As mountains waste with secret fires, Encumbered with thy kindred ties- They thought that time and monkish school, Thy country's eyes were turned on thee- THE LIFE-BOAT. ON the shore between Yarmouth and Lowestoff the sea has occasionally done great damage. No part of the British coast is more dangerous; and those towns, especially the latter, have at different times suffered severely from tempests. At Lowestoff there were formerly two chapels, one of which has been entirely carried away by the sea, and other portions of the town have sustained damage by the tremendous hurricanes which sometimes blow upon this part of the island. On the north side of Lowestoff stands the Upper Lighthouse, a building forty feet high and twenty feet in diameter. On the beach below the cliff another light-house has been erected of timber, for the more immediate advantage of the fishingboats. Not far from the shore, and parallel with it, are several dangerous banks, upon which wrecks frequently occur in stormy weather; and it is quite endearing to humanity to see with what alacrity and fearlessness of all personal danger the boatmen put off to crews in distress, when one would imagine no boat could live a moment in the fiercely convulsed ocean. They hazard their lives with a noble disinterestedness worthy of the highest admiration. Hundreds of lives are yearly saved by the personal intrepidity of the Yarmouth and Lowestoff boatmen, who, from passing the best portion of their days upon the water in the pursuit of their occupation of fishing, naturally acquire a skill in the management of their boats in tempestuous weather, not surpassed by the boatmen upon any part of the English coast. I have often wondered alike at their boldness and at their success. It is a beautiful thing to witness the great result of the magnanimity of human endeavour in the salvation of human life. The calm intrepidity with which men launch their little barks into the tempestuous ocean, with the furious threatenings of death in their ears, and the mightiest perils before their eyes, above and around them, raises a stirring interest in the mind of the beholder. It awakens within us the slumbering but still active principles of love for our fellow-beings, and shows us that in human nature there is yet that likeness to the divine, obscured indeed, but not extinguished, which shall finally raise it to the everlasting inheritance reserved for it among the good of all countries, of all races, and of all conditions. How has it been vilified by the cold and selfish philosophy of those who refer, for their judgment of it, only to their own bosoms, and who have never put themselves in the way where they may behold the exercise of its beautiful and heavenly sympathies ! One afternoon in the month of March I was passing between Yarmouth and Lowestoff, when my attention was particularly arrested by the violence of the breakers dashing over one of the banks, so dangerously prevalent upon this part of the coast. The wind was high, but not boisterous, though the aspect of the weather, even to an unpractised eye, was anything but favourable. I stood and gazed upon the distant shoal with that painful feeling which sudden associations of danger naturally |