Soft gleams on clover-beams they fling,
And glimmer in each shadowy dell,
Or downward with a sudden swing,
Fall, as of old a Pleiad fell;
And on the fields bright gems they strew,
And up and down the meadow go,
And through the forest wander to and fro.
They store no hive, nor earthly cell,
They sip no honey from the rose;
By day unseen, unknown they dwell,
Yet, when the night upon the swamps
Nor aught of their rare gift disclose :
Calls out the murk and misty damps,
They pierce the shadows with their shining
lamps.

Now ye who in life's garish light,

ing and flashing among the honeysuckles and | jasmines is as well worth a voyage across the Atlantic as Niagara or the Mammoth Cave. For it can only be really seen when alive; its peculiar radiance is extinguished by death, like that of glow worms. I have repeatedly caught and tried to keep them in my room with the aid of all the flowers that it usually visits, but it at once pined away and died in captivity. Once, indeed, I thought that I discovered in it a curious instinct of cunning in addition to the passions which St. John declares rage in its tiny breast. As soon as I caught one it closed its diamond eyes and stretched itself on my hand as if dead; but no sooner was I off my guard than it darted away out of the window which I had opened to give it air, as lively as ever. I read some years afterward a deeply interesting account by a naturalist of the same state (Kentucky) in which I saw so many of his experiments with it. He had, he said, tried often to get one to live in his room, but invariably they lost all animation and brilliancy, though he sometimes could keep them alive for On that night and the next morning we had a day or two. At length having released one the satisfaction of seeing the courage of the which seemed to be at the point of death, he English members of our now consolidated party followed it into the garden and watched it. He subjected to a test for which it was less presaw it perch here and there, until at last it found pared than for the rain and discomforts of the a little green spider, very common in that neigh-stage-coach. The Kentucky inn had but two bourhood; this spider it eagerly swallowed, and so soon as it did so its vivacity and its colours returned, and it flashed about its old bowers as before. When next he caught one he took care to secure a number of these particular spiders also; and by occasionally giving the bird one he was able to keep it in good plight for some length of time.

Unseen, unknown, walk to and fro,
When death shall bring a dreamless night,
May ye not find your lamps aglow?
God works, we know not why nor how,
And, one day, lights, close hidden now,
May blaze like gems upon an angel's brow.

spare rooms for all parties, large and small, one for the gentlemen and the other for the ladies, and of these two the inmates of the house had a rather free range. Cuique credendum suo malo.' The English, who had borne themselves so bravely hitherto, could hardly restrain their disgust, and were clearly incapable of appreciating our South-western institutions in parPerhaps there is nothing that a Southerner ticulars where the American adaptability to cirwho has wandered in other climes more tender- cumstances shone out. Margaret Fuller gives ly associates with his native land than its fire- a humorous account of a night passed in a flies. These he and his childhood's compan- western inn, where an English lady was one of ions have chased through many 'lost bowers the company, which agreed very well with that and soft summer nights, and wherever he sees furnished us by the American ladies of their them, sweet memories gleam for a moment on the first night in Kentucky. We ladies,' she says, night of vanished years. Out here in this des-were to sleep in the bar-room, from which its olate region the night is lit up with them, as if the earth were responding with gentle luminous breathings to the soft influences of Pleiades. The fire flies shine as they rise, and they do not flash so much as glow like a universal exhalation of undulating light. They make all the woods mystic. A young American poet George Arnold-who had much poetic feeling, but died before he had accomplished much, has written some lines concerning these beautiful creatures which I insert here in place of any further reflections of my own.

'Tis June, and all the lowland swamps
Are rich with tufted reeds and ferns,
And filmy with the vaporous damps
That rise when twilight's crimson burns;
And as the deepening dusk of night
Steals purpling up from vale to height,
The wanton fire-flies show their fitful light.

drinking visitors could only be ejected at a late hour. The outer door had no fastening to prevent their return. However, our host kindly requested we would call him, if they did, as he had " conquered them for us, and would do so again." We had also rather hard couches (mine was the supper table), but we Yankees, born to rove, were altogether too much fatigued to stand upon trifles, and slept as sweetly as we would in the "bigly bower" of any baroness. But I think England sat up all night, wrapped in her blanket shawl, and with a neat lace cap upon her head, so that she would have looked perfectly the lady, if any one had come in, shuddering and listening. I know that she was very ill next day, in requital. She watched, as her parent country watches the seas, that nobody may do wrong in any case, and deserved to have met some interruption, she was so well prepared.' In the morning there was set in the porch, upon which both of our rooms opened,

