view is, even at this day, admirable, although all these hills are naked, and reflect like polished brass the reverberated rays of the sun of Attica. But what a spectacle must Plato have had from this spot under his view, when Athens, living and clothed with her thousand inferior temples, murmured at his feet like an overflowing hive; when the great wall of the Piræus traced to the very sea an avenue of stone and marble, full of movement, and where the population of Athens were passing and repassing incessantly like waves; when the Piræus itself, and the port of Phaleros, and the sea of Athens, and the gulf of Corinth, were covered with forests of masts or with glittering sails; when the sides of all the mountains, from those that hide Marathon as far as the Acropolis of Corinth, an amphitheatre of forty leagues in a semicircle, were diversified with forests, pastures, olives, and vines, and when the villages and towns decorated on all sides this splendid belt of mountains!

I see from here the thousand roads that descended from these mountains, traced on the flanks of the Hymettus through all the sinuosities of the gorges and valleys, that all come, like beds of torrents, to discharge themselves into Athens. I hear the noises that rise from the town, the blows of the hammer from the workmen in the marble quarries of Mount Penthilicus, the rolling of the blocks which tumble along the slopes of its precipices, and all those sounds that fill with life and bustle the approaches to a great capital. On the side of the town, I see ascending by the sacred way, cut out in the very flank of the Acropolis, the religious population of Athens, coming to implore Minerva, and to burn the incense to all their domestic divinities, in the very place where I am now seated, and where I breathe only the dust of the temples.

Let us rebuild the Parthenon: that is easy, for it has lost only its frieze and its interior compartments. The exterior walls chiselled by Phidias, the columns, or the wrecks of the columns, are still there. The Parthenon was entirely constructed of white marble, called Penthilican marble, from the name of the neighbouring mountain whence it

was brought. It consisted of an oblong, surrounded by a peristyle of forty-six columns of the Doric order. Each column is six feet in diameter at its base, and thirty-four feet in height. The columns rest on the very pavement of the temple, and have no base. At each extremity of the temple, there exists, or did exist, a portico of six columns. The total dimensions of the edifice were two hundred and twenty-eight feet in length by one hundred and two in breadth; the height was sixty-six feet. It presented to the eye only the majestic simplicity of its architectural lines. It was a single idea in stone, one and intelligible at a look, like the idea of the ancients. You had to approach it in order to contemplate the richness of the materials, and the inimitable perfection of the ornaments and details. Pericles had been desirous to make it as much an assemblage of all the masterpieces of genius and of human workmanship, as a homage to the gods; or rather, it was Greek genius all entire, offering itself under this emblem, as itself a homage to the Divinity. The names of all those who carved one stone, or modelled one statue, of the Parthenon, have become immortal.

Let us forget the past, and let us now look around us, now that centuries, and the war of barbarous religions, and ignorant nations, have been trampling it under foot for more than two thousand years.

There are only wanting a few columns to the forest of white columns: they have fallen, in entire and glittering blocks, on the pavements or on the neighbouring temples: some, like the great oaks in the forest of Fontainebleau, have remained leaning on the other columns; others have slidden from the top of the parapet which encircles the Acropolis, and lie in enormous shattered blocks, one above another, as do in a quarry those parings of the blocks which the architect has rejected. Their flanks are gilt with that sunny coating which the lapse of ages spreads over marble; their fractures are as white as ivory freshly turned. They form, on this side of the temple, a streaming chaos of marble, of all shapes and colours, thrown or piled up in the most singular and most majestic disorder: from a distance

one might fancy he saw the foam of enormous waves that were breaking and whitening on a headland beaten by the sea. The eye cannot tear itself away from the view of them; we follow, admire, and lament them, with that feeling which we should have for beings who might have had, or who might still have, the sentiment of existence. It is the most sublime effect of ruins that men have ever been able to produce, because it is the ruin of what they ever made most beautiful!

