Silence is a thing

own bright or shadowy imaginings. indeed truly divine, and often do we wish for a world without tongues. Worldless ideas are alone worthy of spiritual essence; and not even a single monosyllable drops in upon the stillness of living thought. So speechless are we all-as clouds or ghosts,-as we turn our eyes well pleased towards the small serene Langdale chapel, from which fancy hears the sound of the Sabbath-psalm-the wild beauty of Elter-water is passed without encomium, its moorish meadows and wilderness of woods-the Brathay, without any accompaniment from our voices, is suffered to trill his jocund song, and in silence we bid the first far-off reappearing gleam of Win. dermere hail!-First a whisper, and then a word, and then an imperfect sentence, as single houses become more frequent, and the clustered hamlets enliven the cultivated hill-side till collecting our scattered forces into one group on Rothay bridge, we salute beautiful Ambleside almost with a cheer, and see from the dimness that shrouds her church-tower, that twilight is closing on a DAY AMONG

THE MOUNTAINS.

MODES OF TRAVELLING.

(Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1826.)

AMONG the innumerable characteristics of Maga, no one is more surprising than that brought to light by the heat of the bygone summer. She is a salamander. While all the other monthlies panted, purpled, and perspired, Maga drew her breath serenely as on the cool mountain-top; the colour of her countenance was unchanged, except that its pinks and carnations glowed like a bouquet of prizeflowers, and the dew upon her forehead glistened but as that on the queen-tree of the forest. Like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, all in one, she came unscathed out of the very heat that set the snow on fire on Lochnagair; and she now dishevels to the winds of autumn the unsinged beauty of her flowing tresses. The other monthlies are as mummies, laid on their backs, with ape-like faces, sorely shrivelled in their yellow hue, shrouded in mouldly cerements, emitting a grave-smell-melancholy images of the wisdom of the Egyptians. Maga-the divine Maga-flourishes in immortal youth; her frowns are yet as death, her smiles as life, and when with ambrosial kisses she bathes his eyes, what author is not in Elysium?

Yet that all the other periodicals should have nearly perished, is a matter rather for pity than reproach. They could not help it. The drought was excessive. The drop in a thousand pens was dried up; and even Mr. Coleridge's patent inkstand itself stood liquidless as a sand-bottle. You missed the cottage girl with her pitcher at the well in the brae, for the spring scarcely trickled, and the water-cresses were yellow before their time. Many a dancing hill-stream was dead-only here and

there one stronger than her sisters attempted a pas-seul over the shelving rocks; but all choral movements and melodies forsook the mountains, still and silent as so much painted canvass. Waterfalls first tamed their thunder, then listened alarmed to their own echoes, wailed themselves away into diminutive murmurs, gasped for life, died, and were buried at the feet of the green slippery precipices. Tarns sank into moors; and there was the voice of weeping heard and low lament among the water lilies. Ay, millions of pretty flowerets died in their infancy, even on their mothers' breasts; the bee fainted in the desert for want of the honey-dew, and the ground-cells of industry were hushed below the heather. Cattle lay lean

on the brownness of a hundred hills, and the hoof of the red-deer lost its fleetness. Along the shores of lochs great stones appeared, within what for centuries had been the lowest water mark; and whole bays, once bright and beautiful with reed-pointed wavelets, became swamps, cracked and seamed, or rustling in the aridity, with a useless crop, to the sugh of the passing wind. On the shore of the great sea alone, you beheld no change. The tides ebbed and flowed as before the small billow racing over the silver sands to the same goal of shells, or climbing up to the same wild flowers that bathe the foundation of yonder old castle belonging to the ocean.

