ruins of Iona." Associations such as these have been surrounded with irresistible attractions to the cultivated and reflective of all ages, and the best writers of antiquity have feelingly alluded to them. "They snatch the soul away in rapture, as if it had already traversed the tomb, and on the bosom of immensity imbue it with the inexhaustible glories which Jehovah has diffused through the universe." Germanicus wandered amidst the ruins of Athens, and looked with veneration upon its moldering architectural piles; Atticus felt an undefined reverence when he paused among its tombs and monuments; in the swelling emotions of patriotic zeal, Julian shed tears on quitting its groves and bowers; and so awe-inspiring were the associations that came gushing to the memory of Leo Allatries, that he wept over the ruins of a house once in the possession of Homer. And our own great statesman of the North, Daniel Webster, felt its power when he exclaimed: "We shall not stand unmoved on the shore of Plymouth, while the sea continues to wash it; nor will our brethren in another and ancient colony* forget the place of its first establishment, till their river shall cease to flow by it. No vigor of youth, no maturity of manhood, will lead the nation to forget the spots where its infancy was cradled and defended." Again: in the work De Finibus of Cicero, is the following remarkable passage:-"Often, when I enter the Senate house, the shades of Scipio, of Cato, and of Lælius, and in particular, of my venerable grandfather, rise to my imagination." All great and refined intellects experi *Jamestown. ence similar emotions, when meditating upon the same or similar important and thought-inspiring localities. Hence the remark of Southey: "He whose heart is not excited upon the spot which a martyr has sanctified by his sufferings, or at the grave of one who has largely benefited mankind, must be more inferior to the multitude by his moral, than he can possibly be raised above them in his intellectual nature." Almost every great advantage which mankind have derived even from science and education, had an origin in some local incident. Gibbon informs us that, "it was in the church of St. Maria d'Ara Cœli, on the Capitoline Hill, at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as he sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers, the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to his mind." The thoughtful traveler, who perambulates the subterranean streets of Pompeii, is filled with associations of the most thrilling character. He remembers that that city was well stricken in years when the Light of divine truth first dawned upon the world, and the "Sun of Righteousness arose with healing in his wings"-that it is a city which lay entombed for two thousand years, while nations passed and repassed over its monuments—and that for centuries its sculptured figures, its domes and palaces remained in a well-preserved condition beneath the surface of the earth. He remembers, too, that, within its walls, along its avenues and streets, the ever-surging tide of humanity, with all its hopes and aspirations, its joys, its sorrows, once swept with unrestrained hilarity, unconscious that a doom of fearful magnitude impended over their city! There. ་ too, he sees the temple, with its Doric columns yet standing, its walls painted with emblems commemorative of the services of their deity, the sacred vessels, lamps, and table of Isis still remaining. And while he is contemplating these monuments of the past, and memory hurries backward in its rapid gyrations, he might exclaim as a cotemporary of Augustus: "I greet thee, oh my country! My dwelling is the only spot upon the earth which has preserved its form; an immunity extending even to the smallest objects of my affections. Here is my couch, there are my favorite authors. My paintings, also, are still fresh as when the ingenious artist spread them over my walls. Let us traverse the town; let us visit the drama. I recognize the spot where I joined for the first time in the plaudits given to the fine scenes of Terence and Euripides. Rome is but one vast museum; Pompeii is a living antiquity." He likewise recalls the sad but truthful picture which Pliny gives in regard to the destruction of its inhabitants. "A darkness suddenly overspread the country-not like the darkness of a moonless night, but like that of a closed room, in which the light is of a sudden extinguished-women screamed, children moaned, men cried; here children were anxiously calling their parents, and there parents were seeking their children, or husbands their wives; all recognizing each other only by their cries. Many wished for death, from the fear of dying. Many called on the gods for assistance; others despaired of their existence, and thought this the last, eternal night of the world. Actual dangers were magnified by unreal terrors. The earth continued to shake, and men, half distracted, to reel about, exaggerating their own fears and those of others, by terrifying predictions." All these come up rapidly succeeding each other in living realities, and invest that city, that awe-inspiring mausoleum of antiquity, with associations too hallowed to be resisted. Similar emotions imperceptibly steal over the soul, as we wander among the ruins of Athens; for there we read, on her sculptured columns, her original glory as the mistress of Greece, and remember the period when she stood forth a towering prodigy of perfection to the gaze of an admiring world. What Greece was in her power-what Tyre appeared in the perfection of her greatness-mighty Athens was in the days of Pericles. Then it was that she, with her three ports, the lashing of the waves of which had so often blended with the vesper-chants, connected by her celebrated walls, formed one vast enclosure of ponderous fortifications. The Acropolis arose in her midst, a massive rock, upon the summit of which were collected some of the noblest monuments of Grecian taste-rearing itself in lofty splendor toward the heavens, "gleaming with its crest of columns on the will of man," as though they had been placed upon "a mount of diamonds." It was there that the Arts and Sciences were not only cradled, but were carried to as great a height of perfection as was ever known in the ancient world. In a word, it was a sanctuary of the Arts, the residence of the gods, a place of sepulchres, altars and shrines for sacred relics, "and peopled with forms that mocked the eternal dead in marble immortality." Peaceful olives crowned its outskirts. There, too, arose the princely Propylon, the splendid Erectheum, and the lofty Odeum, exhibiting in perfect unity that simplicity, grandeur and magnificence to which only Grecian arts and Grecian taste ever attained. And there arose the sublime Parthenon, affecting the admiration of the astonished beholder as a production of the Deity rather than the art of man-a mighty fabric of sculpture, in which the human form shone deified by paganism, as the virtues do by Christianity. In her silent halls were assembled the poets, gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, "while beauty in eternal sleep, seemed dreaming of herself." It also contained the statue of Minerva, in which the sculptor appears to have made the immortal spirit of the goddess speak through the cold and lifeless marble. And there was the Areopagus, where were the seats of the judges the arena within which the Apostle Paul entered, and in his wonted eloquence proclaimed to Greece's wisest sons the only and true God, and at the sound of whose voice, even the gods themselves trembled! Opposite this was the scene of the patriotic exertions of the Athenian orator; a rock was the bema upon which Demosthenes stood while addressing the populace in those fervid strains of eloquence "That shook the Arsenal, and fulmined o'er Greece, Athens sat then amid her vine-clad hills and olivewilds, a sceptred queen. The nodding promontories and blue hills, the cloud-like mountains and lonely valleys of Greece, smiled beneath the genial rays of her disseminating influences. But, alas! how the mighty are fallen! The birth-place of heroes, and the |