Early in the year 1804, Heber sustained one of the heaviest calamities which men can experience on this side of the grave--the loss of a father; which he bore with that deep but meek sorrow which a youth full of religious hope and untiring resignation to the will of Providence might be naturally expected to feel. In the autumn of the same year he was elected a fellow of All Souls; shortly after which his academical career terminated, and he exchanged the mimic world of the university for that far more arduous scene where many an academical star has grown dim, though Heber, with the happy fortune which usually attends the virtuous, continued even in the great theatre of the world to command the approval and admiration of mankind. About the middle of the year 1805, he accompanied his early friend, Mr. John Thornton, whose virtues would appear to have been akin to his own, on a tour through the north of Europe. They proceeded by sea to Gottenburg in Sweden, where they experienced the effect of that strangeness and novelty, which is felt once by all persons who travel in a foreign country, but which can never, by any possibility, visit the mind a second time. Here they purchased a carriage, and proceeded through the wildest and most sublime scenery, interspersed with meadows and corn-fields, on a tour among the mountains of Norway. At intervals, dispersed over craggy, desolate heaths, immense numbers of cairns and Runic columns were discovered,--which, with pine forests of sombre hue, large bays of the sea nearly land-locked, and appearing like so many lakes; cascades, rocks, cloud-capped mountains,--produced a series of impressions upon the mind, characterized by so high a degree of solemn grandeur, that even the vast solitudes of the Brenner Alps or Wetterhorn could scarcely inspire a deeper sense of sublimity. Amid those wild landscapes the natives amused themselves with wolf-hunting on sledges, during the winter; but their ferocious game sometimes come out in such multitudes from the woods, that even the most skilled huntsmen were in danger.