into the Holy City, and had the early morning, and then, for the first hour reached at once the goal of his pious jour-of the day, as you move forward on your ney, and the end of his sufferings upon earth: there was no coffin nor wrapper; and as I looked full upon the face of the dead, I saw how deeply it was rutted with the ruts of age and misery. The priest, strong and portly, fresh, fat, and alive with the life of the animal kingdom-unpaid or ill paid for his work-would scarcely deign to mutter out his forms, but hurried over the words with shocking haste presently he called out impatiently "Yalla! Goor!" (Come! look sharp!) and then the dead Greek was seized; his limbs yielded inertly to the rude men that handled them, and down he went into his grave, so

camel, he stands at your near side, and makes you know that the whole day's toil is before you-then for a while, and for a long while, you see him no more-for you are veiled and shrouded, and dare not look upon the greatness of his glory; but you know where he strides over your head by the touch of his flaming sword. No words are spoken; but your Arabs moan, your camels sigh, your skin glows, your shoulders ache; and for sights, you see the pattern and the web of the silk that veils your eyes, and the glare of the outer light. Time labors on-your skin glows, and your shoulders ache, your Arabs moan, your camels sigh,

and you see the same pattern in the silk, and the same glare of light beyond; but conquering Time marches on, and by and by the descending sun has compassed the heaven, and now softly touches your right arm, and throws your lank shadow over the sand, right along on the way for Persia; then again you look upon his face, for his power is all veiled in his beauty, and the redness of flames has become the redness of roses,-the fair wavy cloud that fled in the morning now comes to his sight once more—comes blushing, yet still comes on -comes burning with blushes, yet hastens, and clings to his side.'—p. 258.

But even this desert has its solace; thought, with nothing new to feed on, can 'chew the cud of memory,' and realize the vision it recalls.

'On the fifth day of my journey the air above lay dead, and all the whole earth that I could reach with my utmost sight and keenest listening was still and lifeless as some dispeopled and forgotten world that rolls round and round in the heavens through wasted floods of light. The sun growing fiercer and fiercer, shone down more mightily now than ever on me he shone before; and, as I drooped my head under his fire, and closed my eyes against the glare that surrounded me, I slowly fell asleep-for how many minutes, or moments, I cannot tell; but after a while I was gently awakened by a peal of church bells-my native bells-the innocent bells of Marlen, that never before sent forth their music beyond the Blaygon hills! My first idea naturally was, that I still remained fast under the power of a dream. I roused myself, and drew aside the silk that covered my eyes, and plunged my bare face into the light. Then at least I was well enough wakened; but still those old Marlen bells rung on, not

ringing for joy, but properly, prosily, steadily, merrily ringing "for church." After a while the sound died away slowly; it happened that neither I nor any of my party had a watch by which to measure the exact time of its lasting, but it seemed to me that about ten minutes

his thought while sunk in sleep, and at the moment when they were pealing far away over the scene of his childhood-for it was

the Sabbath-day—and lightly as he chooses to tell his story, it is very plain that before the slumber seized him he had been in a pensive day-dream of home. The ear, with its own memory, watches for the accustomed chime, and Imagination will not let it be disappointed. The wanderer wakens, and through the silence of the desert he

hears it still-but from within:

'And deep asleep he seemed, yet all awake,
And music in his ears his beating heart did make.'

We cannot leave the desert without giving a sketch of its only human inhabitants, the Bedouins:

'Almost every man of this race closely resembles his brethren; almost every man has large and finely-formed features, but his face is so thoroughly stripped of flesh, and the white folds from his head-gear fall down his haggard cheeks so much in the burial fashion, that he looks quite sad and ghastly; his large dark orbs roll slowly and solemnly over the white of his deep-set eyes-his countenance shows painful thought and long suffering, the suffering of one fallen from a high estate. His gait is strangely majestic; and he marches along with his simple blanket as though he were wearing the purple. His common talk is a series of piercing screams, more painful to the ear than the most excruciating fine music I ever heard. Milnes cleverly goes to the French for the right word, and calls the Arabs “un peuple criard."—p. 248.

Childe Harold, as the author observes, would scarcely have found the domestic life of the 'desert,' realize his sublime anticipations of repose :

'The tents are partitioned not so as to divide had passed before the bells ceased. I attribu- the Childe and the "fair spirit" who is his ted the effect to the great heat of the sun, the "minister" from the rest of the world, but so as perfect dryness of the clear air through which to separate the twenty or thirty brown men I moved, and the deep stillness of all around that sit screaming in the one compartment me; it seemed to me that these causes, by oc- that scream and squeak in the other. If you from fifty or sixty brown women and children casioning a great tension and consequent susceptibility of the hearing organs, had rendered adopt the Arab life for the sake of seclusion, them liable to tingle under the passing touch you will be horridly disappointed, for you will of some mere memory, that must have swept find yourself in perpetual contact with a mass across my brain in a moment of sleep. Since of hot fellow-creatures. It is true that all who my return to England it has been told me that are inmates of the same tent are related to like sounds have been heard at sea, and that each other, but I am not sure that this circumthe sailor becalmed under a vertical sun in the stance adds much to the charm of such a life.' midst of the wide ocean, has listened in trem-p. 251. bling wonder to the chime of his own village bells.'-p. 273.

