The midnight sun.-In August, the sun never sets. Undertone of life.-- However calm and still a summer day may be with us, there is no appearance of deadness. One has always the feeling that life is abundant, and is putting forth its energy in a thousand ways. In an old English tale we have these words "The very essence, and, as it were, spring-head and origin of all music is the very pleasant sound which the trees of the forest do make when they grow." Hence Poe's lines :

"The murmur that springs

From the growing of grass.”

Al Aaraaf, 105.

Drift ice.— Ice that has broken loose from the main sheet, and is moved about by the winds and currents. It is

particularly dangerous to navigation.

Schistose rocks.-The term schistose is employed to describe rocks capable of being split up into thin plates or divisions like slates.

Glaciers.-"Glaciers. are accumulations of ice, or of snow and ice, which collect in the valleys and ravines of snow mountains like the Alps, or on Arctic uplands like those of Greenland, and which move downward with a peculiar creeping motion, smoothing the rocks over which they pass, and leaving mounds of débris, as they melt away. On Polar lands, where glaciers cover almost the entire surface, they move downwards to the sea-shore, and then, losing their support, the advancing fronts break off, and are floated away as icebergs. As they are floated away by the Polar currents to warmer latitudes, they gradually melt away.”—PAGE.

England's glacial period.—Geology has clearly established the fact that every portion of the existing land has been repeatedly beneath the waters, and that that which now constitutes the bed of the ocean, has, in like manner, been the dry land of former epochs. It has no less clearly

proved that the temperature of the various portions of the earth's surface has undergone equally great changes, and that, at no very remote date, this island had a climate resembling that of Spitzbergen at the present day. Sinister. This word comes from the Latin sinister, mean

ing on the left. As omens seen on the left hand were regarded as unlucky, the word came to be used in the sense of unlucky, inauspicious.

EXERCISES.

1. Where is Spitzbergen? Describe its climate and appearance. 2. What is a glacier? Where are glaciers formed? What happens to glaciers in lower latitudes when they descend below the snowline? What happens to glaciers in Polar regions when they reach the sea? What is an iceberg? When do icebergs melt away? How are icebergs dangerous to navigation?

3. What is meant by England's glacial period? To what fact in the history of our island does this expression refer? What traces of this period are still to be found in our country?

4. Give the derivation and meaning of panorama, atom, pervade, primeval, precipitous, incline, catastrophe, inscription.

HE who hath bent him o'er the dead,

Ere the first day of death is fled,
The first dark day of nothingness,
The last of danger and distress
(Before decay's effacing fingers

Have swept the lines where beauty lingers),
And marked the mild angelic air,

The rapture of repose that's there,
The fixed, yet tender traits that streak
The languor of the placid cheek,
And-but for that sad shrouded eye,

That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now;
And but for that chill, changeless brow,
Where cold obstruction's apathy
Appals the gazing mourner's heart,
As if to him it could impart

The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon;
Yes, but for these, and these alone,
Some moments, ay, one treacherous hour,
He still might doubt the tyrant's power;
So fair, so calm, so softly sealed,
The first, last look by death revealed!
Such is the aspect of this shore;
'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more!
Clime of the unforgotten brave!

Whose land from plain to mountain-cave
Was Freedom's home, or Glory's grave!
Shrine of the mighty! can it be,
That this is all remains of thee?
Approach, thou craven crouching slave:
Say, is not this Thermopyla?

These waters blue that round you lave,
Oh, servile offspring of the free-
Pronounce what sea, what shore is this?
The gulf, the rock of Salamis !

These scenes, their story not unknown,
Arise, and make again your own;
Snatch from the ashes of your sires
The embers of their former fires,
And he who in the strife expires,
Will add to theirs a name of fear,
That tyranny shall quake to hear,
And leave his sons a hope, a fame,
They, too, will rather die than shame;
For Freedom's battle, once begun,
Bequeathed by bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft, is ever won.
Bear witness, Greece, thy living page,
Attest it, many a deathless age!
While kings, in dusty darkness hid,
Have left a nameless pyramid,

Thy heroes, though the general doom
Hath swept the column from their tomb,
A mightier monument command,
The mountains of their native land!
There points thy muse to stranger's eye
The graves of those that cannot die!
"Twere long to tell, and sad to trace,
Each step from splendour to disgrace;
Enough—no foreign foe could quell
Thy soul, till from itself it fell;
Yes! self-abasement paved the way
To villain-bonds and despot-sway.

BYRON.

He who hath bent him, &c.—Byron in a note says—“I trust that few of my readers have ever had an opportunity of witnessing what is here attempted in description; but those who have will probably retain a painful remembrance of that singular beauty which pervades, with few exceptions, the features of the dead a few hours, and but for a few hours, after the spirit is not there." Cold obstruction's apathy.-Compare Shakespeare:-"Ay, but to die and go we know not where, To lie in cold obstruction and to rot."

Measure for Measure, Act iii., scene 2.

Clime of the unforgotten brave!—Moore, the biographer of Byron, states that from this line to the end of the extract, the manuscript is written in a hurried and almost illegible hand, as if these splendid lines had been poured forth in one continuous burst of poetic feeling, which would hardly allow time for the hand to follow the rapid flow of the imagination.

Approach, thou craven, &c.—By this bold figure, the whole

lines acquire a vividness and reality which they would not otherwise have had.

Thermopyla.-A famous pass at the eastern extremity of

Mount Eta in Thessaly, where Leonidas and his 300 Spartans made their bold stand against Xerxes, the Persian, B.C. 480.

Salamis. A small rocky island in the Ægean Sea, south of Attica, in the neighbourhood of which Themistocles gained the famous naval victory over the Persians B.C. 480. So sure was Xerxes of the victory, that he had a splendid throne erected on the shore from which to view the battle. Akenside, in his "Pleasures of the Imagination," has the following reference to this signal victory:— "When the Persian tyrant, foiled and stung

With shame and desperation, gnashed his teeth