whole island into a desert, had we not discovered our error in time, and endeavoured, as far as possible, to repair the mischief already done, by making fresh plantations on the mountains, which, as they grew, effected their purpose as before.

so from the western desert, the Bedawins came down every year to buy corn in Egypt, or rather, perhaps, to barter their dates, antelope skins, charcoal, precious stones, and odoriferous gums and spices, for that great staple of human subsistence. Alexander followed the traces of these caravans, In the Oases, the ignorance of modern times, acwhich, having been marked out by the nature companied by more than corresponding idleness, of the ground, continue to be the very same to has effected a still more deplorable metamorphosis. the present hour. We may imagine the Mace- || The ancients knew no other way of expressing the donians, therefore, drinking at the well of Emrum extreme beauty and fertility of these spots, than by and Jemäima, passing through the gates of the comparing them to the Amenti of the EgypMilky Mountains, traversing the wild and terrific tians, those happy and fortunate islands, blessed pass of the Crow, lingering awhile at the little with everlasting sunshine, in which the souls of the oasis of Garah, and ultimately arriving at that virtuous, when emancipated from their tabernacles paxaga vnces, or island of the blessed, which the of clay, enjoy eternal felicity. The oldest of the god Ammon had selected as the seat of his greatest epic poets of Greece speaks in the following terms oracle. of these fabulous isles :

:

"Stern winter smiles on that auspicious clime, The fields are florid with unfading prime; From the bleak pole no winds inclement blow, Mould the round hail, or flake the fleecy snow; But from the breezy deep the blest inhale The fragrant murmurs of the western gale." The Boeotian bard, also, who possessed an imagination of singular vigour and fertility, speaks of these happy abodes with equal enthusiasm :

"But in the happy fields of light,

Where Phoebus, with an equal ray,
Illuminates the balmy night,

And gilds the cloudless day,
In peaceful, unmolested joy,

The good their smiling hours employ.
There no uneasy wants restrain,

To vex th' ungrateful soil,

To tempt the dangers of the billowy main,
And waste their strength with unabating toil,

A frail, disastrous being to maintain;

But in their joyous, calm abodes,

The recompense of justice they receive,
And in the fellowship of gods,

Without a tear, eternal ages live;

While, banished by the Fates from joy and rest,
Intolerable woes the impious soul infest.
But they who, in true virtue strong,

The future editors of Arrian and Quintus Curtius, Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus, will find many of their perplexities removed by the assistance of Mr. Bayle St. John's little volume, which is learned without pedantry, and breathes a healthful air of enthusiasm without the slightest affectation of it. Many persons who still continue to read ancient authors, consider it necessary to defend themselves against the charge of pedantry, by yielding but a mitigated belief to anything they read; as the common failing once was to adopt, without doubt or reasoning, whatever antiquity had left us, so it is at present the fashion to look down upon the writers of those times as little better than barbarians. But judgment is shown, not by indiscriminately rejecting everything, but by knowing when to believe, and when to call in question. For example, the ancients tell us that certain regions with which they were familiar exhibited in their day signs of immense fertility, whereas they have now for ages been smitten with the curse of barrenness. What, in this case, are we to do? Shall we, with many critics, altogether set aside the testimony of the old historians, and maintain that such as the world is now it has always been? Or shall we investigate, and endeavour to discover whether there may not have been causes in operation which would sufficiently account for the changes that have taken place? Greece, before it was disforested, possessed many large rivers, and innumerable small streams and brooks. The former have now dwindled into rivulets, while the latter have ceased to exist. The explanation is easy. The sources of rivers are not in the earth, but in the heavens; and forests are the channels through which Jove pours his moisture into the bosom of the earth. As these in Greece have been swept away, the clouds now pass over the mountains without resting there, and exhaust their treasures in the unproductive sea. This truth was well un-quity, whose subject would permit them to digress to derstood in antiquity, and has been strikingly ex- the μanagwv vno, delighted to indulge their fancies emplified in our own day by what has occurred in with pictures of these verdant paradises. There the Mauritius. When we took that island from rose the fane of Ammon-there welled forth in the French, we found the summit of nearly all the sparkling brilliancy the Fountain of the Sun-there hills and mountains clothed with woods, which, the palm groves yielded an inexhaustible supply of with more enterprise than wisdom, we forthwith white, yellow, and blue dates. There was tasted in proceeded to cut down. The immediate conse- perfection the fruit of the lotus tree-not that symquence was, the shrinking or drying up of the bolical lotus which maddened the senses in the streams; and we should soon have converted the || Nilotic valley-but the real fruit of the earth, in