The traveller's was a ghostly sense of sound; the music of the bells came upon

This society, however, has its charms for these 'over-roasted snipes' of Arabs; and they would not forego the dry, howling wilderness, and the black tent beside the

tiny sprinkle of water, for all the leafy lux- queror that wasted Africa and Asia in his ury of the Apennines, and all the boudoirs uninterrupted career. of Paris. Could they, in their turn, have It seems extraordinary that the characspeculated on the mysterious state of Eng- ter, causes, and proper treatment of this lish society, might not they also have found pestilence should remain a mystery up to some difficulty in appreciating our enjoy- this hour, though it was described by ment of it? Here, for example, in the Thucydides and cured by Hippocrates two midst of their barren region, stood a wealthy thousand years ago. Almost every mediand highly intellectual Frank, sharing their cal practitioner who has an opportunity of hardships, privations, and dangers, without observing its symptoms entertains a differany earthly apparent object, save that of es- ent theory with regard to its nature. The caping from the society by whose standard late Russian experiments at Alexandria he measured theirs. Here he stood, self- deserve attention. The medical men who exiled from ambition, luxury, and ease; composed the commission of inquiry were now rejoicing to lose himself in the desert, non-contagionists; they procured the dresses and now finding pleasure in the rattling of persons who had died of the plague, and of the tea-cups in his tent, and the little paid Arabs at the rate of a shilling a-day kettle, with her odd, old-maidish looks, as to wear these dresses. The only precaushe sat upon the fire humming away old tion taken was to submit the clothes, for songs about England.' twenty-four hours, to a moderate heat. The applicants for these dangerous trials were numerous; not one took the infection, and the Russians triumphed in their theory ; but, strange to say, their president took the complaint himself, and died before he could decide on his mode of treatment.

He is on his way once more. Behold a sign of human life in the distance-it is a mere moving speck in the horizon-but as he nears it his people declare that it contains an Englishman, 'because,' say they, 'he is alone. The traveller is pleasurably excited, but simply for the reason that it is striking to observe the vast unproportion between his slender company and the boundless plains of sand through which they were keeping their way.' The attendants on either side rejoice that their restless masters are about to meet-men of the same country, the same rank, the same interests they must surely have much to say, and there will be rare repose, and sipping of coffee and smoking of chibouques. They come-they meet-they pass!

The two Englishmen, in the midst of the primeval desert, could not but conduct themselves towards each other as if their encounter had been under the bow-window of White's. These gentlemen could not speak-for they had never been introduced. The Lord of Mudcombe, possible policeman of Bedfordshire,' 'would rather have shaken hands with the Plague!

It would almost seem as if this great scourge of the East was rapidly disappearing, with other Oriental characteristics. According to Moslem belief, the establishment of quarantines was an impious interference with the will of Heaven. It was most salutary, however; and Smyrna, Stamboul, and Alexandria enjoy comparative immunity by means of their lazarettos. It is true their invisible enemy is also shut up within their walls; but the Spirit of the Plague, thus prisoned and confined, is no longer the con

The great cities of the East are seldom quite free from the plague; and most travellers have been struck by the appearance of the coffinless corpse of some Arab or Osmanli covered with a red cloth (the sign of danger), and attended by a policeman to keep off the crowd. Let us pass from these dismal details to the poetry of Eōthen. When he was at Constantinople the plague was prevailing, but not in violence:—

'With all that is most truly Oriental in its character the plague is associated: it dwells with the Faithful in the holiest quarters of their city; coats and hats are held to be nearly as innocent of infection as they are ugly in shape and fashion; but the rich furs and the costly shawls, the embroidered slippers and the gold-laden saddle-cloths, the fragrance of burning aloes and the rich aroma of patchouli-these are the signs which mark the familiar home of plague. You go out from your living London-the all earthly dominions-you go out thence, and centre of the greatest and strongest amongst travel on to the capital of an Eastern prince— you find but a waning power and a faded splendor that inclines you to laugh and mock; but let the infernal Angel of Plague be at hand, and he, more mighty than armies-more terrible than Suleyman in his glory-can restore pomp and majesty to the weakness of must still go prying amongst the shades of the imperial walls, that if, when he is there, you this dead empire, at least you will tread the path with seemly reverence and awe.'

such

At Cairo he encountered the pest in its { with dead. Yet at this very time when the utmost virulence :—

'I believe that about one half of the whole people was carried off by this visitation. The Orientals, however, have more quiet fortitude than Europeans under afflictions of this sort, and they never allow the plague to interfere with their religious usages. I rode one day round the great burial-ground. The tombs are strewed over a great expanse among the vast mountains of rubbish (the accumulations of many centuries) which surround the city. The ground, unlike the Turkish "cities of the dead," which are made so beautiful by their dark cypresses, has nothing to sweeten melancholy-nothing to mitigate the odiousness of course of his education been more directed death. Carnivorous beasts and birds possess to the cultivation of his taste than of his the place by night, and now in the fair morn- genius, the author, in all probability, might ing it was all alive with fresh-comers-alive | have won for himself a specific place among

our poets. Here his talents are displayed at disadvantage. The sermons are models of vigorous composition, and, together with the prize specimens and occasional pieces, form two elegant volumes. Our attention, however, must be confined to the poetry.