a single wash-basin on a chair with a large towel | were these works constructed? What degree beside it; and this had to serve our entire com- of civilisation had this people reached? Were pany, ladies and gentlemen. But when during they acquainted with the use of iron? What the day we were jolted along in a springless has become of them? Can we conceive that nawaggon over a road macadamised with tree- tions sufficiently powerful to have raised such stumps, our England looked back kindly upon considerable fortifications, and who buried their the receding inn, and the paw of the lion and dead with such religious care, can have been the talon of the eagle were clasped together in destroyed and replaced by the ignorant and a common consent, that Kentucky was a land barbarous hordes we see about us at the present of unmitigated barbarism. The distance to the day? Could the calamities occasioned by a long Cave lengthened with each report received in state of war have effaced the last traces of their answer to our plaintive inquiries from the seedy civilisation and brought them back to the primi and lean poor whites' whom we encountered tive condition of hunters? Are our Indians the from time to time; until at last we dumbly re- descendants of that ancient people? . . . . This signed ourselves to our waggon-rack (it was planet is very old. Like the works of Homer drawn by oxen the only team we could pro- and Hesiod, who can say through how many cure), and at the end of a day of torture found editions it has passed in the immensity of ages ourselves bruised and almost fainting on the The rent continents, the straits, the gulfs, the threshold of the Mammoth Cave Hotel. islands, the shallows of the ocean, are but vast fragments on which, as on the planks of some wrecked vessel, the men of former generations who escaped these commotions have produced new populations. Time, so precious to us, the creatures of a moment, is nothing to Nature.

There is stretching southward from the Ohio, and covering an immense but not yet completely measured area in Kentucky and Tennessee, a continuous mass of limestone; blue limestone beneath, cliff limestone above, with now and then some beautiful but fragile marble. Out of this material Nature, waiting so many ages for artists and architects, undertook to do some colossal carving in her own way, and has left in that region some of the most wonderful and grotesque works imaginable. If Professor Ramsay sighs for another geological world to conquer, now that he has got through Wales, I can commend him to the unexplored state of Kentucky, and can promise him unrivalled wonders. The sculptures of Nature, whose ingenuity in them has led the illiterate of that region to attribute them to such black art as is implied in naming them 'Devil's Pulpit,' 'Bottomless Pit,' and the like, are represented in high knobs with holes sinking 300 feet straight down in them, rivers dashing between perpendicular cliffs 1300 feet high, vast inverted cones, down which the roar of distant waterfalls is heard, isolated springs that rise each day 12 or 15 inches and sink again with the regularity of tides, and Sinking Creeks that disappear and run under the earth for five or six miles. There are also vast slabs impressed with the footprints of primitive animals, and, in one important case, with those of man; and there are bone caves as yet half examined. In this state also there are some ten or twelve large Indian mounds or fortifications, the largest of which - that near Bowling Green -is built on a magnificent natural fortress, and shows that the Indians had keen eyes for such large defences.

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Benjamin Franklin, who very carefully studied all the discoveries of his age made concerning the Indians, could not believe that they had originally migrated from Asia, and yet these Indian mounds impressed him with the idea that they had once enjoyed a higher civilisation than any of which the whites were wit

nesses.

There are in Kentuckey, five or six caves which would be accounted marvels in any other part of the world, but there they are all dwarfed by proximity to the great Mammoth Cave, in which one may wander under the earth to an extent variously estimated at from 40 to 100 miles. The period of its discovery is unknown, but it was first pointed out to white pioneers by the Indians. The tracks of hoofed animals were found in it, and, indeed, may still be seen; these and certain bones which were found there, but are no longer discoverable, gave rise to the traditions of the neighbourhood that, in the early struggles between the French and English, regiments were concealed and fed in the cave. Probably no soldiers of either country were ever within a hundred miles, to say the least, of the spot, and it is much to be feared that through the prevalent ignorance of the region, some remains of scientific interest have been hopelessly lost.

Very early in the morning we prepared for our visit to the Underworld. The ladies are taken in one direction, and the gentlemen in another, and when we meet again, fresh introductions are almost required. The ladies, in bloomers' of various colours - - all except Britannia, who will sacrifice herself to Decorumform indeed a charming group of gipsies; but men, in their ugly corduroys, are unpicturesque banditti. To each of us is given a lighted candle, and headed by a handsome and intelligent mulatto for our guide (he is trying to save up from the gifts of tourists enough to raise him from the cavern of slavery to the upper world of freedom), and followed by another bearing a hamper of satisfactory size, we bid farewell to the light of day, and enter, a curious procession, into the fern-wreathed but awful mouth of the chasm.

The main cave into which we soon enter is At what period, [he asks] by what people, six miles in length, from 40 to 100 feet in

ter.

phere into which we have come from the burning summer, now many hundred feet above us, that there are dark and before unsuspected underworlds within ourselves corresponding to the abysses about us. Gnomes, ghouls, genii, already seem weird possibilities. How much of the progress of mankind into sunnier and more liberal beliefs may ultimately have to be ascribed to meteoric changes?

