all beautifully encrusted with pearls, and jewels, and
diamonds, beneath the resplendent night-heavens. The din of populous
cities had long stunned his brain, and his soul had sickened in the
presence of the money-hunting eyes of selfish men, all madly pursuing
their multifarious machinations in the great mart of commerce. The very
sheeted masts of ships, bearing the flags of foreign countries, in all
their pomp and beauty sailing homeward or outward-bound, had become
hateful to his spirit--for what were they but the floating enginery of
Mammon? Truth, integrity, honour, were all recklessly sacrificed to gain
by the friends he loved and had respected most--sacrificed without shame
and without remorse--repentance being with them a repentance only over
ill-laid schemes of villany--plans for the ruination of widows and
orphans, blasted in the bud of their iniquity. The brother of his bosom
made him a bankrupt--and for a year the jointure of his widow-mother was
unpaid. But she died before the second Christmas--and he was left alone
in the world. Poor indeed he was, but not a beggar. A legacy came to him
from a distant relation--almost the only one of his name--who died
abroad. Small as it was, it was enough to live on--and his enthusiastic
spirit gathering joy from distress, vowed to dedicate itself in some
profound solitude to the love of Nature, and the study of her Great
Laws. He bade an eternal farewell to cities at the dead of midnight,
beside his mother's grave, scarcely distinguishable among the thousand
flat stones, sunk, or sinking into the wide churchyard, along which a
great thoroughfare of life roared like the sea. And now, for the first
time, his sorrow flung from him like a useless garment, he found himself
alone among the Cumbrian mountains, and impelled in strong idolatry
almost to kneel down and worship the divine beauty of the moon, and
"stars that are the poetry of heaven."

Not uninstructed was the wanderer in the lore that links the human heart
to the gracious form and aspects of the Mighty Mother. In early youth he
had been intended for the Church, and subsequent years of ungrateful and
ungenial toils had not extinguished the fine scholarship that native
aptitude for learning had acquired in the humble school of the village
in which he was born. He had been ripe for College when the sudden death
of his father, who had long been at the head of a great mercantile
concern, imposed it upon him, as a sacre