The third purgation can endure,

And keep their minds from fraudful wrong
And guilt's contagion pure-
They through the starry paths of Jove
To Saturn's blissful seat remove,
Where fragrant breezes, vernal airs,

Sweet children of the main,

Purge the blest island from corroding cares,

And fan the bosom of each verdant plain;
Whose fertile soil immortal fruitage bears;
Trees, from whose flaming branches flow,
Arrayed in golden bloom, refulgent beams;
And flowers of golden hue that blow
On the fresh borders of their parent streams:
These, by the blest in solemn triumph worn,
Their unpolluted heads and clustering locks adorn."

All the other poets, and some prose writers of anti

taste like a mangustene, and in colour like gold || driven past, laden with dried "aghoul;" files of capainted with streaks of red. Side by side with these grew also the banana's most luscious fruit, and the cooling water-melon, and the refreshing pomegranate with its crimson seeds, with a thousand smaller luxuries, not the least of which are fragrant flowers, the most etherial of all earth's children. When Mr. Bayle St. John stood on the summit of the Mount of Tombs, after having visited the ruins of Ammon's Temple, and cooled his lips at the Fountain of the Sun, he discovered on all sides enough to justify the most glowing descriptions of antiquity. In the story of the phantom camel, the gardens of Irem are compared to an emerald set in a golden ring. The Oasis of Siwah or Jupiter Ammon might easily be made to rival the paradise of Sultan Shedad.

mels move along in the distance on the borders of the desert. From some points the castellated capital is descried down a long vista; or the village of Gharmy rises aloft on its inaccessible rock; or the majestic fragment of the sanctuary of Ammon, which has so bravely stood the brunt of ages, may be seen still standing erect in the midst of its silent glade.

Gardens more luxuriant than those of Rosetta, large palm groves, thickets of banana, pomegranate, olives, and fig-trees; fields of bright green Egyptian clover, intersected in all directions by pebbly streams and fringed brooks, and encompassed by the desert, and ranges of salt-lakes with margins as white as snow-these are some of the features which impart beauty to the Oasis. But there are others. The desert itself is replete with savage beauty. Rolling its wild waves towards this small valley, as if to engulph it in torrents of sand, the power of nature stops it at a given spot, while the salt-lakes interpose between the ever-restless ocean and the sweet

In

The reader of imagination will easily be able to represent the Macedonian conqueror and his followers proceeding between these garden walls, beneath the shade of pomegranates, fig-trees, and bananas, to learn the response of the oracle. those days the Ammonians were not unaccustomed to magnificence. Princes and ambassadors from all parts of the Pagan world, thronged thither to consult the Jupiter of the Nile; and, therefore, when Alexander, with the hereditary pomp of his nation, and more than its hereditary pride, proceeded towards Om-beydah, he displayed perhaps scarcely a shade of grandeur beyond what the natives of the Oasis had witnessed before.

When he arrived at the temple, and entered within the Temenos, or sacred enclosure, the chief priest, advancing, addressed him in the name of Ammon, as the son of that god; to which Alexander replied, that he accepted the title and acknowledged it. The first question he put-for, in regard to his being the son of Ammon, the priests had anticipated his wishes -was, whether he should be able to achieve the conquest of the whole earth? to which the ready reply was, that his father had destined him to become universal lord of mankind. Then, forgetting his divine parentage, and obeying the natural impulse of the affections, he demanded whether all the persons concerned in his father's murder had been punished?

