raiment; some had crowns upon their heads, and others baronial ermine over their shoulders. Side by side with these, a strangely beautiful spectacle, were uncouth artizans, and ill-clothed paupers, and diseased persons. Law-gowns and martial insignia mixed here and there among the kneelers. In time the appearance which the interior of the building presented became harmonious, and the many chants, which had seemed so dissonant at first, became distinct and intelligible. Here was a little child being presented for Baptism; a candle was in its hand, and a few grains of salt lay upon its lips. There was a priest signing the sign of the Cross upon the coffin wherein a dead body was enclosed for burial. At an Altar the marriage ritual was proceeding; and divers other services all over the church. I gazed long and ardently upon the scene, and the tranquil movement which was going on all through the edifice; and it seemed to me as though I beheld the schools of music, painting, and sculpture in movement. The groups upon the Altar stairs, in their ritual attitudes, were the same I had seen in the pictures. Some uncoffined dead bodies, brought in on flower-strewn biers, were the types of the true monumental beauty; the children kneeling round the confessional were the models whence mortal artists imagined angelic fear, angelic love, angelic adoration; the various postures of the solitary kneelers here and there had, from old ages, been to sacred art the language of contrition, intercession, beaming ecstasy, mute rap ture; the strong lights, subdued through stained glass, intercepted by the columns, pierced by blue spires of smoking incense, mottled by the checquered pavement, broken into shadows by the images and tombs, these were the lights of beautiful art; and the swinging lamps, throwing a fiery and uncertain illumination upon the countenances in a dark Altarpiece, had suggested some of the most affecting pictorial marvels. "Yes," said my guide, "this is beauty in movement, and in the school of discipline. And no less is it the school of time; for what is the work in which all these are engaged? There is a divine influence abiding with these walls, permitting holy and consecrated hands to fetch portions of eternity out of Heaven, and link them with portions of time, detained by the faithful, and brought here to be made immortal. Time flows onward, and, like the Rhine-stream, is lost in the sands. But the time, which the faithful bring in here by the way of the west, is taken to the Font, the confessional, or the Altar, stamped with the living signet of immortality, and is permitted to sink underground at the east, where Angels lay it up for an eternal fruit-bearing. Our beauty is not like the beauty shown you before. Ours is imperfect; it witnesses ever with all sweet arts and winning disciplines to its own imperfection; it witnesses to another land; and though not to another beauty, yet to itself in another place and a new home. Beauty has no home on this earth; but she sojourns here, the guest of discipline, like a noble lady with her steward in some distant possessions. Beauty is the moonlight of the moral world, creating shadows for the consolation and perfection of her worshippers. She consists not, as you were erewhile taught, in the absence of fear, but rather she is wedded to it. Fear is gloom's twin-sister, and doubt is their brother; but our great mistress has ennobled gloom into penitence, and doubt into faith; and lo! they are joined with her in all this worship. Go back now to the ruined temples, and judge thou between these two beauties; go back and be a neophyte in schools like these; and when fear is working perfection in thy soul, and thou canst acknowledge from thy heart that beauty is adoring fear, fear acting adoration in ten thousand ways, then shalt thou be admitted within the gates of yonder city." Just then the great bell tolled in the tower above, and the vibration dwelt for long in the building, till the very pillars seemed to absorb it, while the light trembled at its presence. "Sound and silence," said my guide, "are our ministers." As she said this the western doors were thrown open, and the organs burst into a tumult of the loudest music. A procession entered, and we all knelt. From the mitred patriarch, through the priests, and incenseburners, and banner-bearers, and choristers in scarlet vests, through the Crosses and the pictures, and the burning candles, and the monks, and the nuns, and the poor, and the devout lay-folk, down to the little white-robed children strewing rose-buds, white and red, with a pretty solemnity, through all that long waving line, as it bent and swayed and drew itself, like one creature, onward to the Altar, the very soul of chastest spiritual beauty ran, and thrilled, and circulated. "Salvete flores martyrum!" sang the choir. · I burst into tears, and immediately awoke. The sun was making gorgeous preparations for his setting, yet the ravine of Livadia seemed dark and gloomy. I tried to think of the oracle of Trophonius, and the wild grace of pagan faith; but it was impossible. I had but one thought-where shall I find such schools of beauty? And instead of the liquid folds of strophe and antistrophe in silversyllabled Greek, the rude tongue of the greathearted barbarians haunted me, and uttered mournful doctrine. "Alles was je geschieht Trauriger Nachklang ist's Herrlicher Ahnherrn-Tage! The vacant, listless hours of twilight were spent in contemplating, from the balcony of the miserable khan, the placid elegancy of two storks, who were building their nest on the top of the muezzin's tower in an old ruined mosque. Few of the votaries of Trophonius were ever admonished by a more stirring oracle than the one pronounced to me in my dream. My evening amusement consisted in making a beautiful Greek child, whom his father wished to have examined, and would not take ignorance of Romaic for an excuse, read some Herodotus; which he did with the utmost fluency, and considerable music, but without understanding a word of it. On rewarding him with half a drachme, my hands were covered with kisses. I remembered my school-boy days, and confessed again that this was one of "the revenges which the whirligig of time brings in." The place for which we made after leaving Livadia was of course Delphi, the modern Castri. We began to ascend, or rather to cross, some roots of the Parnassian range almost immediately after starting; neither were we sorry to quit the thick air and gloomy flats of Boeotia, and the wretched vicinity of the lake Copais. The day was cloudy and overcast ; and though we regretted the absence of the summits of Parnassus, keen and glittering against the blue skies of Greece, yet overcast days are generally the best for mountain coloring. We passed first through four or five basins of mountain-land, filled with bogplants and evergreens, and separated from each other by gentle ridges. It was interesting and peculiar scenery. We then wound along the upward course of a brook, and shortly began to climb in good earnest. At last we reached a high mountain valley. The sun was now very bright, but the wind so strong we could scarcely sit on horseback. On one side rose Parnassus, with his huge rifted steeps, and his broken tops all smoothed with deep snow; on the other was a lesser mountain, belonging to the Parnassian range, with its tall yellow cliffs tufted and |