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Far o'er its frowning summit;-and the plain
Would seek to win thy downward wing in vain,
Or the green sea-beat shore.

The limits of thy course no daring eye

Has marked; thy glorious path of light on high
Is trackless and unknown;

The gorgeous sun thy quenchless gaze may share;
Sole tenant of his boundless realm of air,

Thou art, with him, alone.

Imperial wanderer! the storms that shake
Earth's towers, and bid her rooted mountains quake,
Are never felt by thee!—

Beyond the bolt,-beyond the lightning's gleam,
Basking forever in the unclouded beam,-
Thy home immensity!

And thus the soul, with upward flight like thine,
May track the realms where heaven's own glories shine,
And scorn the tempest's power;-

Yet meaner cares oppress its drooping wings;
Still to earth's joys the sky-born wanderer clings,
Those pageants of an hour!

LXXXIV.-A CHILD CARRIED AWAY BY AN EAGLE.

Professor Wilson.

The great Golden Eagle, the pride and the pest of the parish, stooped down, and away with something in his talons. One single sudden female shriek,—and then shouts and outcries, as if a church spire had tumbled down on a 5 congregation, at a sacrament!*" Hannah Lamond's bairn! Hannah Lamond's bairn!" was the loud fast-spreading cry. "The eagle's ta'en aff Hannah Lamond's bairn!" and many hundred feet were in another instant hurrying towards the mountain. Two miles, of hill, and dale, and 10 copse, and shingle, and many intersecting brooks, lay between; but, in an incredibly short time, the foot of the mountain was alive with people.

The eyrie was well known, and both old birds were visible on the rock-ledge. But who shall scale that dizzy 15 cliff, which Mark Steuart, the sailor, who had been at the storming of many a fort, attempted in vain? All kept gazing, weeping, wringing of hands in vain, rooted to the ground, or running back and forwards, like so many ants

essaying their new wings in discomfiture.

"What's the

use, what's the use,-o' ony puir human means? We have no power but in prayer!" and many knelt down,— fathers and mothers thinking of their own babies,—as if 5 they would force the deaf heavens to hear!

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Hannah Lamond had all this while been sitting on a rock, with a face perfectly white, and eyes like those of a mad person, fixed on the eyrie. Nobody had noticed her; for strong as all sympathies with her had been at the 10 swoop of the eagle, they were now swallowed up in the agony of eyesight. Only last Sabbath was my sweet wee wean baptized, in the name o' the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost!" and, on uttering these words, she flew off through the brakes, and over the huge stones, 15 up-up-up-faster than ever huntsman ran in to the death,-fearless as a goat playing among the precipices.

No one doubted, no one could doubt, that she would soon be dashed to pieces. But have not people who walk in their sleep, obedient to the mysterious guidance of 20 dreams, climbed the walls of old ruins, and found footing, even in decrepitude, along the edge of unguarded battlements, and down dilapidated stair-cases, deep as drawwells, or coal pits, and returned with open, fixed, and unseeing eyes, unharmed to their beds, at midnight? It is 25 all the work of the soul, to whom the body is a slave; and shall not the agony of a mother's passion,-who sees her baby, whose warm mouth had just left her breast, hurried off by a demon to a hideous death,-bear her limbs aloft wherever there is dust to dust, till she reach that devour30 ing den, and fiercer and more furious far, in the passion of love, than any bird of prey that ever bathed its beak in blood, throttle the fiends that with their heavy wings would fain flap her down the cliffs, and hold up her child, in deliverance, before the eye of the all-seeing God!

35 No stop,-no stay, she knew not that she drew her breath. Beneath her feet Providence fastened every loose stone, and to her hands strengthened every root. How was she ever to descend? That fear, then, but once crossed her heart, as up-up-up-to the little image made of her 40 own flesh and blood. "The God who holds me now from perishing, will not the same God save me, when my child is on my bosom ?" Down came the fierce rushing of the eagles' wings, each savage bird dashing close to her head, so that she saw the yellow of their wrathful eyes. All at

once they quailed, and were cowed. Yelling, they flew off to the stump of an ash jutting out of the cliff, a thousand feet above the cataract; and the Christian mother falling across the eyrie, in the midst of bones and blood, clasping 5 her child,-dead-dead-dead,-no doubt,-but unmangled and untorn, and swaddled up, just as it was, when she laid it down asleep, among the fresh hay, in a nook of the harvest field.

Oh! what a pang of perfect blessedness transfixed her 10 heart from that faint feeble cry:-"It lives-it lives-it lives!" and baring her bosom, with loud laughter, and eyes dry as stones, she felt the lips of the unconscious innocent once more murmuring, at the fount of life and love! "O Thou great, and thou dreadful God! whither hast thou 15 brought me, one of the most sinful of thy creatures? Oh! save my soul, lest it perish, even for thy own name's sake! O Thou, who diedst to save sinners, have mercy upon me!"

