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In the tranquillity that thou dost love,
Enjoys thy presence. Noiselessly, around,
From perch to perch, the solitary bird

Passes; and yon clear spring, that, midst its herbs,
Wells softly forth and wandering steeps the roots
Of half the mighty forest, tells no tale

Of all the good it does. Thou hast not left

Thyself without a witness, in these shades,

Of thy perfections. Grandeur, strength, and grace
Are here to speak of thee. This mighty oak-
By whose immovable stem I stand and seem.
Almost annihilated-not a prince

In all that proud old world beyond the deep
E'er wore his crown as loftily as he

Wears the green coronal of leaves with which
Thy hand has graced him. Nestled at his root
Is beauty, such as blooms not in the glare
Of the broad sun. That delicate forest flower
With scented breath, and look so like a smile,
Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mold,
An emanation of the indwelling Life,

A visible token of the upholding Love,

That are the soul of this wide universe.

There have been holy men who hid themselves

25 Deep in the woody wilderness, and gave

Their lives to thought and prayer, till they outlived
The generation born with them, nor seemed

Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks

Around them; and there have been holy men
Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus.
But let me often to these solitudes
Retire, and in thy presence reassure
My feeble virtue. Here its enemies,

The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrink
And tremble and are still. O God! when thou
Dost scare the world with tempests, set on fire
The heavens with falling thunderbolts, or fill,
With all the waters of the firmament,

The swift dark whirlwind that uproots the woods
And drowns the villages; when, at thy call,
Uprises the great deep and throws himself
Upon the continent, and overwhelms

Its cities who forgets not, at the sight
Of these tremendous tokens of thy power,
His pride, and lays his strifes and follies by?
Oh, from these sterner aspects of thy face
Spare me and mine, nor let us need the wrath
Of the mad unchained elements to teach
Who rules them. Be it ours to meditate,
In these calm shades, thy milder majesty,
And to the beautiful order of thy works
Learn to conform the order of our lives.

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architrave (är kĭ trāv): literally, the chief beam; that which rests on the columns. — instinct: alive. — without a witness: see Acts xiv. 17.

5

A TRAGEDY IN THE DESERT—I

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

HONORÉ DE BALZAC (ō no rā de bal zăc) was a gifted French author who was born in 1799 and died in 1850. He was the founder of the modern social novel, and his is one of the greatest names in French literature. The following pages are adapted from Scenes of Military Life.

During an Egyptian expedition a French soldier fell into the hands of a company of Arabs and was taken by them into the desert beyond the falls of the Nile.

In order to place a safe distance between themselves and the French army, the Arabs made a forced march and 10 only rested during the night. They encamped about a well shaded by palm trees, under which they had previously hidden a store of provisions. Having no fear that their prisoner would try to escape into the illimitable desert, they contented themselves with binding his hands.

15 As soon as the soldier saw that his captors were asleep, he managed to cut the cords that bound him by rubbing them against the blade of a scimitar fixed between his knees. Seizing a rifle and a dagger, and also providing himself with food in the shape of some dried dates and a 20 little bag of barley, he fastened a scimitar to his belt, leaped upon one of the camp horses, and rode off in the direction which he supposed the French army to have taken. Unfortunately his horse was incapable of further exertion,

and before many miles had been covered, the poor animal fell dead, leaving the Frenchman alone in the desert.

After walking all day through the sand with the courage of an escaped convict, the soldier was obliged to stop. In spite of the beauty of the Oriental night, he felt that 5 he had not strength enough to go on. Fortunately he had reached a small hill, on the summit of which a few palm trees shot up into the air; it was their verdure seen from afar which had brought hope and consolation to his heart. His weariness was so great that he lay down upon a gran- 10 ite bowlder, curiously shaped like a camp bed, and there he fell asleep without taking any measures for his defense while he slept. He had apparently sacrificed his life, and his last thought was merely one of regret. He repented having left the Arabs, whose nomad life began to attract 15 him now that he was far from them and without help.

He was awakened by the sun, whose pitiless rays fell with all their force on his hard bed and produced an intolerable heat. When he looked around him the most horrible despair filled his soul. The dark sand of the desert spread 20 farther than sight could reach in every direction, and glittered like steel struck with bright light. It might have been a sea of looking-glass, or lakes melted together in a mirror. Waves of fiery vapor whirled over the quivering land. The sky was lit with an Oriental splendor, leaving 25. naught for the imagination to desire. Heaven and earth were on fire.

The silence was awful in its wild and terrible majesty. Infinity, immensity, closed in upon the soul from every side. Not a cloud in the sky, not a breath in the air, not a flaw on the bosom of the sand, which seemed ever mov5 ing in diminutive waves; the horizon ended as at sea on a clear day, with one line of light, definite as the cut of a sword.

The soldier threw his arms round the trunk of one of the trees, as though it were a friend, and there, in the shelter 10 of the narrow shadow cast by the palm, he wept. He cried aloud to measure the solitude. His voice, lost in the hollows of the hill, sounded faintly and aroused no echo ; the echo was in his own heart.

Looking by turns at the dark expanse and the blue ex15 panse, the soldier dreamed of France, he smelled with delight the streets of Paris, he remembered the towns through which he had passed, the faces of his fellow-soldiers, the most minute details of his life. At length he went down the opposite side of the hill to that by which he had come 20 up the night before. His joy was great when he discovered

a kind of cave among the immense fragments of granite which formed the base of the mound. The remains of a rug showed that this place of refuge had at one time been inhabited; at a short distance he saw some palm trees full 25 of dates. Then the instinct which binds us to life awoke again in his heart. He hoped to live long enough for passing Arabs to find him, or perhaps he might soon hear the