What throes of central agony heaved up these huge mountains, twisting and folding each into each away as far as the eye can follow! What pangs and convulsions at the heart! What startling from chaotic trance, long before man or his mammoth ancestors, at the creative song of some wandering star-messenger, millions of years upon its way! My heart enlarges here, and recognises an aërial amity with the sky. I am filled with celestial promptings. I shake off all incumbrance of the earth. I stretch out my arms to the blue heaven, and its breath comes into my bosom as a friend. The stir of humanity is dumb beneath me. I leap among the heathy knolls. I sing beside the infant rivers. I shout, and hear answers from the lurking echoes, like the mysterious voices of infinite years. I drink in unused air with “Fair creatures of the element, That in the colours of the rainbow live, And play i’ the plighted clouds.” I stand wrapt in mute visions, growing into the majesty of the mountains. I spurn Decay and Time. I share the enduring strength, and carry lightly the burden of centuries. The mountains swell up around me like a sea with billows. My footfall is inaudible, and I fleet to and fro like the unbodied soul of a great poet that makes the worlds it sees. There are no furrows on this soil: the curse has not fallen here. The sweat of the brow has not dropped here, nor aught save the rain and the dew of heaven. I am still nearer to the angels, and my spirit begins to put forth unaccustomed wings. The ancient gods still linger here, and Antiquity has not yet grown old. The world has not yet heard “the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” nor has Paul yet preached. Here I am a devout Pagan. I am the friend of Plato; I remember the voice of Socrates. I worship the Gods reverently, and have come up hither with sacrifice according to the voice of the oracle. I have drunk with the muses at this fountain. Here, under the hanging ivy from the rock, I behold the real Castaly; and wherever the stream may wander, it will carry music on its way from divinest voices. From this clump I have listened to Apollo teaching the shepherds. Yea, I feel my veins tingling with a more celestial liquor; I own invulnerable limbs, and am myself a God! It was not Mercury, but I, who passed swiftly down yon green declivity with feathered feet, and away over the hill-tops like the shadow of a cloud. Those cattle brousing in the thicket, far down the ravine, I stole from Pieria. I bear the imperial mandates, and the breeze carries the sound of my eloquence through all the forests.