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If we once identify our Utopia or other ideal with the real forces that surround us, or with any one of them, we have fallen into an illusion from which we shall emerge only after bitter disappointments; and even when we have come out again into the open, we shall long carry with us the desolating sense of wasted opportunities and vitiated characters.

Italian cities, released from imperial control, warred perpetually for existence or supremacy. England and France were preparing for the desolating struggle that exhausted their resources for a hundred years.

The same year stands distinguished in the annals of Carolina, not only for this unsuccessful expedition against the Spaniards, but also for a desolating fire, which in November following broke out in the capital, and laid the half of it in ruins. This fire began about two o'clock in the afternoon, and burnt with unquenchable violence until eight at night.

B. to the 12th; but how much more near the truth would it be, to say "That His Majesty, in consideration of the distinguished services of the one, has been graciously pleased to appoint him to a case of blue and collapsed cholera, in India; and also, for the bravery and gallant conduct of the other, in his late affair with the 'How-dow-dallah Indians, has promoted him to the yellow fever now devastating and desolating Jamaica."

How should I have felt if, in traversing the deserts and swamps which to-day represent what was the richest and most famous tract of the world, I had thought that I was a scion of a race in whose hands God had placed, for hundreds of years, the destinies of this great country, and that my countrymen could give no better account of their stewardship than the exhibition of two mighty rivers flowing between deserts to waste themselves in the sea for nine months in the year, and desolating everything in their way for the remaining three?

The thought struck me to arrest the desolating hand of Time; to rescue the historic pile from utter ruin, and to make it the closing scene of my wanderings; a quiet home, where I might enjoy "lust in rust" for the remainder of my days.

O self! self! self! are we eternally masking in a domino that reveals your hideous old face when we could be most positive we had escaped you? Eternally! the desolating answer knelled. Nevertheless the poor, the starving, the overtaxed in labour, they have a right to the cry of Now! now!

In due course he ate the customary desolating table-d'hote dinner which is served simultaneously in the vast, odorous dining-rooms, all furnished alike, of scores and scores of grand hotels throughout the provinces. Having filled his cigar-case, he set out once more into the beautiful summer evening. In broad Side Gate were massed the chief resorts of amusement.

This singular rapidity of national life was favoured by very obvious circumstances. The long and desolating wars between Heraclius and Chosroes had altogether destroyed the mercantile relations of the Roman and Persian empires, and had thrown the entire Oriental and African trade into the hands of the Arabs. As a merchant Mohammed himself makes his first appearance.

The whole course of this fine river, as the eye sweeps and ranges over its banks, presents at almost every bend the view of villas enriched with gardens, orchards, and vineyards; castles, convents, and villages in ruins! bearing innumerable evidences of the desolating war that has destroyed them.