azed
over those stupendous masses with wonder, almost with longing desire;
never till this hour had he known Nature, that she was One, that she was
his Mother and divine.

"And as the ruddy glow was fading into clearness in the sky, and the Sun
had now departed, a murmur of Eternity and Immensity, of Death and of
Life, stole through his soul; and he felt as if Death and Life were one,
as if the Earth were not dead, as if the Spirit of the Earth had its
throne in that splendor, and his own spirit were therewith holding
communion.

"The spell was broken by a sound of carriage-wheels. Emerging from the
hidden Northward, to sink soon into the hidden Southward, came a gay
Barouche-and-four; it was open; servants and postilions wore
wedding-favors; that happy pair, then, had found each other, it was their
marriage evening! Few moments brought them near; _Du Himmel!_ It was Herr
Towgood and--Blumine!

"With slight unrecognizing salutation they passed me; plunged down amid
the neighboring thickets, onward, to Heaven, and to England; and I, in my
friend Richter's words, _I remained alone, behind them, with the Night_!"

THE ACTUAL HEIGHT OF SEA WAVES.

Average in Different Oceans--Fifty-Two Feet the Height of the Tallest
Billow Yet Measured--Not More Than Thirty Feet in North Atlantic.

Waves are the agents of tremendous force, as the batterings received by
the big ocean liners in the winter storms tend to prove. But in spite of
the stories told by timid or imaginative passengers on the Europe-America
ferry, the surges of the North Atlantic are not the highest waves nor the
most forcible. The most tremendous of seas are those that form south of
the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, where the oceanic belt is unbroken by
land.

How high those southern waves rise has not been accurately measured, so
far as can be discovered; but probably they are not very much higher than
the waves farther north. Says the New York _Sun_:

Sailors in modern times have never seen such waves as those
which the early navigators declared attained heights of one
hundred to one hundred and thirty feet. La Perouse asserted
that he saw waves towering in the Pacific to a height of
nearly two hundred feet. In these more scientific days we
may say that the highest wave yet measured had an altitude
of about fifty-two feet.

This was in the southern ocean, a little north of the
Antarctic regions; and it is