Rapt into still communion that transcends The imperfect offices of prayer and praise. And, indeed, the mountaineer must be generally excepted from that torpor of mind I have alluded to. The forms of nature that perpetually surround him, are so bold and sublime, that they almost irresistibly impress, excite, and colour his spirit within him; and those legends and stirring histories which generally abound in them, co-operate with these natural influences. This unawakened intellect dwells more generally amid the humbler and quieter forms of natural beauty; in the “sleepy hollows” of more champaign regions. It might be supposed that these nooks of the world would, in their seclusion, possess very much one moral character; but nothing can be more untrue. Universally, they may seem old-fashioned, and full of a sweet tranquillity; but their inhabitants differ widely in character in different parts of the country--widely often in a short space, and in a manner that can only be accounted for by their less or greater communion with towns, less or greater degree of education extended to them--and the kind extended. Where they are far from towns, and hold little intercourse with them, and have no manufactory in them, they may be dull, but they are seldom very vicious. If they have had little education, they lead a very mechanical sort of life; are often very boorish, and have very confined notions and contracted wishes; are rude in manner, but not bad in heart. I have been in places--ay, in this newspaper-reading age, where a newspaper never comes; where they have no public-house, no school, no church, and no doctor; and yet the district has been populous. But, in similarly situated places, where yet they had a simple, pious pastor--some primitive patriarch, like the venerable Robert Walker, of whom so admirable an account is given by Wordsworth; where they have been blest with such a man amongst them, and where they have had a school; where they knew little of what was going on in the world, and where yet you were sure to find, in some crypt-like hole in the wall, or in a little fireside window, about half a dozen books--the Bible, “Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs,” “Baxter’s Saint’s Everlasting Rest,” “Romaine’s Life of Faith,” or his “Drop of Honey from the Rock Christ,” “Macgowan’s Life of Christ,” or “Drelincourt on Death,” and such like volumes; or “Robinson Crusoe,” “Philip Quarle,” “The History of Henry the Earl of Moreland,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” or “Pamela;”--have you found a simplicity of heart and manner, a quiet prosperity, a nearer approach to the Arcadian idea of rural life, than anywhere else in this country. There are yet such places to be found in our island, notwithstanding the awful truth of what was said by Coleridge, that “Care, like a foul hag, sits on us all; one class presses with iron foot upon the wounded heads beneath, and all struggle for a worthless supremacy, and all, to rise to it, move shackled by