If we enter under the peristyle and porticoes, we might believe ourselves to be still at the moment when the edifice was being finished; the interior walls are so well preserved, the face of the marble so shining and polished, the columns so straight, the preserved parts of the edifice so wonderfully free from all damage, that the whole seems to be springing forth from the hands of the workman; only the heaven sparkling with light is the sole roof of the Parthenon, and through the chasms in the faces of the walls, the eye plunges into the immense and voluminous landscape of Attica. The whole soil around is strewed with fragments of sculpture, or with morsels of architecture, which seem to wait for the hand that is to raise them to their place in the monument that waits for them. The feet strike incessantly against the masterpieces of the Greek chisel,-you pick them up, and then throw them down again, to pick up one more curious: you at length tire of this useless labour; the whole is but a masterpiece pulverized. Your footsteps print themselves in a dust of marble; you at length view it with indifference, and remain mute and insensible, overwhelmed in the contemplation of the whole, and in the thousand thoughts that arise from each of these fragments. These thoughts are of the very nature of the scene where you breathe them: they are grave, like these ruins of times passed away,— like these majestic witnesses to the nothingness of human nature; but they are serene as the sky that is over our heads, inundated with a pure and harmonious light, elevated like that pedestal of the Acropolis, which seems to hover on high over the earth; resigned and religious

like this monument erected to a divine idea, which God has allowed to crumble before him to make way for ideas more divine! I feel no sadness here; my soul is light, though meditative; my thoughts embrace the order of the divine will, and of human destinies; she admires that it should have been given to man to raise himself so high in the arts and in a material civilization; she conceives how God may have then broken that admirable mould of an incomplete idea; how the unity of God, recognised at length by Socrates in these very places, may have withdrawn the breath of life from all those religions which the imagination of the early ages gave birth to; how these temples may have fallen on their gods: the idea of the only God is worth more than these dwellings of marble, where only his shadow was worshipped. That idea has no need of temples built by human hand: entire nature is the temple where it worships!

In proportion as religions become spiritualized, the temples disappear; Christianity herself, which constructed the Gothic to animate it with her breath, leaves her admirable cathedrals to fall insensibly into ruins. The thousands of statues of her demigods descend by degrees from their aërial niches around her cathedrals; she is transformed also, and her temples become more naked and more simple as she divests herself more and more of the superstitions of her ages of darkness, and resumes more the great principle which she propagated on earth,—the principle of the one only true God.

THE GOLDEN EAGLE.

THE golden eagle, though occasionally seen and sometimes obtained in the southern counties of England, is more exclusively confined to Scotland, and its western and northern islands. Some years ago a specimen was killed at Bexhill in Sussex; it has also occurred, but very rarely, in Suffolk, Norfolk, Derbyshire, Durham, and Northumberland. Mr. Mudie, in his "Feathered Tribes of the British Islands," has named "the higher glens of the

rivers that rise on the south-east of the Grampians,-the high cliff called Wallace's Craig on the northern side of Lochlee, and Craig Muskeldie on its south side,” as localities for the golden eagle. Mr. Selby and his party of naturalists observed this species in Sutherlandshire, in the summer of 1834. Mr. Macgillivray, in his detailed descriptions of the rapacious birds of Great Britain, has recorded his own observations of this species in the Hebrides; and other observers have seen it in the Orkney and Shetland Islands, where it is said constantly to rear its young.

In a direction west of London, the golden eagle has been obtained or seen on the coasts of Devonshire and Cornwall. In Ireland, a ring-tailed eagle, the young of the golden, was seen by a party of naturalists in Connamara, in the autumn of 1835; and from William Thompson, Esq., Vice-President of the Natural History Society of Belfast, to whom I am indebted for a catalogue and notes of the birds of Ireland, which will be constantly referred to throughout this work, I learn that specimens of the golden eagle are preserved in Belfast, which were obtained in the counties of Donegal and Antrim.

Wilson, in his American Ornithology, states that the golden eagle is found in America from the temperate to the arctic regions, particularly in the latter, breeding on high precipitous rocks, always preferring a mountainous country. Dr. Richardson considers that this bird is seldom seen in North America far to the eastward of the Rocky Mountains. Mr. Audubon saw one on the coast of Labrador, besides others in various parts of the United States of America.

The golden eagle inhabits Iceland, Scandinavia, Russia, and Germany. In France, according to M. Temminck, it is not uncommon in the forests of Fontainebleau, and it breeds in the Alps and Pyrenees. A range still farther to the southward is attributed to this bird: it is said to exist in North Africa and Asia Minor.

The flight of the golden eagle is described by those who have witnessed it as majestic and powerful in the extreme;