relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother? Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear. "Chaos and ancient Night, I come no spy as my way Lies through your spacious empire up to light." The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. Simple races, as savages, do not climb mountains; their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited by them. Pomola is always angry with those who climb to the summit of Ktaadn. ... Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable Nature, or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain. We were passing over "Burnt Lands," burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. I found myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to waste, or partially reclaimed by man; but when I reflected what man, what brother or sister or kinsman of our race, made it and claimed it, I expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature has here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever, to be the dwelling of man, we say,-so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,-not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,-no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there,-the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,-to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,-that my body might, but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!-Think of our life in nature,-daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,-rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Who are we? where are we? Contact! IMPRESSIONS OF NIAGARA. MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI. [Margaret Fuller was born at Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, in 1810. She displayed remarkable precocity as a student, and while yet quite young was looked upon as a prodigy of learning, in those days in which few learned women had as yet appeared in America. Brilliant conversational powers, and excellent ability as a lecturer, brought her prominently before the literary world, while her writings were received with high favor by some of the leading critics, though they have since greatly declined in public estimation, and seem to our eyes of secondary value as literary efforts. We append one of the most attractive of her descriptive essays. In 1846 she went to Europe, and in December, 1847, was married, at Rome, to the Marquis Ossoli, an Italian nobleOn her return to her native country she perished, with her husband and child, in the wreck of the brig Elizabeth, July 19, 1850.] man. NIAGARA, June 10, 1843. SINCE you are to share with me such foot-notes as may be made on the pages of my life during this summer's wanderings, I should not be quite silent as to this magnificent prologue to the, as yet, unknown drama. Yet I, like others, have little to say, where the spectacle is, for once, great enough to fill the whole life, and supersede thought, giving us only its own presence. "It is good to be here," is the best, as the simplest, expression that occurs to the mind. We have been here eight days, and I am quite willing to go away. So great a sight soon satisfies, making us content with itself, and with what is less than itself. Our desires, once realized, haunt us again less readily. Having "lived one day," we would depart, and become worthy to live another. We have not been fortunate in weather, for there cannot be too much or too warm sunlight for this scene, and the skies have been lowering, with cold, unkind winds. My nerves, too much braced up by such an atmosphere, do not well bear the continual stress of sight and sound. For here there is no escape from the weight of a perpetual creation; all other forms and motions come and go, the tide rises and recedes, the wind, at its mightiest, moves in gales and gusts, but here is really an incessant, an indefatigable motion. Awake or asleep, there is no escape, still this rushing round you and through you. It is in this way I have most felt the grandeur, somewhat eternal, if not infinite. At times a secondary music rises; the cataract seems to seize its own rhythm and sing it over again, so that the ear and soul are roused by a double vibration. This is some effect of the wind, causing echoes to the thundering anthem. It is very sublime, giving the effect of a spiritual repetition through all the spheres. When I first came, I felt nothing but a quiet satisfaction. I found that drawings, the panorama, etc., had given me a clear notion of the position and proportions of all objects here; I knew where to look for everything, and everything looked as I thought it would. Long ago, I was looking from a hill-side with a friend. at one of the finest sunsets that ever enriched this world. A little cow-boy, trudging along, wondered what we could. be gazing at. After spying about some time, he found it could only be the sunset, and looking, too, a moment, he said, approvingly, "That sun looks well enough ;"-a speech worthy of Shakespeare's Cloten, or the infant Mercury, up to everything from the cradle, as you please to take it. Even such a familiarity, worthy of Jonathan, our national hero, in a prince's palace, or "stumping," as he boasts to have done, "up the Vatican stairs, into the Pope's presence, in my old boots," I felt here; it looks really well enough, I felt, and was inclined, as you suggested, to give my approbation as to the one object in the world that would not disappoint. But all great expression, which, on a superficial survey, seems so easy as well as so simple, furnishes, after a while, to the faithful observer, its own standard by which to appreciate it. Daily these proportions widened and towered more and more upon my sight, and I got, at last, a proper foreground for these sublime distances. Before coming away, I think I really saw the full wonder of the scene. After a while it so drew me into itself as to inspire an undefined dread, such as I never knew before, such as may be felt when death is about to usher us into a new existence. The perpetual trampling of the waters seized. my senses. I felt that no other sound, however near, could be heard, and would start and look behind me for a foe. I realized the identity of that mood of nature in which these waters were poured down with such absorbing force, with that in which the Indian was shaped on the same soil. For continually upon my mind came, unsought and unwelcome, images, such as never haunted it before, of naked savages stealing behind me with uplifted |