That in such a state of things, the London Magazines should have shrivelled themselves up, or, if the use of the active mood be too bold, and the passive more appropriate, should have been shrivelled up in the manner above alluded to, is, we repeat it, subject matter rather of pity than reproach. But the snow fires on Lochnagair have been extinguished, and Foyers, like a giant refreshed with mountain dew after the late rains, but with no intention of suicide, has flung himself over his cliff in a voice of thunder. The autumnal woods are fresher than those of summer. The mild harvest moon will yet repair the evil done by the outrageous sun; and, in the gracious aftergrowth, the green earth far and wide rejoices as in spring. Like people that have hidden themselves in caves when their native land was oppressed, out gush the torrents and descend with songs to the plain. The hill-country is

itself again when it hears the voice of streams. Magnificent army of mists, whose array encompasses islands of the sea, and who still, as thy glorious vanguard keeps deploying among the glens, rollest on in silence more sublime than the trampling of the feet of horses, or the sound of the wheels of chariots, to the heath-covered mountains of Scotland, we bid thee hail! Lo! sunbeams are thy banners! And as they are unfurled over the seas, Ben Nevis blows his solitary trumpet, and a thousand echoes welcome the invasion!

Away, then, to the Highlands-away with us, gentle reader-away!-One week-one fortnight's flight, will add years to your pilgrimage here below; and your funeral, long long hence, will be attended by at least one hundred and fifty-seven children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren, and children, whose descent from your body will seem absolutely lost in the darkness of antiquity.

"What! must we leave the beautiful lakes and mountains of England, which we were just beginning to understand and to enjoy and is it thus, Christopher, you cheat us out of our Hints for the Holidays' ?" Oh! gentle reader, hast thou only now begun to discover the character of the capricious old man ?

Modo me Thebis modo ponit Athenis.

At every twinge at our toe our will undergoes a revolution-and yet you complain of us for not being in the same mood for two months at a time! Heaven preserve us! in the same mood for sixty-two days and sixty-two nights! That is more than you are entitled to expect from a bottle of hock a hundred years old. Although the ancient gentleman's mouth is corked, his spirit is at work in the bin and his character has continued to change for a century, from Sabbath to Sabbath. Of all our excellencies as an editor, we doubt if there be one more valuable than our total disregard of truth. What promises have we not broken! How many solitary number ones have we not brought forward, full of hope as founders of a dynasty of articles, and then left them to stand disconsolate by themselves, unfollowed by the rest of the series!

Yet in all these, and our manifold other enormities, a man of discernment sees our profound knowledge of character, not only of individuals, but of human nature at large. It is gratifying to many principles in our mortal frame, to see a fine, showy vapouring article, with all the rashness of youth, rush into the magazine in glittering arms, of fensive and defensive, challenging the whole periodicals of the age in which he flourishes, one after another, to mortal combat, and then sinking a No. I. into everlasting oblivion, before he has been permitted by fate even so much as to spit a Cockney. What reminiscence can be more solemn than that of the first part of an essay on tragedy, left incomplete, perhaps, by the death of the author, or some mismanagement of the clerk of the Balaam! How affecting to the subscriber of sensibility, a tour on the continent, terminating with the death of the ingenious author a few stages beyond Calais ! "To be continued," is never half so pathetic at the close of a communication, as when you are afterwards informed in the obituary, that it cannot be on this side of the grave. For our own parts, when we see an Epithalamium taking the place of No. II. of a promised series of elegies, although we feel as if the funeral baked-meats do coldly furnish up the marriage tables, yet such is the charm of variety, that while there is a tear on our cheek there is a smile in our eye, and we are willing to forget the unrejoicing dead for the sake of the happy couple setting off on the honey-moon. In short, on taking up a new number of Ebony, are you not often delighted to find, that there is not in it one single article that you had been led to expect? Fairest of readers-you are at first a little angry or so, and pout so prettily that we wish we were by to kiss those sullen lips relaxing into a sunny smile. Tossing your scorn away with one glitter of your head, with all the fickleness of your sex you suffer your affections to be won by number for September (CXVII.), and forgetting Windermere, and Grassmere, and Rydal, as entirely as if they were air-woven waters of the sky, set off with Christopher North to the land of cakes and chieftains.

And how shall we travel? In a BALLOON? No, no. After all the boasted science of the age, what is a bal