divided among our Arab assistants. The book, from having been so long steeped in the water and mud below, was, with the exception of the boards, reduced to a mass of pulp. In our effort to recover it, we had ascertained the depth of the well, which is exactly seventy-five feet. Its diameter is about nine feet. It is entirely hewn out of the solid rock, and is a work of great labour. It bears marks about it of the greatest antiquity. "The well is deep," was the description given of it by the woman of Samaria to our Lord. It still, as now noticed, has the same character, although to a considerable extent it is perhaps filled with the stones which are thrown into it, to sound it, by travellers and pilgrims.DR WILSON.

OCEAN.

Oh! that the desert were my dwelling-place,
With one fair spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Ye Elements !-in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted-Can ye not
Accord me such a being? Do I err
In deeming such inhabit many a spot ?
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar :
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain ;
Man marks the earth with ruin-his control
Stops with the shore ;-upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain

A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths,―thy fields
Are not a spoil for him,-thou dost arise

And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray
And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,

And dashest him again to earth :-there let him lay.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And monarchs tremble in their capitals,
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war:
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee-
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts: not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play-
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow-
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,

Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale, or storm
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

Dark-heaving ;-boundless, endless, and sublime-
The image of Eternity-the throne

Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
I wanton'd with thy breakers-they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror-'twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane-as I do here.-Byron.

TRACES OF OCEAN.

Was it the sound of the distant surf that was in mine ears, or the low moan of the breeze, as it crept through the neighbouring wood? Oh, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent since time first began,-where has it not been uttered! There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless desert, where no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand, and the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. It is his sands that the winds heap up; and it is the skeleton remains of his vassals,-shells, and fish, and the stony coral,-that the rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall mountain peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where the panting lungs labour to inhale the thin bleak air,-where no insect murmurs and no bird flies, and where the eye wanders over multitudinous hilltops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests that sweep on to the distant horizon, and along long hollow valleys where the great rivers begin. And yet once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. The elegies of his more ancient denizens we find sculptured on the crags, where they jut from beneath the ice into the mist-wreath; and his later beaches, stage beyond stage, terrace the descending slopes. Where has the great destroyer not been, -the devourer of continents,-the blue foaming dragon, whose vocation it is to eat up the land? His ice-floes have alike furrowed the flat steppes of Siberia and the rocky flanks of Schehallion; and his nummulites and fish lie embedded in great stones of the pyramids, hewn in the times of the old Pharaohs, and in rocky folds of Lebanon still

untouched by the tool. So long as Ocean exists, there must be disintegration, dilapidation, change; and should the time ever arrive when the elevatory agencies, motionless and chill, shall sleep within their profound depths, to awaken no more,—and should the sea still continue to impel its currents and to roll its waves,-every continent and island would at length disappear, and again, as of old, "when the fountains of the great deep were broken up,"

66

"A shoreless ocean tumble round the globe."

Was it with reference to this principle, so recently recognised, that we are so expressly told in the Apocalypse respecting the renovated earth, in which the state of things shall be fixed and eternal, that "there shall be no more sea? or are we to regard the revelation as the mere hieroglyphic,the pictured shape, of some analogous moral truth? Reasoning from what we know,"-and what else remains to us?-an earth without a sea would be an earth without rain, without vegetation, without life, a dead and doleful planet of waste places, such as the telescope reveals to us in the moon. And yet the Ocean does seem peculiarly a creature of time,-of all the great agents of vicissitude and change, the most influential and untiring; and to a state in which there shall be no vicissitude and no change,—in which the earthquake shall not heave from beneath, nor the mountains wear down and the continents melt away, it seems inevitably necessary that there should be "no more sea."HUGH MILLER.

HYMN TO THE SETTING SUN.

Slow, slow, mighty wanderer, sink to thy rest,
Thy course of beneficence done;

As glorious go down to the ocean's warm breast
As when thy bright race was begun.

For all thou hast done,

Since thy rising, oh! sun,

May thou and thy Maker be blest.

Thou hast scattered the night from thy broad golden way, Thou hast given us thy light through a long happy day, Thou hast roused up the birds, thou hast wakened the flowers,

To chant on thy path, and to perfume the hours.

Then slow, mighty wanderer, sink to thy rest,
And rise again beautiful, blessing, and blest.

Slow, slow, mighty wanderer, sink to thy rest,
Yet pause but a moment to shed

One warm look of love on the earth's dewy breast,
Ere the starr'd curtain fall round thy bed.
And to promise the time

When, awaking sublime,

Thou shalt rush all refreshed from thy rest.

Warm hopes drop like dews from thy life-giving hand,
Teaching hearts closed in darkness like flowers to expand;
Dreams wake into joys when first touched by thy light,
As glow the dim waves of the sea at thy sight.
Then slow, mighty wanderer, sink to thy rest,
And rise again beautiful, blessing, and blest.

Slow, slow, mighty wanderer, sink to thy rest
Prolonging the sweet evening hour;

Then robe again soon in the morn's golden vest,
To go forth in thy beauty and power.
Yet pause on thy way,

To the full height of day;

For thy rising and setting are blest.
When thou com'st after darkness to gladden our eyes,
Or departest in glory, in glory to rise,

May hope and may prayer still be woke by thy rays,
And thy going be marked with thanksgiving and praise.
Then slow, mighty wanderer, sink to thy rest,
And rise again beautiful, blessing, and blest.--JAMES.

THE TELESCOPE AND MICROSCOPE.

It was the telescope that, by piercing the obscurity which lies between us and distant worlds, put Infidelity in possession of the argument against which we are now contending; but, about the time of its invention, another instrument was formed, which laid open a scene no less wonderful, and rewarded the inquisitive spirit of man with a discovery, which serves to neutralise the whole of this argument. This was the microscope. The one led me to see a system in every star-the other leads me to see a world in every atom