mouth, a poor wounded soldier, who happened to be carried by him at that instant, looked up to it with wistful eyes. The gallant and generous Sidney took the bottle from his mouth, and delivered it to the soldier, saying, "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine."

It is related of Pythagoras, an eminent philosopher of antiquity, that before he would admit any one as a pupil into his school, he was accustomed to inquire who were his associates:-justly concluding that those who could keep bad company would not be much profited by his instructions. "REVERENCE THYSELF"- -was one of the noblest precepts of the excellent Pythagoras. The first and leading disposition to engage us on the side of virtue is, to preserve above all things a constant reverence towards our own mind, and to dread nothing so much as to offend against its native dignity. The maxim which Periander of Corinth, one of the seven sages of Greece, left as a memorial of his knowledge and benevolence, was, "Be master of your anger." He considered anger as the great disturber of human life, the chief enemy both of public happiness and private tranquillity, and thought he could not lay on posterity a stronger obligation to revere his memory, than by leaving them a salutary caution against this outrageous passion.

When any of his courtiers attempted to inflame Antoninus Pius with a passion of military glory, he would answer, that he more desired the preservation of one subject than the destruction of a thousand enemies. When we contemplate the character of Cato, his greatness of soul, his superiority to pleasure, to toil, and to danger, his ardent zeal for the liberty of his country; when we see him standing unmoved in misfortunes, the last pillar of the liberty of Rome, and falling nobly in his country's ruin, who would not wish to be Cato, rather than Cæsar in all his triumph?

Sir Isaac Newton, the wonder of his own age and of posterity for sagacity and research, modestly observed, just before his death,-“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." It was a common observation of Lavater, that next to the worship of the Supreme Being, the great rule of life is,-to respect time. Time is the most precious of human treasures, and any waste of it must, therefore, be highly sinful. The story of Melancthon affords a striking lecture on the value of time. Whenever he made an appointment, he expected not only the hour, but the minute, to be fixed, that the day might not run out in the idleness of ANTHOLOGY.

suspense.

CLXIV. THE CLOUD.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet birds every one,

When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.

I wield the flail of the lashing hail,

And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,

And their great pines groan aghast; And all the night 'tis my pillow white,

While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skyey bowers
Lightning, my pilot, sits;

In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls by °fits;
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,

Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,

Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The spirit he loves remains;

And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,

Leaps on the back of my sailing rack

When the morning star shines dead.

As on the jag of a mountain crag,

Which an earthquake rocks and swings,

An eagle alit, one moment may sit

In the light of its golden wings;

And when sunset may breathe from the lit sea beneath, Its ardors of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fall

From the depth of heaven above,

With wings folded I rest on my airy nest,
As still as a brooding dove.

That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,

Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn ;

And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,

May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer;

And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,

Like a swarm of golden bees,

When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
Till the calm river, lakes, and seas,

Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone,
And the moon's with a girdle of pearl;
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.
From cape to cape with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,

Sunbeam proof, I hang like a roof,

The mountains its columns be.

The triumphal arch through which I march,
With hurricane, fire, and snow,

When the powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-colored bow;

The sphere-fire above, its soft colors wove,

While the moist earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of the earth and water,
And the nursling of the sky;

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.

For after the rain, when, with never a stain,

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams, Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own °cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

I rise and upbuild it again.

P. B. SHELLEY.

CLXV.-NAPOLEON AND THE ALPS.

On the eastern frontiērs of France there surge up from luxuriant meadows and vine-clad fields and hill-sides, the majestic ranges of the Alps, piercing the clouds and soaring with glittering pinnacles, into the region of perpetual ice and snow. Vast spurs of the mountains extend on each side, opening gloomy gorges and frightful defiles, through which foaming torrents rush impetuously, walled in by almost precipitous cliffs, whose summits, crowned with melancholy firs, are inaccessible to the foot of man.

