and confounded!-Like the peasant of the Alps, we gain nothing by our search:

"Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.""

I have searched the depths of caverns; I have thrilled beneath high and impending rocks; I have contemplated the vastness of the ocean; and climbed one mountain, while the sun has risen from behind another, and all around has been one continued scene of wonder and glory. In those moments, I have been lost in admiration and astonishment, at the power of that tremendous Being, who alone was capable of forming such gigantic works as those. But what are high and impending rocks; what are the giant heavings of an angry ocean; and what the proudest summit of the Andes; when placed in the scale of such interminable vastness, as the creating, balancing, and peopling of innumerable globes?-In contemplating systems, so infinite, who can forbear exclaiming,2 2 "What a mole-hill is our earth, and how insignificant are we, who creep so proudly on her surface?"

1 Scienter nescius, et sapienter indoctus.

Grotius has a similar passage :

Nescire quædam magna pars sapientiæ est.

St. Gregory said of St. Benedict, "Recessit scienter nesciens, et sapienter indoctus."

2 Lambert.

CHAPTER II.

How many are the enjoyments, which the progress of the seasons affords us !-What can be more delightful, than that season of the year, when Nature, weary and exhausted by her own efforts, clothes every object in renovated gladness; when the snows are melted away, and the trees are bursting with leaves; when the flowers are painting themselves with every varia. tion of colour; the rivers rolling with temperance; and when every hill and every thicket ring with the modulation of various notes. At this season, the mind, enraptured, seems as if it were capable of building castles in the ocean, and pyramids in the skies.

If SPRING is the most delightful season to the poet, because it affords him a greater multitude of images, SUMMER is no less so to the contemplatist, than the season of AUTUMN is to the enthusiast. What can be more transporting, than the splendour of the rising sun at this season of the year, with all the scene of rural industry it unfolds; when subjects for the poet and the painter are as infinite as they are transcendent?

An evening and a morning sun, when skirted with bold masses, is said to have fired Barry with ungovernable rapture.-Virgil, in his picture of Elysium, says that the sun has a purple light at all times. And it is from this beautiful appearance of the sky, before and after sunset, that we associate the idea of

beauty and grandeur with purple :-hence purple has, in most ages, been esteemed a royal and imperial colour.

Sensible of these glories of early day, the disciples of Pythagoras, after the manner of their master, prostrated themselves, as soon as the disk of the sun was seen above the horizon. Whenever they saw it,' they recognized the splendour of the Deity. Actuated by the same awful admiration, Aristippus, when at the point of death, directed his friends to carry him to the city gates, and to place his couch immediately opposite the lattice, that he might, even to the last of life, enjoy the verdure of the fields and the splendour of the setting sun. While Caniz, one of the German poets, upon the bed of death, requested to be raised from his couch, in order to take a last look of that glorious luminary.—" Oh," said he, with sublimity of enthusiam, "if a small part of the Eternal's creation can be so exquisitely beautiful as this; how much more beautiful must be the Eternal himself!"

II.

So enthusiastic an admiration had Eudoxus2 for this luminary, that he would willingly have suffered the fate of Phaeton, for the delight of approaching it. He prayed, therefore, to the gods, that he might once be permitted to see it so closely, as to be able to comprehend its form, its magnitude and beauty, and then to die by the heat of its beams.

It is curious yet melancholy to observe, with what atheistical horror some theologians listen to argu1 Max. Tyrius, Dissert. xxv.

2 Plutarch.

ments, derived from Nature. An instance of this kind occurred, some little time since, in Spain :where a prisoner, we are told,' was gagged at an auto de fé, merely because, after being confined many years in prison without seeing the light of the sun, he was struck with such rapture, at again beholding it, that he exclaimed, in the ardour of his enthusiasm," How is it possible, that men, who see that glorious orb, can worship any other Being, than the one, who created it!"

Rousseau in his last illness was heard to ejaculate, "Oh! how beautiful is the sun! I feel as if he calls my soul towards him?!"-Indeed the sun is so glorious a body, that it can excite no wonder, that, in the more early ages, it should have received the honours of deification.-Josephus informs us, that the people of Judah issued out of the eastern gate of the city to salute the sun on its first rising. The sun, as well as the moon, was worshipped by the ancient Egyptians,* Germans, and British Druids.— The Persians worshipped it also; but they did not

5

3

Southey's Letters from Spain and Portugal, p. 317.

This naturally calls to our recollection the passage in Tasso, where Olindus and Sophronia are represented, as being tied to the same stake. -Sophronia enquires of her friend, "why dost thou lament ?-Behold yon sky!-How beautiful it is!-Look, too, at the sun-oh! how he consoles my heart!-Helooks, as if he summoned us to his glory." 3 Vide also 2d Kings, c. xxiii.

♦ The Egyptians of ancient times, says Diodorus, the Sicilian, coutemplating the arch of the Heavens, and admiring the harmony which prevails in the universe, esteemed the sun and moon deities. The one they called Osiris, the other Isis.

5 Cæsar de Bell. Gall., lib. vi. c. 21.

for many ages permit any symbol to be made of it.' Such was the creed of the first Zoroaster (Zerdusht); the second, however, decreed the erection of temples, and the institution of the sacred fire. The fire-worshippers of Persia and India do not, however, believe the sun to be the Deity; but that his throne is centred there.

III.

;

In Egypt the sun was hieroglyphical of the fructifying power; in Greece it was an emblem of human life and in Rome of the sovereign majesty of the empire. In the finest of all soliloquies,-that of Satan on beholding the splendour of the sun,-the hatred of the fiend does not debar him from acknowledging how worthy that luminary is of being worshipped as a deity.

O thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd,
Looks from thy soles dominion, like the GOD

Of this NEW WORLD: at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminished heads to thee I call,

But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,

O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams;

That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell ;-how glorious once above thy sphere.

1 Xenoph. Cyrop. viii.

2 There appear to have been five Zoroasters: 1st. Chaldean; 2d. Bactrian; 3d. Persian; 4th. Pamphylian; and 5th. Armenian.

3 This word is obscure. Perhaps we may render it less so by referring to a passage in Boethius:

Quem quia respicat omnia solus,

Verum possis dicere solem.

Lib. v. Metr. 2.