then set foot on the famous Crissæan plain: a cause of war in old Greek history for its great fertility. Indeed, it seemed to answer to the Scripture phrase of corn and wine and oil, though the vines were few in comparison of the corn and olives. It is not a valley, but, as in Attica and Boeotia, strictly a plain, from which the mountains rise straight up, as if the Bay of Salona had at some time relinquished part of its bed. It consists of two bowls, an outer one in the shape of a horse-shoe, and an inner one of a more compressed form. On the right was the town of Salona, and on the left a village called Xero Pegadia. The heat was very oppressive; and although the plain was half filled by a superb olive-grove, immense trees, shady, and glistening with their blue silvery leaves, like a quiet summer sea when not an air profanes the quivering field of waters, yet the path perversely kept just on the outside of the wood, and out of the shadowy reach of the boughs. I envied some camels tethered under the trees, browsing on the young shoots, which they cropped by help of their long necks with the most languid gracefulness. There was one young one, a very beautiful animal, who seemed wandering the wood at will, stalking about in the shade, and nibbling here and there; for his neck was not long enough to reach the shoots at all times.

At Scala Salonæ I took boat, and in an hour was landed at Galaxidi, a miserable town on the eastern promontory of old Locris. From noon till two hours

from sunset the time was spent in a violent and angry quarrel between the townspeople and myself about leaving the place, where they were anxious to detain me. My scanty knowledge of Romaic, of course, aggravated the matter, and some rough handling and shaking, as well as demonstrations of further violence, drove me out of the town to the base of the mountain, two miles off, where I waited till after dark, half-famished, my Athenian boy having rendered me no assistance; for the sympathy which he expressed by weeping was rather provoking than otherwise. After dark I returned to the town, paid two mariners exorbitantly for a boat to Lutrarchi, found my craven-hearted Athenian, and, more weary with anger than hunger, I persuaded the mariners to put me on board the boat, which was at anchor in the bay, where I would await their coming, a little before sunrise. Through their agency I obtained some brown bread and a handful of dates, which I ate, maintaining Xenophon's warning to apply only to the green fruit. My own stores produced me tea, which, even without milk, was a real luxury.

I made my repast on deck, with Parnassus before me, and the moon behind; and while I gazed on the rocky cleft above Delphi, from time to time I decyphered, by moonlight, a quaint old oracle out of Herodotus. The whole night long I was serenaded by the crowing of the cocks, and the lonely-sounding wail of the curlews, all distinctly echoed back from the Parnassian range opposite.

There are some who could more easily chronicle their lives by nights than by days. Since that night, when I gazed on Parnassus as one might gaze on an altar, and in that long gaze transferred every rift on its huge side to memory's faithful keeping, how many a fair moon has come to me with calmest visitation among the secret woods and by the lonely watercourses of the English mountains! How many a cloudy night with merciful sternness has forced peace upon my spirit, chastising a repining heart and a doubting intellect! How often has the majesty of venerable night, enthroned in all those everlasting clefts, taught with authority some truth which in the heat and toil of study had seemed uncertain, and almost false! How often, when the midnight mountains were solemnly shadowed in the stedfast lake, have I held communion with the departed, such as I once believed not to be held on earth! Oh! be not backward to confess the power of night! In that sunken lane between the wood and the wall, where the mountain brook comes down to meet the river as it bends westward, most often has it been my lot to receive the influence of night. Emerging from the screen of gloomy firs some moonlight night, how wonderful is that scene! The two meeting mountains in front, with glistening stones and dark spots of holly and juniper, the mighty cove, scooped out by some fierce agency in long past ages, lying to the right, with the wood and park in front, and then the river-side meadows on the left: how beautiful all is,

how very beautifully calm! Look at the vast outline of that cove, knoll rising on knoll, brought near in shade or thrown far off in light, a very heavenly benediction of radiance spread upon it. Did the earth alway so appear before the curse pressed heavily on it, and it grew aged? Does it not look as if just fresh from the Creator's hand? Might they not, for untroubled beauty and exceeding calmness, be the hills of Eden? Was there ever such a mystery as the nightly world, so different in all things from the world of day, as if the old elements had vanished, the old substances waxed thin, the old forms been filled with new spirit; another empire, and subject to other laws? How mysterious are these pauses of darkness wherewith God has chequered this stage of our eternal course! How different is the nightly world from the patient, suffering world of day!

Can there be an inhabitant of the vale before whose eyes night has not worked a separate marvel at every turn in that winding road from the large to the lesser lake? And when I reach the garden-gate, and mount the mossy bank, can I pass the young beech-tree half-way up, without turning to look upon the slumbering village? The wet roofs are glistening in the moon-beams, Wansfell yearning over more near than in the day, as if the guardianship of the hamlet were entrusted to it for the night, and the shrill church-clock numbering to the vale the hours that have elapsed since its creation, or rather since its Creator died to make creation new again. O ye far

off lands which I have traversed! can I not name villages, one, two, three, four, nay many, most like to this one, and whose nightly appearance, buried in the roots of the Carpathian mountains or among the Carnic Alps, now rushes back upon me? O glorious region, fair provinces of the great Kaiser! since it was given me to wander among your lawns and woods and round lakes, I have seen nothing beautiful anywhere, but I have said to myself, as though it were a standard of natural beauty, Such is Styria ! O earth, earth, thou hast too many ties to fasten our affections to thyself! Thou art dowered above measure with majesty and loveliness!

Yet it is wronging nature, and specially wronging night, so to speak. The same sunken vale is haunted by other influences. There are timorous spirits on whom night leans somewhat heavily at times, on whom it has leaned heavily in that sunken vale. Reverend night has touched them there with a more awful sceptre, a touch more weighty than the slender pillar of a star or the tremulous flaky shower of moonlight. Night in that lane, as some have not been ashamed to witness of themselves, has more than once drawn them within the confines of the spiritual world. There, though every mood of night was familiar to them and every mutation in her temper dear, she has sometimes overshadowed their spirits with a fearful panic. The silent trees have seemed possessed by a spiritual indwelling, and the woods filled with legions of airy beings, the hoary

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