Onward, still onward! Beneath me I beheld a solemn spot, where the linden, the ash, the sycamore, the cypress, the cedar, the beech, the church-yard yew and hemlock, were clustered together in one mournful company. I knew by the stone altars, by the sculptured urn, the graceful obelisk, the foam-white pyramid, the funereal cenotaph, the marble mausoleum, which glimmered amid the groves and bowers, that I looked upon a sanctuary, consecrated by the living to the repose of the dead. A sweet sabbath-like calm seemed to hover about the place, and even the very birds that were flitting from branch to branch, and the breeze that was sighing its hollow dirge along the wood-tops, appeared to know that the spot was holy. As I looked, I beheld a slow procession winding along this highway of the departed, and bearing a new tenant to the narrow house. Some sweet infant, perhaps, was there cut down in the dewy bloom of its innocence,--some beautiful bud of beauty severed from its stem, and torn away from its blossoming mates, in the garden of youth,--or, haply, some silver-haired sire, gathered like the shock of corn, fully ripe, into the vast granary of death. As I passed from this interesting spot, I was attracted by a merry train of riders, whose loud and cheerful voices resounded along the road, seeming to mock the sacred silence of the place I had so lately left. As the gay array of youth and beauty dashed away from my sight, with foamy bridle and gory spur, I could not but be reminded of the close juxta-position on earth, of joy and sorrow, life and death. Onward, onward! over winding streams, that glittered like twisting serpents on the green surface of the earth, over the broad bay, that rested in smooth and glassy repose in the arms of the far-extending shore, and over the dashing billows of the ocean, my route continued. Birds of the briny sea, whose strong wings had borne them safely and surely from the frosty atmosphere that sparkles around the pole, or the ice-cold waters of some far-away lagoon, now darted around me with discordant cry and affrighted pinion. In those hovering flocks I discerned the duck, the goose, the coot, the loon, the curlew, the green-winged teal, the dusky duck, the sooty tern, the yellow-winged gadwale, the golden eye, and the gaudy mallard, proudly vain of that lovely plumage, whose intense hues rival the glory of the breaking dawn, the autumnal sunset, or the intermingled dyes which tinge the stripes of the showery bow. On an iron-bound promontory, whose jutting crags waved an eternal strife with the rolling billows, I saw the thick-scattered cottages of wealth and taste, seeming no bigger than the nest, which the tropical bird constructs in the sands of the desert, while around, on the tumbling expanse of waters, were glancing a thousand receding and approaching sails, bearing the riches of the orient or the occident, from shore to shore.