THE DELUGE.

"IN the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened."* The artist has endeavoured to represent this terrible scene in its most fearful and destructive climax. The abruption of the great deep is taking place at this dreadful moment. The whole frame of nature is dislocated and convulsed. The sun, the moon and a comet are in conjunction in the sky, portending ruin, desolation, and death. On the right hand side of the picture, the waters are seen rushing down into an almost interminable gulf, formed by the upper crust of the earth giving way, and yawning to its inmost depths to receive them. Just beyond, the lower region of a precipitous mountain is crowded with persons and animals, exhibiting the most frantic expressions of horror. The former are some praying and some blaspheming, while the latter are howling their terrors to the conflicting elements. Beneath an extensive ledge on which they stand, the foaming billows are pouring downward in one wild hissing vortex, which bears away thousands in its mighty sweep. The rocks above, torn by a thunderbolt from the crest of the mountain, are toppling down upon the agonized multitude. Beyond the horizontal line the mountains are bursting, rocks are upheaved, the ocean rises from its bed, while the sluices of the skies are unlocked, and the torrents which pour from them obscure the sun. In the mean time the ark rests midway upon a mountain in the distance, the holy family waiting until the arm of Providence shall raise the water to float it upon its unruffled bosom; the strife of nature being removed beyond the immediate vicinity of this frail sanctuary, by the express agency of God.

THE ASSUAGING OF THE WATERS.

In order to ascertain how far the flood had abated, Noah opened the window of the ark and sent forth a raven. He also sent forth a dove, but, finding no rest for her foot, she speedily returned. After this, "he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; and the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive-leaf plucked off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth."* The elements had now ceased their desolating conflict, and the waters floated in undisturbed supremacy over a depopulated world. The brightness of the sun, the calmness of the liquid mirror beneath, the loveliness of the sky, fringed with a drapery of transparent clouds, seem but as the smiles of lamentation and the mockery of woe. Like funereal lamps casting their clear light through the solitary gloom of the sepulchre, they only serve to show more distinctly the surrounding devastation. The shoreless waste reflects the splendors of the scene above, as if to mask the horrors that had been but too palpably realized in the depths beneath. Here nature appears in her gentlest repose at the very moment that her capacious womb is teeming with the dilacerations of a once beautiful world. The clouds which had gathered upon the horizon disperse before the rising sun, that pours a flood of light upon the vast liquid expanse, through which small patches of vegetation from the mountain tops appear to break the measureless uniformity of the watery waste. The waters had begun to subside. The dove hovers over an olive branch, which it is about to pluck and bear to the ark that appears faintly in the distance.