ad, that he is glad to toss them all away, and give up his
soul, if possible, to locusts and lizards, vines and shade.

And far below him fleets the mighty Rhine, rich with the memories of two
thousand stormy years; and on its further bank the grey-walled Coblentz
town, and the long arches of the Moselle-bridge, and the rich flats of
Kaiser Franz, and the long poplar-crested uplands, which look so gay,
and are so stern; for everywhere between the poplar-stems the
saw-toothed outline of the western forts cuts the blue sky.

And far beyond it all sleeps, high in air, the Eifel with its hundred
crater peaks; blue mound behind blue mound, melting into white haze.--
Stangrave has walked upon those hills, and stood upon the crater-lip of
the great Moselkopf, and dreamed beside the Laacher See, beneath the
ancient abbey walls; and his thoughts flit across the Moselle flats
towards his ancient haunts, as he asks himself--How long has that old
Eifel lain in such soft sleep? How long ere it awake again?

It may awake, geologists confess,--why not? and blacken all the skies
with smoke of Tophet, pouring its streams of boiling mud once more to
dam the Rhine, whelming the works of men in flood, and ash, and fire.
Why not? The old earth seems so solid at first sight: but look a little
nearer, and this is the stuff of which she is made!--The wreck of past
earthquakes, the leavings of old floods, the washings of cold cinder
heaps--which are smouldering still below.

Stangrave knew that well enough. He had climbed Vesuvius, Etna,
Popocatepetl. He had felt many an earthquake shock; and knew how far to
trust the everlasting hills. And was old David right, he thought that
day, when he held the earthquake and the volcano as the truest symbols
of the history of human kind, and of the dealings of their Maker with
them? All the magnificent Plutonic imagery of the Hebrew poets, had it
no meaning for men now? Did the Lord still uncover the foundations of
the world, spiritual as well as physical, with the breath of His
displeasure? Was the solfa-tara of Tophet still ordained for tyrants?
And did the Lord still arise out of His place to shake terribly the
earth? Or, had the moral world grown as sleepy as the physical one had
seemed to have done? Would anything awful, unexpected, tragical, ever
burst forth again from the heart of earth, or from the heart of man?

Surprising question! What can ever happen henceforth, save infinite
railroads and