"Stop a moment here, said Corinne to Lord Nelvil, as he stood under the portico of the church; pause before drawing aside the curtain which covers the entrance of the Temple. Does not your heart beat at the threshold of that sanctuary? Do you not feel, on entering it, the emotion consequent on a solemn event? At these words Corinne herself drew aside the curtain, and held it so as to let Lord Nelvil enter. Her attitude was so beautiful in doing so, that for a moment it withdrew the eyes of her lover even from the majestic interior of the Temple. But as he advanced, its greatness burst upon his mind, and the impression which he received under its lofty arches was so profound, that the sentiment of love was for a time effaced. He walked slowly beside Corinne; both were silent. Every thing enjoined contemplation; the slightest sound resounded so far, that no word appeared worthy of being repeated in those eternal mansions. Prayer alone, the voice of misfortune was heard at intervals in their vast vaults. And, when under those stupendous domes, you hear from afar the voice of an old man, whose trembling steps totter along those beautiful marbles, watered with so many tears, you feel that man is rendered more dignified by that very infirmity of his nature which exposes his divine spirit to so many kinds of suffering, and that Christianity, the worship of grief, contains the true secret of man's sojourn upon earth.

"Corinne interrupted the reverie of Oswald, and said to him, 'You have seen the Gothic churches of England and Germany, and must have observed that they are distinguished by a much more sombre character than this cathedral. There is something mystical in the Catholicism of these Northern people; ours speaks to the imagination by exterior objects. Michael Angelo said, on beholding the cupola of the Pantheon, I will place it in the air;' and, in truth, St. Peter's is a temple raised on the basement of a church. There is a certain alliance of the ancient worship with Christianity in the effect which the interior of that church produces: I often go to walk here alone, in order to restore to my mind the tranquillity it may have lost. The sight of such a monument is like a continual and fixed music, awaiting you to pour its balm into your mind, whenever you approach it; and certainly, among the many titles of this nation to glory, we must number the patience, courage, and disinterestedness of the chiefs of the church, who consecrated, during a hundred and fifty years, such vast treasures and boundless labour to the prosecution of a work, of which none of them could hope to enjoy the fruits."" -Corinne, vol. i. c. 3.

In this magnificent passage, the words underlined are an obvious blemish. The idea

As another specimen of Madame de Staël's descriptive powers, take her picture of the Appian Way, with its long lines of tombs on either side, on the southern quarter of Rome.

"She conducted Lord Nelvil beyond the gates of the city, on the ancient traces of the Appian Way. These traces are marked in the middle of the Campagna of Rome by tombs, on the right and left of which the ruins extend as far as the eye can reach for several miles beyond the walls. Cicero says that, on leaving the gate, the first tombs you meet are those of Metellus, the Scipios, and Servillius. The tomb of the Scipios has been discovered in the very place which he describes, and transported to the Vatican. Yet it was, in some sort, a sacrilege to displace these illustrious ashes; imagination is more nearly allied than is generally imagined to morality; we must beware of shocking it. Some of these tombs are so large, that the houses of peasants have been worked out in them, for the Romans consecrated a large space to the last remains of their friends and their relatives. They were strangers to that arid principle of utility which fertilizes a few corners of earth, the more by devastating the vast domain of sentiment and thought.

"You see at a little distance from the Appian Way a temple raised by the Republic to Honour and Virtue; another to the God which compelled Hannibal to remeasure his steps; the Temple of Egeria, where Numa went to consult his tutelar deity, is at a little distance on the left hand. Around these tombs the traces of virtue alone are to be found. No monument of the long ages of crime which disgraced the empire are to be met with beside the places where these illustrious dead repose; they rest amongst the relics of the republic.

"The aspect of the Campagna around Rome has something in it singularly remarkable. Doubtless it is a desert; there are neither trees nor habitations; but the earth is covered with a profusion of natural flowers, which the energy of vegetation renews incessantly

observe Vesuvius athwart the flames, and those flames consumed him.

"Cicero lost his life near the promontory of Gaeta, which is seen in the distance. The Triumvirs, regardless of posterity, bereaved it of the thoughts which that great man had conceived-it was on us that his murder was committed.

"Cicero sunk beneath the poniards of tyrants-Scipio, more unfortunate, was banished by his flow-citizens while still in the enjoyment of freedom. He terminated his days near that shore, and the ruins of his tomb are still called the Tower of our Country.' What a touching allusion to the last thought of that great spirit!