The principal pass over this enormous ridge was that of the Great St. Bernard. The traveler, accompanied by a guide, and mounted on a mule, slowly and painfully ascended a steep and rugged path, now crossing a narrow bridge, °spanning a fathomless abyss, again creeping along the edge of a precipice, where the eagle soared and screamed over the fir-tops in the abyss below, and where a perpendicular wall rose to giddy heights in the clouds above. The path at times was so narrow, that it seemed that the mountain goat could with difficulty find a foothold for its slender hoof. A false step, or a slip upon the icy rocks, would precipitate the traveler a mangled corpse, a thousand feet upon the fragments of granite in the gulf beneath. As higher and higher he climbed these wild and rugged and cloud-enveloped paths, borne by the unerring instinct of the faithful mule, his steps were often arrested by the roar of the avalanche, and he gazed appalled upon its resistless rush, as rocks, and trees, and earth, and snow, and ice, swept by him with awful and resistless desolation, far down into the dimly discerned torrents which rushed beneath his feet.

At God's bidding the avalanche fell. No precaution could save the traveler who was in its path. He was instantly borne to destruction, and buried where no voice but the archangel's trump could ever reach his ear. Terrific storms of wind and snow often swept through those bleak altitudes, blinding and smothering the traveler. Hundreds of bodies, like pillars of ice, embalmed in snow, are now sepulchred in those drifts, there to sleep till the fires of the last conflagration shall have consumed their winding-sheet. Having toiled two days through such scenes of desolation and peril, the adventurous traveler stands upon the summit of the pass, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, two thousand feet higher than the crest of Mount Washington, our own mountain monarch. This summit, over which the path winds, consists of a small level plain, surrounded by mountains of snow of still higher elevation.

The scene here presented is inexpressibly gloomy and appalling. Nature in these wild regions assumes her most severe and sombre

aspect. As one emerges from a precipitous and craggy ascent, upon this Valley of Desolation, as it is emphatically called, the Convent of Saint Bernard presents itself to the view. This cheerless abode, the highest spot of inhabited ground in Europe, has been tenanted, for more than a thousand years, by a succession of joyless and selfdenying monks, who, in that frigid retreat of granite and ice, endeavor to serve their Maker by rescuing bewildered travelers from the destruction with which they are ever threatened to be overwhelmed by the storms which battle against them. In the middle of this icebound valley lies a lake, clear, dark, and cold, whose depths, even in midsummer, reflect the eternal glaciers which soar sublimely around.

The descent to the plains of Italy is even more precipitous and dangerous than the ascent from the green pastures of France. No vegetation adorns these dismal and storm-swept cliffs of granite and of ice. Even the pinion of the eagle fails in its rarified air, and the chamois ventures not to climb its steep and slippery crags. No human beings are ever to be seen on these bleak summits, except the few shivering travelers who tarry for an hour to receive the hospitality of the convent, and the hooded monks, wrapped in thick and coarse garments, with their staves and their dogs, groping through the storms of sleet and snow. Even the wood which burns with frugal faintness on their hearths is borne, in painful burdens, up the mountain sides, upon the shoulders of the monks.

Such was the barrier which Napoleon intended to surmount, that he might fall on the rear of the Austrians who were battering down the walls of Genoa, where Massena was besieged, and who were thundering, flushed with victory, at the very gates of Nice. Over this wild mountain pass, where the mule could with difficulty tread, and where no wheel had ever rolled, or by any possibility could roll, Napoleon contemplated transporting an army of sixty thousand men, with ponderous artillery, and tons of cannon-balls, and baggage, and all the bulky munitions of war. England and Austria laughed the idea to scorn. The achievement of such an enterprise was apparently impossible. Napoleon, however, was as skillful in the arrangement of the minutest details, as in the conception of the grandest combinations...

The appointed hour at last arrived. On the 7th of May, 1800, Napoleon entered his carriage at the Tuileries. At a word, the whole majestic array was in motion. Like a meteor he swept over France. He arrived at the foot of the mountain. The troops and all the °paraphernalia of war were on the spot at the designated hour. Napoleon immediately appointed a very careful inspection. Every foot soldier and every horseman passed before his scrutinizing eye. If a shoe was ragged, or a jacket torn, or a musket injured, the defect was immediately repaired. His glowing words inspired the troops