ater, perhaps during three months in each
year, the stream had caused this mass to revolve on its own axis,
until it has worn itself of a round figure, and worn also the rock
into a cup, now about six feet deep. Still, it revolves when the water
reaches it--nature still plays at this cup-and-ball--the ball weighing
five tons. Talk of this sort brought us to the railway. In due time I
reached home; and I do not remember to have ever been more interested
than by the day spent at Lowell.

THE SEA AND THE POETS.

Of three poets, each the most original in his language, and each
peculiarly susceptible of impressions from external nature--Horace,
Shakspeare, and Burns--not one seems to have appreciated the beauty,
the majestic sublimity, the placid loveliness, alternating with the
terrific grandeur, of the 'many-sounding sea.' Judging from their
incidental allusions to it, and the use they make of it in metaphor
and imagery, it would seem to have presented itself to their
imaginations only as a fierce, unruly, untamable, and unsightly
monster, to be loathed and avoided--a blot on the fair face of
creation--a necessary evil, perhaps; but still an evil, and most
certainly suggestive of no ideas poetic in their character.

It is marvellous, for there is not one of these poets who does not
discover a lively sense of the varied charms of universal nature, and
has not painted them in glowing colours with the pencil of a master.
Who has not noted with what evident love, with what a
nicely-discriminative knowledge Shakspeare has pictured our English
flowers, our woodland glades, the forest scenery of Old England,
before the desolating axe had prostrated the pride of English woods?
How vividly has not Burns translated into vigorous verse each feature
of his native landscape, till

---- 'Auld Coila's plains and fells,
Her muirs, red-brown wi' heather-bells,
Her banks and braes, her dens and dells,'

live again in the magic of his song. And Horace--with what charming
playfulness, with what exquisite grace, has he not figured the
olive-groves of Tibur, the pendent vines ruddy with the luscious
grape, the silver streams, the sparkling fountains and purple skies of
fruitful Campania! Looking on nature with a poet's eye, as did these
poets, one and all of them, is it not a psychological mystery that
none of them should have detected the ineffable beauty of a
sea-prospect?

First, as to Horace. When climbing th