"Marius fled into those marshes not far from the last home of Scipio. Thus in all ages the people have persecuted the really great; but they are avenged by their apotheosis, and the Roman who conceived their power extended even unto Heaven, placed Romulus, Numa, and Cæsar in the firmament-new stars which confound in our eyes the rays of glory and the celestial radiance.

"Oh, memory! noble power! thy empire is in these scenes! From age to age, strange destiny! man is incessantly bewailing what he has lost! These remote ages are the depositaries in their turn of a greatness which is no more, and while the pride of thought, glorying in its progress, darts into futurity, our soul seems still to regret an ancient country to which the past in some degree brings it back."-Lib. xii. c. 4.

Enough has now been given to give the unlettered reader a conception of the descriptive character of these two great continental writers to recall to the learned one some of the most delightful moments of his life. To complete the parallel, we shall now present three of the finest passages of a similar character from Sir Walter Scott, that our readers may be able to appreciate at a single sitting the varied excellences of the greatest masters of poetic prose who have appeared in modern times.

The first is the well-known opening scene of Ivanhoe.

"The sun was setting upon one of the rich grassy glades of that forest, which we have mentioned in the beginning of the chapter. Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious green sward; in some places they were intermingled with beeches, hollies, and copsewood of various descriptions, so closely as totally to intercept the level beams of the sinking sun; in others they receded from each other, forming those long sweeping vistas, in the intricacy of which the eye delights to lose itself, while imagination considers them as the paths to yet wilder scenes of silvan solitude. Here the red rays of the sun shot a broken and discoloured light, that partially hung upon the shattered boughs and mossy trunks of the trees, and there they illuminated in brilliant patches the portions of turf to which they made their way. A con

siderable open space, in the midst of this glade seemed formerly to have been dedicated to the rites of Druidical superstition; for, on the sum mit of a hillock, so regular as to seem artificial, there still remained part of a circle of rough unhewn stones, of large dimensions. Seven stood upright; the rest had been dislodged from their places, probably by the zeal of some convert to Christianity, and lay, some prostrate near their former site, and others on the side of the hill. One large stone only had found its way to the bottom, and in stopping the course of a small brook, which glided smoothly round the foot of the eminence, gave, by its opposition, a feeble voice of murmur to the placid and elsewhere silent streamlet."

The next is the equally celebrated description of the churchyard in the introductory chapter of Old Mortality.

"Farther up the narrow valley, and in a recess which seems scooped out of the side of the steep heathy bank, there is a deserted burial-ground which the little cowards are fearful of approaching in the twilight. To me, however, the place has an inexpressible charm. It has been long the favourite termination of my walks, and, if my kind patron forgets not his promise, will (and probably at no very distant day) be my final resting-place after my mortal pilgrimage.

"It is a spot which possesses all the solemnity of feeling attached to a burial-ground, without exciting those of a more unpleasing description. Having been very little used for many years, the few hillocks which rise above the level plain are covered with the same short velvet turf. The monuments, of which there are not above seven or eight, are half sunk in the ground and overgrown with moss. No newly-erected tomb disturbs the sober serenity of our reflections, by reminding us of recent calamity, and no rank springing grass forces upon our imagination the recollection, that it owes its dark luxuriance to the foul and festering remnants of mortality which ferment beneath. The daisy which sprinkles the sod, and the hair-bell which hangs over it, derive their pure nourishment from the dew of Heaven, and their growth impresses us with no degrading or disgusting recollections. Death has indeed been here, and its traces are before us; but they are softened and deprived of their horror by our distance from the period when they have been first impressed. Those who sleep beneath are only connected with us by the reflection, that they have once been what we now are, and that, as their relics are now identified with their mother earth, ours shall, at some future period, undergo the same trans. formation."

The third is a passage equally well known, but hardly less beautiful, from the Antiquary. "The sun was now resting his huge disk upon the edge of the level ocean, and gilded the accumulation of towering clouds through which he had travelled the livelong day, and which now assembled on all sides, like misfortunes and disasters around a sinking empire, and falling monarch. Still, however, his dying splendour gave a sombre magnificence to the massive congregation of vapours, form

ing out of their unsubstantial gloom, the show of pyramids and towers, some touched with gold, some with purple, some with a hue of deep and dark red. The distant sea, stretched beneath this varied and gorgeous canopy, lay almost portentously still, reflecting back the dazzling and level beams of the descending luminary, and the splendid colouring of the clouds amidst which he was sitting. Nearer to the beach, the tide rippled onward in waves of sparkling silver, that imperceptibly, yet rapidly, gained upon the sand.

