"Dearest child, what else see you?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Only the bright, green, mossy ground interspersed with tufts of dewy clover-grass, that run into the interstices of the shattered arches, and round the isolated pinnacles of the ruins."

"Like those lawny dells of soft short grass which wind among the high forests and precipices of the Alps of Savoy."

"Indeed, father, your eye has a vision more serene than mine."

"And the great wrecked arches, the shattered masses of precipitous ruin overgrown with the younglings of the forest, and more like chasms rent by earthquakes among the mountains, than the vestige of what was human workmanship." "What are they?"

"Things awe-inspiring and wonderful-are they not caverns such as the untamed elephant and

Shelley on visiting Meillerie, says, "Groves of pine, chesnut, and walnut, overshadow it; magnificent and unbounded forests, to which England affords no parallel. In the midst of these woods are dells of lawny expanse inconceivably verdant, adorned with a thousand of the rarest flowers, and odorous with thyme."

tigress might choose amid the Indian wildernesses where to hide their cubs-such as, were the sea to overflow the earth, the mighty monsters of the. deep would change into their vast chambers ?"

"Father, your words image forth what I would have expressed, but could not."

"I hear the rustling of leaves, and the sound of water—but it does not rain-like the faint drops of a fountain among woods."

"It falls from among the heaps of ruin over our heads. It is, I suppose, the water collected in the rifts from the showers."

"A nursling of man now abandoned by his care, and transformed by the enchantment of Nature into a likeness of her own creations, and destined to partake their immortality. Changed to a mountain cloven into woody dells, which overhang its labyrinthine glades, and shattered into toppling precipices, even the clouds, intercepted by its craggy summits, supply eternal fountains with their rain."

"By the column on which we sit, I should judge that it had once been crowned with a temple or theatre, and that in sacred days the radiant multitude wound up its craggy path to the spectacle or the sacrifice."

"It was such, Helen-What sound of wings is that?"

"It is of the wild pigeons returning to their young. Do you not hear the murmur of those that are brooding in their nests?"

"It is the language of their happiness."

THE AGE OF PERICLES:

WITH CRITICAL NOTICES OF THE SCULPTURE IN THE FLORENCE GALLERY.

THE period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle, is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself, or with reference to the effects which it produced upon the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in the history of the world. What was the combination of moral and political circumstances which produced so unparalleled a progress during that period in literature and the arts;why that progress, so rapid and so sustained, so soon received a check, and became retrograde,-are problems left to the wonder and conjecture of

posterity.

The wrecks and fragments of those subtle and profound minds, like the ruins of a fine statue, obscurely suggest to us the grandeur and perfection of the whole. Their very language,—a type of the understanding, of which it was the creation and the image,-in variety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness, excels every other language of the western world. Their sculptures are such as, in our perception, assume to be the models of ideal truth and beauty, and to which, no artist of modern times can produce forms in any degree comparable. Their paintings, according to Pausanias, were full of delicacy and harmony; and some were powerfully pathetic, so as to awaken, like tender music or tragic poetry, the most overwhelming emotions. We are accustomed to consider the painters of the sixteenth century, as those who have brought this art to the highest perfection, probably because none of the ancient pictures have been preserved.

All the inventive arts maintain, as it were, a sympathetic connexion between each other, being no more than various expressions of one internal power, modified by different circumstances, either of an individual, or of society.

The paintings of that period would probably bear the same relation as is confessedly borne by the sculptures to all successive ones. Of their music we know little; but the effects which it is said to have produced, whether they be attributed to the skill of the composer, or the sensibility of his audience, were far more powerful than any which we experience from the music of our times; and if, indeed, the melody of their compositions were more tender, and delicate, and inspiring, than the melodies of some modern European nations, their progress in this art must have been something wonderful, and wholly beyond conception. Their poetry seems to maintain a high, though not so disproportionate a rank, in comparison. Perhaps Shakspeare, from the variety and comprehensionof his genius, is to be considered as the greatest individual mind, of which we have specimens remaining;-perhaps Dante created imaginations of greater loveliness and beauty than any that are to be found in the ancient literature of Greece;-perhaps nothing has been discovered in the fragments of the Greek lyric poets equivalent to the sublime and chivalrous sensibility of Petrarch :—but, as a poet, Homer must be acknowledged to excel Shak