When Scandinavia and Britain have but half emerged from old glacial periods, what wonder that they believed in the icy realm of Hela ? (whose name, by the way, now denotes the most tropical region of theology!) Surely

The thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

height, and from 60 to 100 feet in width. This, saint, reduced gradually to a monk, evolved it which is the largest part of the cave, leads to from such damp and dismal material as his what is called the Rotunda, which is a vast abode furnished. Nay, we begin to feel condome over 100 feet in height, and 175 in diame.scious, feeling the influence of the heavy atmosRockets sent up here do not, indeed, as in the Speedwell mine, Derbyshire, burst without reaching the ceiling, but Roman candles show a splendid dome. To the right of the Rotunda, a large space stretches which is called Audubon's Avenue, that naturalist having devoted much time to its exploration. At this point there are traces of some cottages which were built many years ago for the residence of consumptives, the odd notion having got abroad that the air of the cave was good for persons afflicted with diseases of the lungs. Strange as it may seem, a considerable number went there to live. It, of course, hastened their death, and before they died their eyes became sunken, and their faces bloodless. The cavern proved but a way-station to the scarcely more gloomy realms of Death. Not far from this is the Church,' where, indeed, those spirits in prison' heard One is not at a loss to account even for those preaching at various times from the Methodist monotonous, characterless hells, into which all itinerants who passed that way. Nature was offenders are supposed to be indiscriminately not at all, however, in a methodistic mood when thrust, when standing beside what our guide she carved this curious hall, with its queer calls the Bottomless Pit.' A vast hole is altars and Gothic ceiling. The most interest- this, of some twenty feet in diameter, and round ing thing in it is the Organ,' which is formed as if drilled by a gigantic auger over this a of stalagmitic layers of stone curving over, one bridge has been thrown upon which our guide upon another, to the number of nine or ten. invites us all to stand, and he then kindles a Each is hollow, and has the appearance of an great red light which, flaring down into it is organ-pipe, and each yields a separate tone when caught by a thousand crystals which glare from struck with the fist or a mallet, the tone vary- the abyss up to us like the fiery eyes of demons; ing in character with the length and size of the stalactites glow in the light and become terrible pipe. The series C, D, D sharp, E, F, G, G tongues of flame. We hurl huge rocks into sharp, comes in successive layers; and by re- this pit, and hear them crashing from side to membering the sounds of other pipes, which are side, returning shrieking demoniac echoes to us irregular, one can easily beat out a simple tune. until the ear loses the sound without discerning I could easily find good reasons why some that any stone has reached the bottom. oriental worshippers should have set their altars and idols in caverns, as in the alabaster cave of Birmah where the disciples of Buddha still keep consecrated images: no more fit pedestals or niches for the grim unshapely objects of their worship than these are imaginable. Originally, I suppose, every religion was born in, and dwelt in, some place physiognomically representative of it. Magni, exploring the Grotto of Antipa

ros, wrote:

In the midst of this grand amphitheatre rose a concretion of about fifteen feet high, that in some measure resembled an altar; from which, taking the hint, we caused mass to be celebrated there. The beautiful columns that shot up round the altar appeared like candlesticks; and many other natural objects represented the customary ornaments of this sacrament.

The pious traveller was nearer to the historical origin of the lighted altars of his church than he suspected. Many a hard stony dogma, or half-blocked out creed also, which now builds fair temples in the upper light and air, would under the spear-touch of Ithuriel recede into the gloomy eave where some pursued and hiding

One of our party, a universalist, plaintively asks the guide if the pit is bottomless, and is evidently much relieved on being told that its bottom has been ascertained to be just 175 feet below. We pass next through Martha's Palace, by Side-Saddle Pit, and enter the glories of Minerva's Dome. The Side-Saddle Pit is a smaller thing of the same kind as that just described. Martha's Palace has in it many crystals of fluor-spar which light up splendidly, and Minerva's Dome was evidently named by some one of classic tastes who saw in the superior whiteness of its pillars formed by the gradual blending of descending stalac tites with ascending stalagmites and a certain simplicity in the hall, something of the Greek character. We then came to the Revellers' Hall,' a room of 20 feet in height and 40 in width. After recognising feebly the name of the place, our English friends by taking draughts from their pocket-flasks, and our Americans by whirling a little in dances, which excited such explosions of laughter as must have been acceptable to the genius of the place, we passed through what is called the Scotchman's Trap. This is an opening downward o five feet in diameter, just under a vast stone,

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any object, however near. The latter species is more rarely found than the other, which has mere rudimentary marks for eyes.

