Amidst a coast of dreariest continent,
In many a shapeless promontory rent;

-O'er rocks, seas, islands, promontories spread,
The iceberg rears its undulated head;

On which the sun, beyond the horizon shrined,
Hath left his richest garniture behind;
Piled on a hundred arches, ridge by ridge,
O'er fixed and fluid strides the Alpine bridge,
Whose blocks of sapphire seem to mortal eye
Hewn from cerulean quarries of the sky;
With glacier battlements that crowd the spheres,
The slow creation of six thousand years,
Amidst immensity in towers sublime,
Winter's eternal palace, built by Time.

All human structures by his touch are borne
Down to the dust; mountains themselves are worn
With his light footstep; here for ever grows,
Amid the region of unmelting snows,
A monument, where every flake that falls
Gives adamantine firmness to the walls.
The sun beholds no mirror, in his race,
That shows a brighter image of his face;
The stars, in their nocturnal vigils, rest
Like signal fires on its illumined crest;
The gliding moon around the rampart wheels,
And all its magic lights and shades reveals;
Beneath, the tide with idle fury raves
To undermine it through a thousand caves,
Rent from its roof though thundering fragments oft
Plunge to the gulf, immovable aloft,

From age to age, in air, o'er sea, on land,

Its turrets heighten, and its piers expand.

--James Montgomery.

labyrinth, a place full of windings. vigils, watches.

FALLS OF THE ZAMBESI.

1. Of the African rivers that flow into the Indian Ocean, the largest, so far as is yet known, is the Zambesi, which appears to drain a vast extent of inland country. Its celebrated falls are thus described by Dr. Living

stone:

2.

"Have you smoke that sounds in your country?” This is one of the first questions put to the traveller on the shores of the Upper Zambesi, in reference to the Falls of Victoria. The natives do not go near enough to examine these falls; but, viewing them with awe, at a distance, said to Dr. Livingstone, "Smoke sounds there." "Being persuaded," says the adventurous and distinguished doctor, "that Mr. Oswell and myself were the very first Europeans who ever visited the Zambesi in the centre of the country, and that this cataract is the connecting link between the known and unknown portions of that river, I decided to give it the name of Victoria.” 3. "After twenty minutes' sail from Kalai," Dr. Livingstone continues, we came in sight for the first time of the columns of vapour appropriately called 'smoke,' rising at a distance of five or six miles, exactly as when large tracts of grass are burned in Africa. Five columns now arose, and, bending in the direction of the wind, they seemed placed against a low ridge covered with

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trees; the tops of the columns at this distance appeared to mingle with the clouds. They were white below, and higher up became dark, so as to simulate smoke very closely.

4. "The whole scene was extremely beautiful; the banks and islands dotted over the river are adorned with sylvan vegetation of great variety of colour and form. Each tree has its own physiognomy. There, towering over all, stands the great burly baobab, each of whose enormous arms would form the trunk of a large tree; besides groups of graceful palms, which, with their featheryshaped leaves depicted on the sky, lend their beauty to the scene. As a hieroglyphic, they always mean far from home; for one can never get over their foreign air in a picture or landscape.

5. "The silver mohonono, which in the tropics is in form like the cedar of Lebanon, stands in pleasing contrast with the dark colour of the motsouri, whose cypress form is dotted over with its pleasant scarlet fruit. Some trees resemble the great spreading oak, others assume the character of our own elms and chestnuts; but no one can imagine the beauty of the view from any scenery witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes. The falls are bounded on three sides by ridges 300 or 400 feet in height. The only want felt is that of mountains in the back-ground.

6. "When about half a mile from the falls I left the canoe by which we had come down thus far, and embarked in a lighter one with men well acquainted with the rapids, who, by passing down the centre of the stream in the eddies and still places caused by many jutting rocks, brought me to an island situated in the middle of the river, and on the edge of the lip over which the water rolls.

7 "The river was now low, and we sailed where it is totally impossible to go when the water is high. But though we were within a few yards of the spot a view from which would solve the whole problem, I believe that no one could perceive where the vast body of water went. It seemed to lose itself in the earth, the opposite lip of the fissure into which it disappeared being only 80 feet distance. Creeping with awe to the verge, I peered down into a large rent which had been made from bank to bank of the broad Zambesi, and saw that a stream of 1000 yards broad leaped down 100 feet, and then became suddenly compressed into a space of 15 or 20 yards.

8. "The entire falls are simply a crack made in a hard basaltic rock from the right to the left bank of the Zambesi, and then prolonged from the left bank away through 30 or 40 miles of hills. If one imagines the Thames, filled with low tree-covered hills, immediately beyond the tunnel, extending as far back as Gravesend, the be of black basaltic rock instead of London mud, and a fissure made therein from one end of the tunnel to the other, down through the keystone of the arch, and prolonged from the left end of the tunnel through 30 miles of hills, the pathway being 100 feet down from the bed of the river instead of what it is, with the lips of the fissure from 80 to 100 feet apart; then fancy the Thames leaping bodily into the gulf, and forced there to change its direction, and flow from the right to the left bank, and then rush boiling and roaring through the hills,-he may have some idea of what takes place at this the most wonderful sight I had witnessed in Africa.

9. "In looking down through the fissure on the right of the island one sees nothing but a dense white cloud, which, at the time we visited the spot, had two bright rainbows on it. From this cloud rushed up a great jet

of vapour exactly like steam, and it mounted 200 or 300 feet high; there condensing, it changed its hue to that of dark smoke, and came back in a constant shower, which soon wetted us to the skin. This shower falls chiefly on the opposite side of the fissure, and a few yards back from the lip there stands a straight edge of evergreens, whose leaves are always wet. From their roots a number of little rills run back into the gulf; but as they flow down the steep wall there, the column of vapour, in its ascent, licks them up clean off the rock, and away they mount again. They are constantly running down, but never reach the bottom.

10. "On the left of the island we see the water at the bottom-a white, rolling mass, moving away to the prolongation of the fissure, which branches off near the left bank of the river. The walls of this gigantic crack are perpendicular, and composed of one homogeneous mass of rock. The edge of that side over which the water falls is worn off two or three feet; and pieces have fallen away, so as to give it somewhat of a serrated appearance. That over which the water does not fall is quite straight, except at the left corner, where a rent appears, and a piece seems inclined to fall off. Upon the whole, it is nearly in the state in which it was left at the period of its formation.

11. "The rock is dark-brown in colour, except about ten feet from the bottom, which is discoloured by the annual rise of the water to that or a greater height. On the left side of the island we have a good view of the mass of water which causes one of the columns of vapour to ascend, as it leaps quite clear of the rock, and forms a thick, unbroken fleece all the way to the bottom. Its whiteness gave the idea of snow. As it broke into (if I may use the term) pieces of water all rushing on in the