Joined in the spheres' soft chorus, and awoke
Responses sweet from heaven-born melodies.

The moonbeams glide along the dusky vale,
Like shadowy spectres from the spirit-land !
The nightingale is singing in the woods;
How well her song accords with these still hours,
This moonlit scene, this starry solitude!
The very flowers seem bowed, and listening to
Her pensive warblings; darkness, stars, and sky
Are all familiar with thy plaintive song,
Sweet serenader of the midnight hours.

Sure there are spirits in these twilight hours,
Nocturnal guardians of a sleeping world;
For never have I wander'd forth alone
On such an eve as this, but I have felt
A gentle pressure hover on my brow,
Soft as the touch of spiritual essences;
And I have heard voices of music, such

As seraph's breathe o'er sleeping infancy;

And viewless forms have seemed to float around me

In the grey twilight, till I have been wrapt

Into the dreamy future, and my thoughts

Have roved from what my eye still gazed upon,
And link by link the mystic chain which binds
The lost and loved ones of life's memory to
The sorrowing heart has been rewound, until
The very air seemed pregnant with the past,
And I have stood, compassed with the pale shades
Of the departed dear ones, and have held
Strange converse with the venerable dead.
Oh, I remember once especially!

"It was an eve of autumn's holiest mood;"
The night's grey watchers crowded the blue air,
Hanging in shadowless beauty on the tops
Of the tall mountains, whose uneven peaks

Glittered in the hoar frost! I had strolled forth
In the calm twilight hour, to weep for one
Who had loved me tenderly, and I had loved.
And step by step my thoughts reverted back
To childhood's happy moments, and I basked
In all the happiness of bygone days,

And lived o'er all the scenes of youth again,
Till my heart fainted, and I sat me down
And sobbed aloud; and then methought I heard
A still, small voice, as musical as that

Which oft had called me from my infant sports-
My gentle mother's-who had long since fallen
To rest beneath the long, cold, waving grass.
I loved to think it hers; it seemed to speak
Of heaven, and heavenly things, and of a land
Where troubling ceases and the weary rest.
A gentle touch seemed resting on my brow,
Soft as the pressure of my mother's hand
In childhood, when in the calm vesper hour
I breathed my infant orisons with hers;
And fancying that it was that selfsame touch,
I sat and wept, just like a very child.

But now those days have fled, and we have met
For the last time; parted for ever, now!
For ever? No; death's but a gentle sleep,
A little slumber at the weary close
Of life's dull day, to be disturbed anon;
For we shall rise again, if this still hour,

These viewless forms and whispering voices, which
Around us float, speak truth, we shall mount up,
And wander with ethereal essences

Amidst yon orbs of beauty, which have hung
For near six thousand years in yonder roof.
The world's eternal sentinels, they seem
Fit homes for happy spirits freed from earth,
To commune with each other, and to pay
High adoration to the Eternal One!

CHAPTER XIV.

Curious Contrasts, Facts, and Phenomena in Nature.

【ATURE is full of curious phenomena, resemblances,

N

and contrasts, some of which we proceed to place Gbefore the reader in this chapter.

Plants claim some affinity with animals. The stalk of the former resembles the body of the latter; the root, the stomach; the bark, the skin; the pith, the marrow; and the juice, the blood. Like animals, too, plants are subject to a great variety of disorders. They imbibe air and moisture by their leaves, and food by their roots, both being transubstantiated into their own substance, as theirs is afterwards employed in the structure of animals. For the entire frame of animated being derives its form and its consistence from vegetable organizations.

Some writers confound sensation with the power of motion; and if no motion is perceived, they cannot imagine the existence of sensation. Oysters have no more the locomotive power than thistles, and they can no more forsake the beds in which they are deposited by the tide, than fishes can swim without water, or birds and

insects fly without air. Vegetable sensation, however, is not animal sensation; and it is no superficial mode of supporting this argument to observe that, as Nature has given compensations to all, she would never have ordained so cruel a result as animal sensation to plants, without giving in return the power of defence. A few plants, it is true, seem to be endued with this faculty; some by the noxiousness of their qualities, and others by the peculiarity of their structures, as the nettle, the thistle, the noli-metangere, the thorn, the rose, the holly, the kamadu of Japan, with the deadly nightshade, and other poisonous plants. Yet these plants, armed as some of them are against attacks, and as others are against animal use, support innumerable insects. Some plants open their petals to receive rain, others avoid it. Some contract on the approach of a storm, and others at the approach of night, while some expand and blossom only to the evening air.

The stamina of the flowers of sorrel thorn are so peculiarly irritable that, when touched, they will incline almost two inches; and the upper joint of the leaf of the Dionæa is formed like a machine to catch food. When an insect therefore settles upon its glands, the tender parts become irritated, the two lobes rise up, grasp the insect, and crush it to death. The sensitive plant shrinks back and folds its leaves upon being touched, after the manner of a snail, and a species of the hedysarum of Bengal has its leaves during the day in continual motion; on the approach of night these leaves sink from their erect posture and seem to repose. Nor is this motion confined to the time of being in full perfection; for if a

branch is cut off and placed in water, the leaves will, for the space of an entire day, continue the same motion ; and if anything is placed to stop it, no sooner is the obstacle removed than the plant resumes its activity with greater velocity than it did before, as if it endeavoured to recover the motion it had previously lost.

The plane-tree exhibits the power of exercising a sagacity for securing food not unworthy of an animal. Lord Kaims relates that among the ruins of New Abbey, in the county of Galway, there grew, in his time, on the top of one of its walls, a plane-tree, upwards of twenty feet in height. Thus situated it became straightened for food and moisture, and therefore gradually directed its roots down the side of the wall, till they reached the ground, at the distance of ten feet. When they had succeeded in this attempt, the upper roots no longer shot out fibres, but united in one, and shoots, vigorously sprung up from the root that had succeeded in reaching the earth.

The island of St. Lucia presents a still more curious phenomenon in the animal flower. This organization lives in a large basin, the water of which is brackish. It is more brilliant than the marigold, which it resembles ; but when the hand is extended towards it, it recoils, and retires, like a snail, into the water. It is supposed to live upon the spawn of fish. Some caterpillars in China burrow in the ground at the approach of winter, to the roots of plants, and fasten there. Hence for many ages it was supposed, in that country, that it was a worm in summer and a plant in winter.

Some of the ancients imagined vegetables to have souls