All the stars in the poetical firmament cannot be suns; the glory of some will be mere reflection, and one will differ from another even in this. These prize poems are, of course, mostly on Scriptural subjects -David playing on the Harp before Saul,' The Plague Stayed,'' St. Paul at Philippi,'' Jacob,'' Ishmael,' The Story of Constantine,' Ethiopia Stretching out her Hands unto God,' 'The Ministry of Angels,' The Call of Abraham,' The Cross planted upon the Himalaya Mountains.' Of these the most ambitious attempt is the 'St. Paul.' It thus opens:—

Its chain of silver twine,-
The man whose loved and honored name
May save, if aught can save from shame,-
This lowly lay of mine.

A warrior he !-but not like those
Whose bones along that shore repose;

Wild men, whose savage mood
Held foremost of their stormy joys
The battle of confused noise

And garments rolled in blood;
He fought!-but silently and lone;
A viewless shield was o'er him thrown;
A viewless helmet fenced his head;
No blow was struck!-no blood was shed!
And yet, in deadly fight,

The soldier of the cross prevailed
O'er mightier foe than ever quailed
To mortal skill or might!

Another poem is illustrated with a picture of domestic affliction. The poet thus addresses his wife :

Come sit thee down beside me; let me rest My dying head upon thy gentle breast;

Midnight! The Moon hath climbed the steep, Oh, yet a little longer! hand in hand,

And looks o'er Ida's hill;

Tracking in light the mazy sweep

Of Simoïs' slender rill :

And from the mountains to the deep,
All fragrant in its dewy sleep,

The Troad's plain is still!

The Troad-Time and Change have sped,-
Her pride and power have vanished,

Like sunset splendor fleeting;
Nought now is left her but the river
That dances on as blythe as ever,
And lofty Ida's summits hoar,
And the great sea's eternal roar,

Advancing or retreating,
That seems, as on the ear afar,
It falls so deep and regular,

The pulse of Nature beating.

But Time and Change may wreak their worst!
And still, all freshly as at first,
The blind old Harper's spells of power-
A glorious and immortal dower-

To yon proud clime belong!
And first must sink dark Ida's hill,
Rush upward to its fount the rill,
Old Ocean's mighty pulse be still,
Ere pilgrim, as he wanders by,
Shall slight with cold or careless eye
The land of war and song.

Not mindless of the land that erst
The vision of his boyhood nursed,-
Not mindless of the charm that lies
In old romantic histories,-

The charm that, while the minstrel's strain
Woke memory of the past again,

And breathed wild Scio's rocks among

The music of Ionian song,

In tranced and mute attention held

The hero and the sage of eld,-
Was he who wanders forth to try
The quiet of that midnight sky,

And mark its planets shine,

And the sweet moonlight o'er the sea,
That slept beneath so tranquilly,

Before the sunny hills of Westmoreland,

Whose forms e'en now with heavenly visions blend,

Frostwick, and Rainsborough, and Ling-mell

end.

'Mid those dear haunts our careless childhood

trod,

We pledg'd us to each other and to God.
Since then, submissive to his high decree,
"In perils of the desert and the sea,

In perils from the heathen," whom we strove
To win from idols to the Lord of love,
'Mid Afric's sands, as in our native heather,
We prayed and sang, rejoiced and wept together.

Such communing must cease: a little while
Must I forego the sweetness of thy smile:
Immortal eyes shall beam on me above,
But not the eyes that taught me first to love:
Yet let those words thy widowed woe beguile,
Those Heaven-breathed words of hope, "A little

while."

And, oh my Saviour, be the wish forgiven,
If I would ask one hour's delay of Heaven,-
One hour forego that world of perfect bliss,
That I may cheer the lone one left in this!
And grant me speech; for mortal words in vain
Strive with the task to win those scenes again,
Which, calmly rising o'er the fever's strife,
Entranced in bliss my final hours of life;
God's latest grace to me would I transfer,
If he permit,-my parting gift to her.

Have we not prayed, my Laura, have we not
Wove one fond wish with all our earthly lot?
Have we not watched and studied, sought and
striven,

To hail on earth the dawning reign of Heaven, When Christ shall bid the world prepare his home,

Hallow his name, and mark his kingdom come?

My soul goes back to those remembered hours, When Spring was young in Kentmere's vale of flowers,