Experiments have been made with the object of cultivating these marks into eyes, but without success. It is doubtful, however, whether these animals have received the attention from naturalists which is due to the interest of the subject. These fishes, after being captured, refuse to eat anything provided for them, and though they sometimes live long, do not thrive. They have a skin like that of the ecl, a mouth like that of the cat-fish, and various sauroid characteristics. They have teeth, and one must almost believe the general assertion that these fishes devour each other. Nearly all of them are about the same length -eight inches-and they are much more lively than one might expect in eyeless creatures. They are generally white, but with their wide mouths and horned heads, are not pretty. The other species which, having eyes, makes such poor use of them, I did not see, nor did I see the cave-rat, though from the accounts of it, I suspect that it is that wandering Jew' of rats- the Norway - whose squeak even the settler beyond the Rocky Mountains is sure to hear under his floor the moment after he has nailed it down. Bats are also found in the cave. It is a pity that Mammoth Cave has not been explored thoroughly by any naturalist. Even Sir Charles Lyell, who has so often visitcd America and explored so many sections of it, did not visit this cave, which, besides being second only to Niagara as a prodigy, presents so many points of interest for scientific study.

which is only kept from falling over the aper- at least in daylight
ture by a few inches of limestone. A Scotch-
man once tried to persuade a party from going
through, maintaining that the big rock must
fall at some period, that it might fall just after
they had gone through, in which case they
would be all held in a trap. The Scotchman
succeeded only in giving his name to one of
the many formidable points of the cave. That
he was justified by the appearance of the place
in his apprehensions we all felt, and indeed, at
this point, one of our most swashing and
martial' Rosalinds sat down and had a good
cry before going through. Next came the Fat
Man's Misery.'
This is a tortuous, slimy
passage, in some parts only a foot in width,
and with the ceiling only a foot above one's
back, for, of course, we must all crawl through
this villanous place, which might well be called
'Anybody's Misery.' We have to be tied with
ropes, one to the other, there being really dan-
ger that some one may stick fast between the
rocks and have to be dragged through by the
rest. This passage stretches to the frightful
extent of 150 feet, and few are the adventurers
into it who do not echo from their hearts the
groans of the fat man whose agonies gave the
place its name. Oh that I were an eel!'
gasped cur good-sized English lady (to whom I
was harnessed) sotto voce. Our guide relates,
to keep our courage up, the fearful experience
of a lady, too modest to appear in a bloomer,
who tried to go through with crinoline: she got
through at last, but the crinoline never did.
From this we emerged into the Bacon Cham-
ber, a small room, from the ceiling of which
hang innumerable blunt stalactitic rocks, which
have a most curious resemblance to hams,
shoulders, sides, jowls, and indeed to every
usual cut of pork. After our ordeal in the
narrow passage we were quite ready for a piece
of ham, and it was suggested that it might
have been some weary explorer of an ancient
grotto who emerging from a similar labyrinth
of misery, came upon hams that he could not
eat, that originated the story of Tantalus.
After walking over a rocky road for some dis-
tance we come to the Dead Sea,' a pool of
water formed, doubtless, partly from the rains
filtered through the earth, but partly also, like
the Zirknitz Sea and others, fed by subter-
ranean fountains. The water is not stagnant,
and so must have subterranean exits; but these
are probably small and slow, leaving the water
perfectly motionless. No fish has, I believe,
ever been found in this pool, which is of an
average depth of 15 feet, and is 20 by 50 feet in
superficial extent.

Very interesting is that part of the Cave in which the various waters are found. The smallest of these is the Dead Sea. Not very far beyond this we come to the river Styx, after crossing which we soon reach Lake Lethe, and 500 yards farther, Echo River. It is in Echo River that the eyeless fish is found, there being also found in it another species of fish which has an eye with which it cannot see

I should say, from looking at the eyeless fish, that the Proteus of the Illyrian caverns could not be far off. The pleasure-parties which explore the cavern generally give as wide a berth as possible to those muddy flats in the Cave, where, perhaps, lie to-day animals as wonderful as that which gave Sir Humphrey Davy the text for his discourse on immortality, preached in the Grotto of the Maddalina, at Adelsburg. And, by the bye, if Socrates could have had the Proteus anguinus, or the eyeless fish, before him, what a dialogue would have been transmitted to us from the Academy! As it is, one can scarcely read the Phaedo without suspecting that, fair as our landscapes seem, we are after all only fumbling about in Nature's cellar, and that we may be dotted from spine to brow with senses unsealable elsewhere than in this dim underworld.

The River Styx has been bridged, and Charon's boat is now found only on Lake Lethe and the Echo River. Nevertheless we found crossing the Styx one of the most difficult parts of our journey, for the river has great floods, one of which had not entirely subsided when we were there. To reach the bridge we had to go by a perilous circuit and cross a bottomless' chasm, which could only be done by the aid of a Bostonian, who, brave as Curtius and strong as Hercules, stood astride