Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

And grow forever and forever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

91. THE DYING CHRISTIAN TO HIS SOUL.-Alexander Pope.

Explosive O.

Vital spark of heavenly flame,

Quit, Oh, quit this mortal frame!
Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying,
Oh, the pain, the bliss, of dying!
Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,
And let me languish into life!

Hark! they whisper; angels say
Sister Spirit, come away;

What is this absorbs me quite,—
Steals my senses, shuts my sight,
Drowns my spirits, draws my breath?
Tell me, soul! can this be death?

(AO) The world recedes,- it disappears!
Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears
With sounds seraphic ring.

Lend, lend your wings! I mount, I fly!

O Grave! where is thy victory?

O Death! where is thy sting?

92. THE BURIAL OF MOSES.-Mrs. C. F. Alexander. Idem, low pitch.

By Nebo's lonely mountain, on this side Jordan's wave,
In a vale in the land of Moab, there lies a lonely grave;

But no man dug that sepulchre, and no man saw it e'er,

For the angels of God upturned the sod, and laid the dead man there.

That was the grandest funeral that ever passed on earth;
But no man heard the tramping, or saw the train go forth;
Noiselessly as the daylight comes when the night is done,

And the crimson streak on ocean's cheek grows into the great sun,

Noiselessly as the spring-time her crown of verdure weaves,
And all the trees on all the hills open their thousand leaves,-
So, without sound of music, or voice of them that wept,

Silently down from the mountain crown the great procession swept.

Lo! when the warrior dieth, his comrades in the war,

With arms reversed, and muffled drum, follow the funeral car.
They show the banners taken, they tell his battles won,

And after him lead his masterless steed, while peals the minute-gun.

Amid the noblest of the land men lay the sage to rest,

And give the bard an honored place with costly marble dressed.

In the great minster transept, where lights like glories fall,

And the sweet choir sings, and the organ rings, along the emblazoned wall.

This was the bravest warrior that ever buckled sword;

This the most gifted poet that ever breathed a word;

And never earth's philosopher traced, with his golden pen,

On the deathless page, truths half so sage, as he wrote down for men.

And had he not high honor, the hill-side for his pall;

To lie in state while angels wait with stars for tapers tall;
And the dark rock pines, like tossing plumes, over his bier to wave;
And God's own hand, in that lonely land, to lay him in the grave?

Oh, lonely tomb in Moab's land, Oh, dark Beth-peor's hill,
Speak to these curious hearts of ours, and teach them to be still.
God hath his mysteries of Grace - ways that we cannot tell;
He hides them deep, like the secret sleep of him he loved so well.

226. Slow Movement: Descriptions of Natural Scenery. Natural and Effusive P. and O., passing often, especially in the latter portions of the extracts, into Expulsive 0.

Medium pitch.

93. THE SKY.-John Ruskin.

Not long agó | I was slowly || descénding || the carriage road || after you leave | Albàno. It had been wild weather when I left | Rõme, || and áll | acróss | the Campâgna || the clouds | were sweeping | in sulphurous | blúe, | with a clap of thunder | or two, | and breaking | gleams | of

sun along the Claudian | áqueduct, | lighting up its arches like the bridge of chàos. But, as I climbed || the long || slope || of the Alban || mount, || the storm | swept | finally to the north, I and the noble | outline || of the domes || of Albâno || and the graceful | darkness of its || îlex grove | rose | against | pure || streaks of alternate || blue and amber, | the upper | sky | gradually | flushing through the last | fragments | of rain-cloud, | in deep | palpitating | azure, | half | éther | and half | dèw. The noon-day sun came | slanting | down | the rocky | slopes of La Ricca, || and its masses of entangled | and tall foliage, whose autumnal | tints | were mixed | with the wet verdure of a thousand | évergreens, ❘ were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot call it cōlor, it was conflagration. Púrple, and crímson and scarlet, | like the curtains | of God's | tabernacle, | the rejoicing | trées | sank | into the válley | in showers | of light, | every separate | leaf | quivering | with buoyant | and burning | life; | éach, as it turned | to refléct | or to transmít | the sunbeam, | first || a torch, || and then || an èmerald.