green isle which it encompasses. The spaces covered with dazzling salt are compared by our traveller himself to glaciers just beginning to melt; and when he descends from his lofty point of view, and comes to speak of the beauties of the country in detail, he dilates with much pleasure on the many agreeable walks he took during his stay. There is generally a garden wall or a fence on either hand of the lanes, with pomegranate trees bursting over it in redundant luxuriance, and hanging their rich, tempting purple fruit within reach of the hand, or the deep green fig-tree, or the apricot, or the huge He then went on to say that Alexander ragged leaf of the banana, or the olive, or the vine. should prove invincible till raised in due time to his The spaces between them are not left idle, being place among the gods. His followers then came carpeted with a copious growth of bursim and lu- forward and put no other question than this, whecerne, that loads the air with its fragrance, and is|ther it were lawful for them to pay divine honour often chequered with spots of a green light that to their victorious king? To which the priest, with steals in through the branchy canopy above. Some-ready flattery, replied that Ammon willingly contimes a tiny brook shoots its fleet waters along by sented they should adore his son. the way-side, or lapses slowly with eddying surface, nestling gently between grassy banks, or babbling over a pebbly bed. Here and there a wide bridge of palm-trunks is thrown across, but the glassy current frequently glides at will athwart the road. At one place there is a meadow, at another a copse; but on all sides the date-trees fling up their colum-ferent; oracles were not then organised impostures, nar forms, and wave aloft their leafy capitals. Occasionally a huge blue crane sails by on flagging wing to alight on the margin of some neighbouring pool; the hawk or the falcon soars or wheels far up in the air; the dove sinks fluttering on the bough; the quail starts up with its short, strong, whirring flight; and sparrows, with numerous other small predatory birds, go sweeping across the fields. Sometimes you may observe the hard-working black turning up huge clods with his mattock; asses are

To this the priest replied, that it was not in the power of mortal man to injure his father, but that the individuals engaged in the assassination of Philip had already paid the penalty of their crime.

The history of this transaction shows that, although mankind still consulted oracles, they put but very little faith in them; for it could not but be evident to all observing men present, that the whole affair was a theatrical exhibition got up to impose upon the vulgar. In the earlier ages it was dif

though they were, of course, always based on the unfounded supposition that heaven, when consulted in a particular manner, deigned to give audible responses to the inquiries of man. Whoever is acquainted with the natives of the East, must be aware how prone they still are to superstition, and how easy it is to excite their enthusiasm and impose upon their credulity. They believe, and never affect to deny, that the world is filled with several orders of spirits, whose business or whose pleasure it is to

hold intercourse with man, to guide his present || and the blandishments of women, he often forgot the thought of empire, and descended to the level of his meanest courtier; gradually yielding more and more to the suggestions of his senses, a poison put a period to his life, and sent him still victorious to the stars. Literally, therefore, was the declaration of the Oracle fulfilled. He met with no serious reverses during his whole life, as he went on adding kingdom after kingdom to his empire, while he was every day losing more and more his command over himself.

actions, and to reveal to him the colour of the future. If there be less of this feeling in the West, you must not thence conclude that it is, or ever can be, extinct. Indeed, travellers even from England often exhibit in the valley of the Nile a stretch of credulity, which would-do no discredit to the most illiterate Arab. If, then, we carry our minds back to the infancy of civilization, when the whole philosophy of nature was a still greater mystery than it is now, it would not be difficult to conceive how men could persuade themselves into the belief that they were holding intercourse with heaven. Even at the present day the wanderer from Europe feels, as he breathes the air of the desert, that it is pervaded by the influence of superstition. He listens at night with a sort of breathless eagerness, as if he expected the voice of nature to become audible, because there are influences at work around him which induce him to personify her, to clothe her with intellectual attributes, and to imagine that she sympathises visibly with man.

