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Show 50 LOVE OI•' COUNTRY. sandy plain, fleet as the whirl_wind, carrying ~1is handful of dates for his day's repast, and march~ng twenty miles to the palm-encircled pool, at whtch he i~ to quench his thirst, would not give up the joy of the wilderness for the fattest plains and the most gorgeous cities~ He has known nature, ~nd seen 1he working of nature's God in the desert, and be· yond that, or higher than that, the very excess and perfection of man's working cannot give him pleasure And who are they, whose ancestry in their present localities stretches backward till its fading/ memorials out-measure not only all that has bee1 written, but all that has been erected in brick or in marble, or in the aged granite itself-the primeval father of mountain and of rock~ Are they the inhabitants of fertile plains, spreading wide their productive bosoms to the sun, rich in flocks and herds, thronged with villages, and joyous with cities and palaces 1 I trow not. They are the men of the mountains; and if there is love of country upon earth, you will find it where there is only a mountain pine, a mountain goat, and a mountaineer, as fast rooted and as firm footed on the rock as either. Ask of the mountains of your own country; and Snowdon shall answer to Ben-Nevis, and Wharnside shall respond to gray Cairngorm, '" We have known our people for a thousand years, and each year of the thousand they have loved us the more. Our summits are bleak, but they point to heaven; they I are hoary with eld, but the hope of immortality breathes around them." Glance your eye over Asia, and you shall find, that while conquest and change of race have swept the plains of Euphrates and Ganges like floods, and the level steppes of Siberia like the north wind, Caucasus and Himmalaya have retained their people, and their tuneful cliffs echo the ~arne language as they did in the days of the patnarchs. And who, too, had footing on the Alps before the Swiss, or on the Pyrenees before the MOUNTAINEERS. 51 Basques ; and how long did the expiring sounds of , the Celtic language wail among the Cornish rocks, after the lowlands of England had become Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Nor~ an, by turns, and the mingling of a fivefold rae~ had gtven to the country the most capable populatwn under the sun 1 Turn whithersoever we will, on the surface of the globe, or in the years of its history, the discovery is ever the same. The Phenicians were once great in Northern . Africa, and the Egyptians mighty by Nilus' flood; but where now are the ships of Carthage, the pa1aces of Memphis, or the gates of Thebes; or where are the men hy whom these were erected, or the conquerors by whom they were laid waste 1 The cormorant sits solitary on those heaps by the Euphrates, where the conqueror of Egypt erected his throne ; the Goth and the Hun trod with mockery over the tombs of the Scipios; and the turbaned Arab has erected his tent over the fallen palaces of N umantia; but the cliffs of Atlas have retained their inhabitants, and the same race which dwelt there before Carthage or Rome, or Babylon or Memphis, had existence, dwell there still, and, shielded by the fastnesses of their mountains, the sword will not slay them, neither will the fire burn. Everywhere it is the same. If we turn our observation to the west :the plains of Guiana, and Brazil, and Mexico, and Peru, and Chili, and Paraguay have been rendered up to the grasping hand of conquest ; and, because of the gold and the silver they contain, the thickly- • serried Andes have been held by the skirts; but the red Indian is still in his mountain dwelling ; and in spite of all that fanaticism and avarice, yet more f~ll, have been able to accomplish, in the very pasSIOn and intoxication of their daring (and they have been dreadful in those sunny lands), Chimborazo looks down, from his lofty dwelling among the earthq~akes, on the huts of his primeval inhabitants; and Onzaba yet mingles his smoke with that of fires |
