putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies
simmering and hid!

"The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are
being born; men are praying--on the other side of a brick partition, men
are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void Night.

"The proud Grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes
within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers
hunger-stricken into its lair of straw; in obscure cellars,
_Rouge-et-Noir_ languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard, hungry
Villains; while Councillors of State sit plotting and playing their high
chess game, the pawns being Men.

"The Lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready, and she, full of
hope and fear, glides down, to fly with him over the borders; the Thief,
still more silently, sets-to his pick-locks and crowbars, or lurks in wait
till the watchmen first snore in their boxes.

"Gay mansions, with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are full of light and
music and high-swelling hearts; but in the Condemned Cells the pulse of
life beats tremulous and faint, and bloodshot eyes look out through the
darkness, which is around and within, for the light of a stern last
morning. Six men are to be hanged on the morrow; comes no hammering from
the Raven's Rock?--their gallows must even now be a-building.

"Upward of five hundred thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie
around us, in horizontal positions; their heads all in nightcaps, and full
of the foolishest dreams. Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in
his rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with streaming hair, kneels over
her pallid dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now
moisten--all these heaped and huddled together, with nothing but carpentry
and masonry between them--crammed in, like salted fish in their barrel--or
weltering, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each
struggling to get its _head above_ the others; _such_ work goes on under
that smoke-counterpane! But I sit above it all; I am alone with the
Stars."

In Nature's Wilds.

"Mountains were not new to him; but rarely are Mountains seen in such
combined majesty and grace as here. The rocks of that sort called
Primitive by the mineralogists, which always arrange themselves in masses
of a rugged, gigantic character; which ruggedness, however, is here
tempered by a singular airiness of form and softness of environme