It was in the footsteps of this man, Mr. Bayle St. John went to, and returned from, the Oasis of Siwah, which few Europeans have visited since the Oracle ceased to utter responses. It is now inhabited by a fierce race of Berbers, imbued with all the prejudices of El-Islam, but still capable of being subdued by long continued acts of forbearance and courtesy. During the stay of Mr. St. John and his companions, however, they displayed the most inhospitable disposition; though, towards the end, they exhibited some tokens of a desire to make amends for their ill-behaviour. A few weeks more would probably have opened for the travellers the way into the City of Salt; but they were weary of ill-usage, of being shot at in their tent at night, of being refused provisions, and incessantly threatened with starvation. We cannot wonder, therefore, that when, at the eleventh hour, the Sheikh of the Oasis entreated them to prolong their stay, and even to return when they had actually started, they should have persisted in quitting so disagreeable a race, with whose caprice and insolence nothing but the moderation and curiosity of travellers could have induced them to put up so long. The reader, we think, will derive much pleasure and instruction from Mr. Bayle St. John's volume, which describes a portion of the desert which has very rarely been visited. We ourselves have beheld it far southward, within the tropics, where the atmosphere is never moistened by a single shower, where no cloud is ever visible, and where the sun rises and sets in unmitigated splendour from one year's end to another. This grand monotony is not beheld in Marmarica. There the travellers sometimes walk beneath a canopy of rosy clouds, which cover the whole arch of the horizon for a few minutes before the sun goes Alexander, though a man of genius, and an astute down. This also is beautiful, though we prefer the statesman, was still too little the master of his own imperturbable serenity which broods over the intepassions to keep up the imposture. Constantly al-rior wastes, and renders them so delicious to the imalured and subdued by pleasure, by wine, feasting, ginative traveller.

Still, from the tenor of Alexander's questions, and the replies made to them, it is impossible to doubt that the whole was a political stratagem, put in play by the conqueror, in conjunction with the priests of the Nile, for the purpose of operating upon public opinion. The vulgar easily seize upon rumour, and convert it into truth. Accepting it with doubt and misgiving at first, they soon familiarised it to their minds, and found themselves interested in maintaining what they received without examination. The saying of the oracle was soon spread through all lands; and it cannot be doubted that it reached the valley of the Nile before the return of the son of Ammon himself. destined to become the king of the whole earth. || Ammon had declared so much; and, therefore, though the King of Persia might still choose to fight for his crown, the idea insinuated itself into his army, and unbraced the sinews of those most devoted to his service. It was a precisely similar idea that sat on the edge of Mohammed's sword, and gave him perpetual victory. He was the prophet, commissioned to instruct the nations, and, at the same time, to|| subdue them. It was therefore, in some respects, impious to contend against him.

He was

SHAKSPERE-LAND.

"I KNOW a bank where the wild thyme blows,"
By the broad river, bending o'er whose brim
The blossoms woo their shadows, as it flows
Through the flat mead-lands with a solemn hymn.
And there the heaven-turned willow branches weave
A gauze-hung temple by the stream; all o'er
The grassy slope young Spring is wont to leave
Prints of her footsteps bloom-ray'd on its floor,
Of "ox-lips," "nodding violets," by "woodbine"
"O'er-canopied;" there Fancy oft will see,
"Lulled in these flowers," the Poet's form recline,
Or wandering in thought, and "fancy-free."

There have I heard the distance-mellowed chime
Peal on the summer breeze, down Avon's wave,
From the old fane, the beacon-star sublime

Of world-wide pilgrims to the Poet's grave.
Oh! that is Shakspere-land-for, think ye not
His feet have wandered from his homestead there ?
The very hope gives glory to the spot,

Each form imbuing with a hue more fair.
But not alone is this haunt Shakspere-land;
Yet from this bank song's halo ne'er departs;
Its home is on each shore, each wave-kiss'd strand—
Still, its abiding-place is in our hearts.

FREDERICK ENOCH.

HUDDERSFIELD-ITS PHYSICAL, SOCIAL, MANUFACTURING, COMMERCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTERISTICS.

BY JANUARY SEARLE.

In the debtor and creditor account which I keep of the pains and pleasures of life, I esteem it no small item of the balance sheet in my favour, that I live in a hilly and beautiful country, where I can walk at my leisure, and enjoy, in Nature's own picture gallery, the sight of innumerable, rich, and varied landscapes. I am so sensible of this privilege, and of the high influence which beautiful scenery exercises over the mind, that I would sacrifice many private comforts rather than forego this public and bountiful enjoyment. I have always, indeed, been well enough content with small household means, when I have had free access to the golden largess of Nature. It has even happened to me, more than once in my life, to keep the wolf upon my hearthstone; or, in other words, to sit down hob and nob with Poverty, beating time with my knuckles to the wild overtures of famine which this unwelcome guest has whistled at my empty board; but I no sooner stepped forth into the free and generous air, amid the pomp and magnificence of Nature, than I forgot my companion and my misery alike, and felt that I was a born king of these realms. No doubt this was a poetical and pleasant way of cheating the appetite for bread, which, somehow or other, is natural to me; and I certainly got some valuable lessons out of the process and the remedy, so that I can now look back upon those Barnecidal times with more pleasurable than painful feelings.