Cliffs, chasms, blocks of stone, and the skeletons of old 20 trees,-far-far down,-and dwindled into specks, a thousand creatures of her own kind, stationary, or running to and fro! Was that the sound of the waterfall, or the faint roar of voices? Is that her native strath ?—and that tuft of trees, does it contain the hut in which stands the cradle 25 of her child? Never more shall it be rocked by her foot! Here must she die,-and when her breast is exhausted, her baby too! And those horrid beaks, and eyes, and talons, and wings, will return; and her child will be devoured at last, even within the dead bosom that can protect 30 it no longer.

LESSON LXXXV.-SAME SUBJECT CONCLUDED.-ID.

Where all this while was Mark Steuart, the sailor? Half way up the cliffs. But his eye had got dim, and his head dizzy, and his heart sick;—and he who had so often reefed the top-gallant sail, when at midnight the coming of the 5 gale was heard afar, covered his face with his hands, and dared look no longer on the swimming heights.

"And who will take care of my poor bed-ridden mother," thought Hannah, whose soul, through the exhaustion of so many passions, could no more retain, in its grasp, that 10 hope which it had clutched in despair. A voice whispered, "God!" She looked around, expecting to see an angel ;

but nothing moved, except a rotten branch, that, under its own weight, broke off from the crumbling rock. Her eye, -by some secret sympathy of her soul with the inanimate object,-watched its fall; and it seemed to stop, not far 5 off, on a small platform.

Her child was bound within her bosom,-she remembered not how or when,-but it was safe;-and scarcely daring to open her eyes, she slid down the shelving rocks, and found herself on a small piece of firm root-bound soil, 10 with the tops of bushes appearing below. With fingers suddenly strengthened into the power of iron, she swung herself down by brier, and broom, and heather, and dwarfbirch. There, a loosened stone leapt over a ledge; and no sound was heard, so profound was its fall. There, the 15 shingle rattled down the screes, and she hesitated not to follow. Her feet bounded against the huge stone that stopped them, but she felt no pain. Her body was callous as the cliff.

Steep as the wall of a house, was now the side of the 20 precipice. But it was matted with ivy centuries old,-long ago dead, and without a single green leaf,-but with thousands of arm-thick stems, petrified into the rock, and covering it, as with a trellis. She bound her baby to her neck, and with hands and feet clung to that fearful ladder. 25 Turning round her head and looking down, lo! the whole population of the parish,-so great was the multitude, on their knees! and, hush! the voice of psalms! a hymn breathing the spirit of one united prayer! Sad and solemn was the strain, but nothing dirge-like, breathing not of 30 death, but deliverance. Often had she sung that tune, perhaps the very words, but them she heard not,-in her own hut, she and her mother,―or in the kirk, along with all the congregation. An unseen hand seemed fastening her fingers to the ribs of ivy; and, in sudden inspiration, believ35 ing that her life was to be saved, she became almost as fearless, as if she had been changed into a winged creature.

Again her feet touched stones and earth,-the psalm was hushed, but a tremulous sobbing voice was close beside her, and lo! a she-goat, with two little kids at her 40 feet. "Wild heights," thought she, "do these creatures climb;-but the dam will lead down her kid by the easiest paths, for oh! even in the brute creatures, what is the holy power of a mother's love!" and turning round her head, she kissed her sleeping baby, and for the first time she 45 wept.

Overhead frowned the front of the precipice, never touched before by human hand or foot. No one had ever dreamt of scaling it; and the golden eagles knew that well in their instinct, as, before they built their eyrie, they had 5 brushed it with their wings. But all the rest of this part of the mountain-side, though scarred, and seamed, and chasmed, was yet accessible;-and more than one person in the parish had reached the bottom of the Glead's Cliff. Many were now attempting it, and ere the cautious 10 mother had followed her dumb guides a hundred yards, though among dangers, that, although enough to terrify the stoutest heart, were traversed by her without a shudder, the head of one man appeared, and then the head of an other; and she knew that God had delivered her and her 15 child, in safety, into the care of their fellow-creatures.

Not a word was spoken,-eyes said enough,—she hushed her friends with her hands, and, with uplifted eyes, pointed to the guides sent to her by Heaven. Small green plats, where those creatures nibble the wild-flowers, 20 became now more frequent,-trodden lines, almost as easy as sheep-paths, showed that the dam had not led her young into danger; and now the brush-wood dwindled away into straggling shrubs; and the party stood on a little eminence above the stream, and forming part of the strath.

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There had been trouble and agitation, much sobbing, and many tears, among the multitude, while the mother was scaling the cliffs :-sublime was the shout that echoed afar the moment she reached the eyrie ;-then had succeeded a silence deep as death;-in a little while arose 30 the hymning prayer, succeeded by mute supplication ;--the wildness of thankful and congratulatory joy had next its sway;--and now that her salvation was sure, the great crowd rustled like the wind-swept wood. And, for whose sake, was all this alternation of agony ? A poor, humble 35 creature, unknown to many even by name,-one who had but few friends, nor wished for more,-contented to work all day, here, there, any where, that she might be able to support her aged mother and her little child, and who on Sabbath took her seat in an obscure pew, set apart 40 for paupers, in the kirk.

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