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SEPTEMBER. 



planet were no small advantage ; the beauty which 

 they spread out to our vision in their woods and 

 waters, their crags and slopes, their clouds and 

 atmospheric hues, were a splendid gift ; the sub- 

 limity which they pour into our deepest souls from 

 their majestic aspects ; the poetry which breathes 

 from their streams, and dells, and airy heights, from 

 the sweet abodes, the garbs and manners of their 

 inhabitants, the songs and legends which have 

 awoke in them, were a proud heritage to imagina- 

 tive minds ; but what are all these when the thought 

 comes, that without mountains the spirit of man 

 must have bowed to the brutal and the base, and 

 probably have sunk to the monotonous level of the 

 unvaried plain ? 



When I turn my eyes upon the map of the world, 

 and behold how wonderfully the countries where 

 our faith was nurtured, where our liberties were 

 generated, where our philosophy and literature, the 

 fountains of our intellectual grace and beauty, 

 sprang up, were as distinctly walled out by God's 

 hand with mountain ramparts from the irruptions 

 and interruptions of barbarism, as if at the especial 

 prayer of the early fathers of man's destinies, I am 

 lost in an exulting admiration. Look at the bold 

 barriers of Palestine ! see how the infant liberties 

 of Greece were sheltered from the vast tribes of 

 the uncivilized North by the heights of Haemus and 

 Rhodope ! behold how the Alps describe their 

 magnificent crescent, inclining their opposite extre- 

 mities to the Adriatic and Tyrrhene Seas, locking 



