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The top of the Bernina is not always thus in winter. It has a bad reputation for the fury of invading storms, when falling snow hurtles together with snow scooped from the drifts in eddies, and the weltering white sea shifts at the will of whirlwinds.

You see his path down the heavens, straight as a line; if near, you hear the rush of his wings; his shadow hurtles across the fields, and in an instant you see him quietly perched upon some low tree or decayed stub in a swamp or meadow, with reminiscences of frogs and mice stirring in his maw.

I hope he is living; I hope he stirs his toddy still in the tap-room of the inn by the pretty Erme River; but I hope that he has grown wiser as he has grown older, and that he has given over his wheezy curses at the engine as it hurtles past on the iron way to Plymouth and to Penzance.

What's the fool waiting for now?" says Captain Purnall. The skipper comes up, still appealing to us to stand by and see him fetch St. John's. He dives below and returns at which we little human beings in the void cheer louder than ever with the ship's kitten. Up fly the liner's hissing slings; her underbody crashes home and she hurtles away again. The dial shows less than 3000 feet.

Here and there a monk, fresh from his Desert-Laura, hurtles through the eclipse-light of history like the stone from a catapult, rules a church with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while Greeks cringe, and Jews blaspheme, and heathen flee into, or away from, conversion; and the Church itself canonizes this spiritual father, this Sphinx-son of an instinct and a stone!

Instead, it went out with a wild, white bluster and blow. It was one of the nights when the storm-wind hurtles over the frozen meadows and black hollows, and moans around the eaves like a lost creature, and drives the snow sharply against the shaking panes.

But so it is. Perhaps the very consciousness of external danger enhances the enjoyment of the well-lighted interior, just as the storm does that roars and hurtles over the roof.

"Raven Crag," the name of Acton's home, was situated just within the borders of Yorkshire. A single line of rails takes you from Lowbay Junction up the Westmoreland hills to the top of the heaviest gradient in the kingdom, and then hurtles you down into the little wayside station of Lansdale, the station for "Raven Crag."

Yet the generalizations for which they were seeking a basis were trivial in comparison with those which our author hurtles out after a glance at M. Quetelet. "A continuous average of so many murders a year; then so many must happen; then somebody must commit them; then free-will is a figment, and society is the source of all action which we call individual."

He who would see at last for himself, then, the trick of this 'Magician, when he 'brings the rabble to his place, the reader who would know at last why it is that these old Roman graves 'have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth, by his so potent art'; and why it is, that at this great crisis in English history, the noise of the old Roman battle hurtles so fiercely in the English ear, should read now but read as a work of natural science in politics, from the scientific statesman's hands, deserves to be read this great revolutionary scene, which the Poet, for reasons of his own, has buried in the heart of this Play, which he has subordinated with his own matchless skill to the general intention of it, but which we, for the sake of pursuing that general intention with the less interruption, now that the storm appears to be 'overblown, may safely reserve for the conclusion of our reading of this scientific history, and criticism, and rejection of the Military Usurpation of the COMMON-WEAL.