"With a mind employed in admiration of the romantic scene, or perhaps on some more agitating topic, Miss Wardour advanced in silence by her father's side, whose recently offended dignity did not stoop to open any conversation. Following the windings of the beach, they passed one projecting point or headland of rock after another, and now found themselves under a huge and continued extent of the precipices by which that iron-bound coast is in most places defended. Long projecting reefs of rock, extending under water, and only evincing their existence by here and there a peak entirely bare, or by the breakers which foamed over those that were partially covered, rendered Knockwinnock bay dreaded by pilots and ship-masters. The crags which rose between the beach and the mainland, to the height of two or three hundred feet, afforded in their crevices shelter for unnumbered sea-fowl, in situations seemingly secured by their dizzy height from the rapacity of man. Many of these wild tribes, with the instinct which sends them to seek the land before a storm arises, were now winging towards their nests with the shrill and dissonant clang which announces disquietude and fear. The disk of the sun became almost totally obscured ere he had altogether sunk below the horizon, and an early and lurid shade of darkness blotted the serene twilight of a summer evening. The wind began next to arise; but its wild and moaning sound was heard for some time, and its effects became visible on the bosom of the sea, before the gale was felt on shore. The mass of waters, now dark and threatening, began to lift itself in larger ridges, and sink in deeper furrows, forming waves that rose high in foam upon the breakers, or bursting upon the beach with a sound resembling distant thunder."

Few objects are less beautiful than a bare sheet of water in heathy hills, but see what it becomes under the inspiration of genius.

"It was a mild summer day; the beams of the sun, as is not uncommon in Zetland, were moderated and shaded by a silvery haze, which filled the atmosphere, and, destroying the strong contrast of light and shade, gave even to noon the sober livery of the evening twilight. The

little lake, not three-quarters of a mile in cir cuit, lay in profound quiet; its surface un dimpled, save when one of the numerous water-fowl, which glided on its surface, dived for an instant under it. The depth of the water gave the whole that cerulean tint of bluish green, which occasioned its being called the Green Loch; and at present, it formed so per fect a mirror to the bleak hills by which it was surrounded, and which lay reflected on its bosom, that it was difficult to distinguish the water from the land; nay, in the shadowy uncertainty occasioned by the thin haze, a stranger could scarce have been sensible that a sheet of water lay before him. A scene of more complete solitude, having all its peculiarities heightened by the extreme serenity of the weather, the quiet gray composed tone of the atmosphere, and the perfect silence of the elements, could hardly be imagined. The very aquatic birds, who frequented the spot in great numbers, forbore their usual flight and screams, and floated in profound tranquillity upon the silent water.”

It is hard to say to which of these mighty masters of description the palm should be awarded. Scott is more simple in his language, more graphic in his details, more thoroughly imbued with the character of the place he is desirous of portraying: Chateaubriand is more resplendent in the images which he selects, more fastidious in the features he draws, more gorgeous from the magnificence with which he is surrounded: Madame de Staël, inferior to both in the power of delineating nature, is superior to either in rousing the varied emotions dependent on historical recollections or melancholy impres sions. It is remarkable that, though she is a southern writer, and has thrown into Corinne all her own rapture at the sun and the recollections of Italy, yet it is with a northern eye that she views the scenes it presents-it is not with the living, but the mighty dead, that she holds communion-the chords she loves to strike are those melancholy ones which vibrate more strongly in a northern than a southern heart. Chateaubriand is imbued more largely with the genuine spirit of the south: albeit a Frank by origin, he is filled with the spirit of Oriental poetry. His soul is steeped in the cloudless skies, and desultory life, and boundless recollections of the East. Scott has no decided locality. He has struck his roots into the human heart-he has described Nature with a master's hand, under whatever aspects she is to be seen; but his associations are of Gothic origin; his spirit is of chivalrous descent; the nature which he has in general drawn is the sweet gleam of sunshine in a northern climate.