Are not all natural things, it may be asked, as lovely near as far away? By no means. Look at the clouds and watch the delicate sculpture of their alabaster sides, and the rounded lustre of their magnificent rolling. They are meant to be beheld far away: they were shaped for their place high above your head: approach them and they fuse into vague mists, or whirl away in fierce fragments of thunderous vapor. Look at the crest of the Alp from the far-away plains over which its light is cast, whence human souls have communed with it by their myriads. It was built for its place in the far-off sky: approach it, and as the sound of the voice of man dies away about its foundations, and the tide of human life is met at last by the eternal "Here shall thy waves be stayed," the glory of its aspect fades into blanched fearfulness; its purple walls are rent

แ

into grisly rocks, its silver fret-work saddened into wasting the stormbrands of ages are on its breast, the ashes of its own ruin lie solemnly on its white raiment.

snow;

If you desire to perceive the great harmonies of the form of a rocky mountain, you must not ascend upon its sides. All there is disorder and accident, or seems so. Retire from it, and as your eye commands it more and more, you see the ruined mountain world with a wider glance; behold! dim sympathies begin to busy themselves in the disjointed mass: line binds itself into stealthy fellowship with line: group by group the helpless fragments gather themselves into ordered companies: new captains of hosts, and masses of battalions, become visible one by one; and faraway answers of foot to foot and bone to bone, until the powerless is seen risen up with girded loins, and not one piece of all the unregarded heap can now be spared from the mystic whole.

94. AVALANCHES OF JUNGFRAU ALP.-G. B. Cheever. Idem.

Suddenly an enormous mass of snow and ice, in itself a mountain, seems to move; it breaks from the toppling outmost mountain ridge of snow, where it is hundreds of feet in depth, and in its first fall of perhaps two thousand feet is broken into millions of fragments. As you first see the flash of distant artillery by night, then hear the roar, so here you may see the white flashing mass majestically bowing, then hear the astounding din. A cloud of dusty, dry snow rises into the air from the concussion, forming a white volume of fleecy smoke, or misty light, from the bosom of which thunders forth the icy torrent in its second prodigious fall over the rocky battlements. The eye follows it delighted, as it ploughs through the path which preceding avalanches have worn, till it comes to the brink of a vast ridge of bare rock, perhaps more than two thousand

feet perpendicular; then pours the whole cataract over the gulf, with a still louder roar of echoing thunder, to which nothing but the noise of Niagara in its sublimity is comparable.

Another fall of still greater depth ensues, over a second similar castellated ridge or reef in the surface of the mountain, with an awful, majestic slowness, and a tremendous crash in its concussion, awakening again the reverberating peals of thunder. Then the torrent roars on to another smaller fall, till at length it reaches a mighty groove of snow and ice. Here its progress is slower; and last of all you listen to the roar of the falling fragments, as they drop out of sight, with a dead weight, into the bottom of the gulf, to rest there forever.

Figure to yourself a cataract like that of Niagara, poured in foaming grandeur, not merely over one great precipice of two hundred feet, but over the successive ridgy precipices of two or three thousand, in the face of a mountain eleven thousand feet high, and tumbling, crashing, thundering down with a continuous din of far greater sublimity than the sound of the grandest cataract. The roar of the falling mass begins to be heard the moment it is loosened from the mountain; it pours on with the sound of a vast body of rushing water; then comes the first great concussion, a booming crash of thunders, breaking on the still air in mid-heaven; your breath is suspended, and you listen and look; the mighty glittering mass shoots headlong over the main precipice, and the fall is so great that it produces to the eye that impression of dread majestic slowness of which I have spoken, though it is doubtless more rapid than Niagara. But if you should see the cataract of Niagara itself coming down five thousand feet above you in the air, there would be the same impression. The image remains in the mind, and can never fade from it; it is as if you had seen an alabaster cataract from heaven.