just before the announcement of the final cession of Acadia to England. Grand-Pré, (French). An-gel-us (àn-jel-us), the bell tolled (morning, noon, and evening) to mark the time great meadow when the Angelus (a Roman The rhythm of the hexameter verse will be caught by the pupils, with a little help. HIGHLAND MOORS. 1. BEAUTIES OF THE LANDSCAPE. To those who are accustomed to the rich beauty of lowland scenery, the treeless desolate aspect of the moorlands may appear harsh and uninviting. They miss there the objects which they are accustomed to see, and around which have gathered the associations of years. There is apparently nothing within the circle of vision to arrest the eye or interest the mind. All seems one dead dull monotony, an interminable dark level, an eye-wearying waste, marked only but not relieved by grey rocks and shallow bogs reflecting an ashen sky. This first unfavourable impression, however, is sure to be dispelled by a more intimate acquaintance. Apart from the charm of contrast which most persons find in circumstances differing widely from those in which their life is usually spent, and the interest which contemplative minds find in all bare solitary places, there are countless objects of attraction and beauties of hue and form which fill up the seeming void, and make these apparently blank pages of nature most suggestive even to the dullest intellect. The seasons, marching with their slow, solemn steps over the moorlands, may leave behind them none of those striking changes which mark their progress in the haunts of man. The elements of the scenery are too simple to be very susceptible to the vicissitudes of the year. But, still, there are some tokens of their presence; and these are all the more interesting that they do not reveal themselves at once to a cold, casual gaze, but require reverently to be sought out. Nowhere is the grass so vividly green in early spring-time as along the banks of the moorland stream, or on the shady hill-side, on which the cloud reposes its snowy cheek all day long, and weeps away its soul in silent tears. How gorgeous is that miracle of blossoming when Summer with her blazing torch has kindled the dull brown heather, and every twig and spray burst into blushing beauty, and spread wave after wave of rosy bloom over the moors, until the very heavens themselves catch the reflection, and bend enamoured over it with double loveliness! How rich, under the mild blue skies of Autumn, are the russet hues of the withered ferns and mosses that cluster on the braes, or creep over the marshes, imparting a mimic sunshine to the scene in the dullest day! How exquisitely pure is the untrodden snow in the hollows which the winds heap into gracefully swelling wreaths, and mark with endless curves of beauty! Wander over one of the Perthshire moors from break of morn to close of day, and you will no longer stigmatize. it as a monotonous, uninteresting waste. From sunrise to sunset the appearance of the landscape is never precisely the same for two successive hours. Like a human face, changing its expression with every thought and feeling, it alters its mood as cloud or sunshine passes over it. Now it is bathed in light, under which every cliff and heather-bush shine out with the utmost distinctness; anon it lies cold and desolate, unutterably forlorn and forsaken when the sky is overcast. At one time it is invested with a transparent atmosphere, in which the commonest and meanest objects are idealized as in a picture; at another, great masses of sharplydefined shadows from the stooping clouds lie like pineforests on the bright hill-sides; or a flood of molten gold, welling over the brim of a thunder-cloud, streams down and irradiates with concentrated glory a single spot, which gleams out from the surrounding gloom like a lovely isle in a stormy ocean. And the sunrises and sunsets-those grand rehearsals of the conflagration of the last day-who can describe them in an amphitheatre so magnificent, a region so peculiarly their own! How inexpressibly sweet is the lingering tremulousness of the gloaming, that quiet, ethereal, Sabbath-like pause of nature, in which the smallest and most distant sounds are heard, not loud and harsh, but with a fairy distinctness exquisitely harmonized with the holiness of the hour! There are no such twilights in England; they belong only to northern latitudes, where the light, if it be colder and feebler, compensates by its longer stay, and its heavenly purity and beauty at the close. And how full of weird, wild mystery is the scene as the evening grows darker; how vast, and vague, and awful in the uncertain light are the forms of the hills; how ghostly are the shadows! There Night is a visible form, and her solitude is like the presence of a god. Nor is the moorland altogether dependent for its beauty upon atmospheric effects. It hides within its jealous embrace many a lovely spot on which one comes unexpectedly with all the interest of discovery. There are little dells where a streamlet has lured up from the valley, by the magic of its charms, a cluster of rowantrees, whose red berries dance like fire in the broken foam of the waterfalls, or a group of tiny, white-armed birches that always seem to be combing their fragrant tresses in the clear mirror of its linns. There are moorland tarns, sullen and motionless as lakes of the dead, lying deep in sunless rifts, where the very ravens build no nests, and where no trace of life or vegetation is seen-associated with many a wild tradition, accidents of straying feet, the suicide of love, guilt, despair. And there are lochs beautiful in themselves, and gathering around them a world of beauty; their shores fringed with the tasselled larch, their shallows tesselated with the broad green leaves and alabaster chalices of the water-lily; and their placid depths mirroring the crimson gleam of the heather-hills and the golden clouds overhead. |