Compitum

but, though we had promise of a happy change on quitting the last road, the impressions caused by such tracts as we have been lately traversing do not yield all at once on leaving them. There we passed through scenes of ruin, that might recall the lines of the old poet, who views them as symbolical :

"Beeches and broad oaks
Were blowen to the ground,
Turned upward their roots,
In tokening of dread."

It is with the moral as with the forest journey that represents it. There are pauses in life, and times of transition, when, without being directly influenced by any of the many forms of evil, there is an experience of distress, a consciousness of having caught infection from the air one breathed, occasioned by a general retrospect of them all. Human kindness, divine charity, wise moderation, all must have suffered from having been placed in hostility to others. We resemble at present travellers who have not yet recovered from the effects of visiting those cypress swamps in the states of Delaware and of Maryland, which are also called dismal swamps, and swamps of distress; where the cedar and the bald cypress cover vast marshes, in which only bears and serpents live. The description given by Marbois in his letter to Malesherbes might convey an idea of

VOL. VI.

what we have seen and experienced upon the last roads. The drifted sand, under which the winds had covered the pine forest, leaving visible only the dead and withered tops of each tree; the deep and hardly passable morass; the bears' walk; the snakes' grove and the stagnant pools, where toads and serpents bathe; the menacing retreat of these serpents, hissing as they retire; their sufferings in winter, when they take refuge in the hollow trees, in which they are sometimes sawed across; the charcoal heaps, and black stems of trees half consumed by fire which the lightning kindled; the spectacle of ruin there presented by prostrate cypress-trees, a hundred feet in length below their branches, and sixteen in circumference-trees which when once cut die for ever; the burning, in 1782, of four thousand acres of venerable cypress in less than twelve hours, when, if the wind had not changed, the narrator, Jones, who describes the same, would have perished with his family, the smoke being so thick that they could not see any thing three feet distant from them, and the only means to escape suffocation being to lie with their faces to the ground-though even then, with mouths closed, they inhaled ashes, which affected their tone of voice for a long time afterwards; the terrors of this conflagration, so apt an image of the moral and political calamities we witnessed; the flames rising to more than a hundred feet in height, lighting up the horizon to a distance of four hundred and twenty miles their fearful roaring; the sound of the falling trees; the atmosphere sparkling with kindled charcoal, rising to a prodigious height, and carried to a distance of fourteen miles from the place of destruction ;—all these scenes and incidents can recall the moral dangers and miseries from which we have but lately turned. But, in fine, we have turned from them, and we may now expect henceforth a different impression from our wanderings. "Sta in viis pluribus," says St. Jerome, ut ad illam viam, quæ ad Patrem ducit, pervenias." This whole journey supposes compliance with the precept.

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Among the descriptions that we meet with of forest wanderings, there is an account of a change of scenery on a memorable occasion, that might be taken to represent the transition of views which is prepared for us here. Vasca Nunez and his companions, travelling to discover the sea beyond the mountains, had to traverse a region in some respects resembling that which we have just left. They were obliged to climb rocky precipices, to struggle through close and tangled forests, and to cross deep and turbulent streams; suffering from hunger and the attacks of hostile tribes, furiously yelling as they assailed them with arrows. They had, in fine, to scale the bald summit of the mountain, from which the long-desired prospect burst upon their view. We are arrived at a point which may remind

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Compitum: Or, The Meeting of the Ways at the Catholic Church, Volumen6