reality of true devotion. My intention has been to show to what extremes of preposterous folly man may be hurried when he once resigns himself to the vagaries of fancy upon a subject which demands the severest deductions of reason. It is, indeed, a melancholy consideration, that, in a country like our own, which we fondly look upon as the hope of the world, and amid the full-orbed effulgence of the nineteenth century, there should exist a body of men, more than twelve thousand in number, as is estimated, professing belief in a faith so unutterably absurd as that styled Mormonism; a faith which would have disgraced the darkest hour of the darkest era of our race.* But it is not for

me to read the human heart.

Shelbyville, Ill.

*For a year after the above was written, the cause of Mormonism seemed to have received a salutary check. It has since revived, and thousands during the past summer have been flocking to their Mount Zion on the outskirts of Missouri. The late Mor mon difficulties in Missouri have been made too notorious by the public prints of the day to require notice.

XXX.

"The day is lowering; stilly black

Sleeps the grim waste, while heaven's rack,
Dispersed and wild, 'tween earth and sky
Hangs like a shatter'd canopy!"

Fire-worshippers.

"Rent is the fleecy mantle of the sky;

The clouds fly different; and the sudden sun
By fits effulgent gilds the illumined fields,
And black by fits the shadows sweep along."

MERRILY, merrily did the wild night-wind howl, and whistle, and rave around the little low cabin beneath whose humble roof-tree the traveller had lain himself to rest. Now it would roar and rumble down the huge wooden chimney, and anon sigh along the tall grass-tops and through the crannies like the wail of some lost one of the waste. The moonbeams, at intervals darkened by the drifting clouds and again pouring gloriously forth, streamed in long threads of silver through the shattered walls; while the shaggy forest in the back-ground, tossing its heavy branches against the troubled sky, VOL. II.-I

roared forth a deep chorus to the storm. It was a wild night, and so complete was the illusion that, in the fitful lullings of the tempest, one almost imagined himself on the ocean beach, listening to the confused weltering of the surge. There was much of high sublimity in all this; and hours passed away before the traveller, weary as he was, could quiet his mind to slumber. There are seasons when every chord, and nerve, and sinew of the system seems wound up to its severest tension; and a morbid, unnatural excitement broods over the mind, forbidding all approach to quietude. Every one has experienced this under peculiar circumstances; few can describe it.

The night wore tediously away, and at the dawn the traveller was again in the saddle, pushing forth like a "pilgrim-bark" upon the swelling oceanwaste, sweeping even to the broad curve of undulating horizon beyond. There is always something singularly unpleasant in the idea of going out upon one of these vast prairies alone; and such the sense of utter loneliness, that the solitary traveller never fails to cast back a lingering gaze upon the last low tenement he is leaving. The winds were still up, and the rack and clouds were scudding in wild confusion along the darkened sky;

"Here, flying loosely as the mane

Of a young war-horse in the blast;

There, roll'd in masses dark and swelling,
As proud to be the thunder's dwelling!"

From time to time a heavy blast would come ca

reering with resistless fury along the heaving plain, almost tearing the rider from his horse. The celebrated "Grand Prairie," upon which I was now entering, stretched itself away to the south thirty miles, a vast, unbroken meadow; and one may conceive, not describe, the terrible fury of a stormwind sweeping over a surface like this. As the morning advanced, the violence of the tempest lulled into fitful gusts; and, as the centre of the vast amphitheatre was attained, a scene of grandeur and magnificence opened to my eye such as it never before had looked upon. Elevated upon a full roll of the prairie, the glance ranged over a scene of seemingly limitless extent; for upon every side, for the first time in my ramble, the deep blue line of the horizon and the darker hue of the waving verdure blended into one.

The touching, delicate loveliness of the lesser prairies, so resplendent in brilliancy of hue and beauty of outline, I have often dwelt upon with delight. The graceful undulation of slope and swell; the exquisite richness and freshness of the verdure flashing in native magnificence; the gorgeous dies of the matchless and many-coloured flowers dallying with the winds; the beautiful woodland points and promontories shooting forth into the mimic sea; the far-retreating, shadowy coves, going back in long vistas into the green wood; the curved out. line of the dim, distant horizon, caught at intervals through the openings of the forest; and the whole gloriously lighted up by the early radiance of morning, as with rosy footsteps she came dancing

over the dew-gemmed landscape; all these constituted a scene in which beauty unrivalled was the sole ingredient. And then those bright enamelled clumps of living emerald, sleeping upon the wavy surface like the golden Hesperides of classic fiction, or, like another cluster of Fortunate Isles in the dark-blue waters, breathing a fragrance as from oriental bowers; the wild-deer bounding in startled beauty from his bed, and the merry note of the sky. lark, whistling, with speckled vest and dew-wet wing, upon the resin-weed, lent the last touchings to Nature's chef d'œuvre.

Here, indeed, and life, in all

But the scene amid which I was now standing could boast an aspect little like this. were the rare and delicate flowers; its fresh and beautiful forms, was leaping forth in wild and sportive luxuriance at my feet. But all was vast, measureless, Titanic; and the loveliness of the picture was lost in its grandeur. Here was no magnificence of beauty, no gorgeousness of vegetation, no splendour of the wilderness;

"Green isles and circling shores ne'er blended here

In wild reality!"

All was bold and impressive, reposing in the stern, majestic solitude of Nature. On every side the earth heaved and rolled like the swell of troubled waters; now sweeping away in the long heavy wave of ocean, and now rocking and curling like the abrupt, broken bay-billow tumbling around the