not quarrel with them about their title-deeds, however; although I fancy that the right of appropriation, secured to every deserving person by the charter of life, is of an older and more ancient date than any sheet of parchment can boast of. I am, nevertheless, content to enjoy the goods and estates of men, without having a legal possession of them; and am grateful, moreover, for the faculty of enjoying. I persuade myself of the justice of Providence, in the apparently unequal distribution of the chattels and commodities of life, by this very consideration-that those who have not, can appreciate the things of those who have; and so secure them, in the highest sense of the term, as the spiritual appurtenances of their own nature. The great and lofty moments of existence, when the spirit is abandoned to those holy and unseen influences which haunt the woods and dells, the meadows, moors, and mountains of our native land, are not in any way either enhanced or deteriorated by the fact that a man owns, or does not own, the landscape as a heritage. Beauty lives for him who has the eyes to see and admire her; but she has the heart of a saint, and will be worshipped for herself alone. The dukes who own the forest of Sherwood are more remarkable for the pride they take in the forester's account of the trees that are ready for the axe, than for their acknowledgment of the splendour of that beautiful domain. I have the vanity to think myself richer even than It has been my good fortune throughout life, with these noble proprietors, inasmuch as Beauty herself but one or two exceptions, to reside in neighbourhoods has given me the key which unlocks all their possesof more than ordinary loveliness and grandeur. In my sions, and has shown me the sunny spots and tiny young days, whilst yet in my teens, I found myself glades where her profusest wealth is scattered. It is one fine morning in July upon the top of a mountain a privilege reserved for good and cultivated persons, in the other hemisphere, looking out of the window of that they shall have Nature for their friend, however my schoolhouse, upon the broad and sunny bosom of hardly they may be dealt with by the world; and I the Hudson, over which many beautiful craft were should rejoice to see that more men were worthy to gracefully sailing. The river was dotted with little claim it. I owe so much to this befriending, that I do islands of luxuriant verdure, which were occupied by not know very well how to speak for it. Nature has Dutch fishermen, whose wooden shanties were suffi- been my teacher more than books; and although I ciently aquatic and picturesque. Beyond the river have the profoundest reverence for these silent friends, swept the bold outline of the green and wooded hills, I should love them less, if Nature had not taught me with flocks of sheep grazing upon them; whilst here to love her more. Every walk a man takes, if he be and there the handsome house of some rich old settler in an open and receptive mood, is as good as a course peeped through the openings of the trees, in the neigh- of lectures in any modern university, and goes far bourhood of a mighty cataract. The sunny days and more toward his spiritual fashioning and culture. The starry nights of this gorgeous climate amply compen- forest of Sherwood has been a kind of alma mater to sated, in the discipline and culture they afforded me, me: a paradise, also, as well as a school. I have spofor the losses of English civilization. I became ac-ken so often of this forest, and in such unwonted enquainted with new and strange sights and sounds, new thusiasm for these literary times, that some of my plants and animals, new men and manners, and with a closest friends have thought me a little cracked in the large, wild, and romantic life, which both charmed and matter, until they visited themselves the scenes I had instructed me. At a much later period I dwelt on the celebrated. I lived within a few miles of it for nearly borders of Sherwood Forest, still following my early three years, and earned the right of speaking in its avocation of teaching, and rejoicing in the fine wood-praise, by making myself acquainted, far and wide, land property which I had stolen, without any com- with its rich and varied beauty.

punctions of conscience, from the Dukes of Portland The poets tell us many strange stories about the and Newcastle, and their noble peers, the Lords Man-footfall of angels, and how they caught their inspiravers and Scarborough, who, before my felony, and even tions in the woods; and the Platonists talk to us now, I believe, claim Sherwood as their own. I will about the divine afflatus, the rushing of fiery wings