To His great works must we ever come with reverential knee, and before them lowly bow; for the grey rocks, and the high mountain summits, and the wide-spreading plains, and the ever-sounding seas, are stamped with the image of Eternity,--a mighty shadow ever hangs over them. The grey and weather-beaten headlands still look over the sea, and the solemn mountains still slumber under their old midnight shadows; but what human ear first heard the murmur of the waves upon the beaten beach, or what human foot first climbed up those high-piled summits, we can never know. What would it benefit us could we discover the date when our island was buried beneath the ocean; when what was dry land in one age became the sea in another; when volcanoes glowed angrily under the dark skies of the early world, and huge extinct monsters bellowed, and roamed, and swam, through the old forests and the ancient rivers which have perhaps ages ago been swept away? What could we find more to interest us were we in possession of the names, the ages, and the numbers, of the first adventurers who were perchance driven by some storm upon our sea-beaten coast, than what is said in the ancient Triad before alluded to? "there were no more men alive, nor anything but bears, wolves, beavers, and the oxen with the high prominence," when Aedd landed upon the shores of England. What few traces we have of the religious rites of the early inhabitants of Great Britain vary but little from such as have been brought to light by modern travellers who have landed in newly-discovered countries in our own age. They worshipped idols, and had no knowledge of the true God, and saving in those lands where the early patriarchs dwelt, the same Egyptian darkness settled over the whole world. The ancient Greeks and Romans considered all nations, excepting themselves, barbarians; nor do the Chinese of the present day look upon us in a more favourable light; while we, acknowledging their antiquity as a nation, scarcely number them amongst such as are civilized. We have yet to learn by what hands the round towers of Ireland were reared, and by what race the few ancient British monuments that still remain were piled together, ere we can enter those mysterious gates which open upon the History of the Past. We find the footprint of man there, but who he was, or whence he came, we know not; he lived and died, and whether or not posterity would ever think of the rude monuments he left behind concerned him not; whether the stones would mark the temple in which he worshipped, or tumble down and cover his grave, concerned not his creed; with his hatchet of stone, and spear-head of flint, he hewed his way from the cradle to the tomb, and under the steep barrow he knew that he should sleep his last sleep, and, with his arms folded upon his breast, he left "the dead past to bury its dead." He lived not for us. CHAPTER II. THE ANCIENT BRITONS.