bilities, few of which would he admitted at Birmingham." Of Naples he says: "How it is possible for English men and women to pass months in such a place, and 'bless their stars and call it luxury,' even if the satiated mosquitoes give them leave to sleep, is a mystery which has doubtless a solution—which I sought in vain." As he lingers, at evening, in St. Peter's at Rome, he sees three priests kiss the foot of the statue of Jupiter-Cephas, and kneel down before it, as if to pray; but next, "to our surprise, notwithstanding our experience of continental habits, each began zealously spitting on the beautiful pavement, as if it was a portion of his duty—I fear illustrating the habits which a priesthood, possessed of unlimited power, encourages by its example." This is not the Judge's only paper pellet at Romanism in the present itinerary.
To these illustrations of his mild indulgence in sarcasm and rebuke, let us add one more, referring to the hotel-book at the Montanvert, in which travellers inscribe their names, and some "perpetuate their folly for a few autumns. Among these fugitive memorials, was one ambitious scrawl of a popular and eloquent divine, whereby, in letters almost an inch long, and in words which I cannot precisely remember, he recorded his sense of the triumphant refutation given to Atheism by the Mer de Glace, intimating his conviction, that, wherever else doubts of the being of Deity might be cherished, they must yield to the grandeur of the spot; and attesting the logic by his name in equally magnificent characters." The
Rambler appends his opinion that this poetical theist had wholly misapprehended the Great First Cause, and supposes him to imagine, that in proportion as the marks of order and design are withdrawn, the vestiges of Deity become manifest;—"as if the smallest insect that the microscope ever expanded for human wonder did not exhibit more conclusive indications of the active wisdom and goodness of a God than a magnificent chaos of elemental confusion." It is not for us to assume what the popular and eloquent divine may actually have meant; but at least we can suppose the Rambler to have misapprehended him, especially as he is oblivious of the wording of the entry: may not the pulpit poet have drawn his impression of a present God from the feelings, not the thoughts, inspired by the sublimities around him—from the sentiments of awe, the mysterious emotions of adoring wonder, the yearnings of religious worship, excited by such a scene, and by no means from a cold adjustment of logical mechanics, worked out by harmonious junction of Paley, Whately, and pocket microscope? Coleridge was not thinking of logic when he wrote (or translated, or adapted,—what you will) his Hymn before Sunrise, in the vale of Chamouni; and we can suppose the small poet (saving his Reverence) who wrote such a big hand, and whose theism seemed to his censor so out-of-place (of all places in the world) at the Montanvert, to have really meant very much the same as S. T. C. when he exclaimed,
Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain—********Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!
Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? …..
God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!
