PANTHEISTIC NOTIONS. 239 



surely preferable to the cold and bloodless anti-creed that professes 

 to have searched the universe for a God, but failed to find Him. 

 For our own part, we have dwelt so long among the mountains, 

 and within sight and sound of the sea, that we have learned to 

 love them with a strange, undefinable affection, such as one bestows 

 only on what is at once weird and mysterious, as well as intelligent 

 and potent, and, upon the whole, beneficent and friendly. So 

 impressed are we with this feeling at times, that we fear that, how- 

 ever weighty the advantages otherwise, a city life for us would now 

 be irksome and unenjoyable, and anything like a lengthened sojourn 

 in a mountainless land, far from the sight of ocean waves, well- 

 nigh unendurable. There is some meaning, however wild and 

 improbable it may seem at first sight, in the theory that accounts 

 for the Egyptian pyramids as erected by a nomade people, who 

 finally settled along the valley of the Nile, in remembrance of the 

 mountains of their native land, and to serve instead of these 

 mountains in making the astronomical observations for which the 

 ancient Assyrians and Chaldeans were so famous. Be these things 

 as they may, we dearly love the mountains by which our humble 

 home is surrounded, whether basking in jubilant sunshine or 

 wrapt in sorrowing cloud, whether robed in midsummer green, in 

 autumnal purple, in brown and gold, or snow-covered and ice-bound 

 to their base ; what time the day is shortest, and the sun, almost 

 shorn of his beams, shines but faint and far down at its farthest 

 point of southern declination. It is recorded of Queen Mary, of 

 sanguinary, or rather igneous memory, that so affected was she by 

 the loss of Calais, that had been in the possession of England since 

 the victory at Cressy under the gallant Edward III., upwards of 

 two hundred years previously, that she declared in her last moments 

 thatt, if her body was opened after death, the name of the lost city 

 would be found written upon her heart; probably the nearest 

 approach to anything like poetry to be found in any word or act of 



