"All pale and dim, as if from rest
The ghost of the late buried sun
Had crept into the skies."

The level beam fell along a lonely coast, on brown precipice and gray pebbly shore, here throwing into darker shade some wooded recess, there soliciting into prominence some tall cliff whitened by the cormorant. The dark-browed precipice, in which the cavern is hollowed, stood out in doubtful relief; while the cavern itself - bristling gray with icicles, that showed like the tags of a dead dress seemed tenanted, in the exaggerative gloom, with all manner of suggestive shapes. Here a sheeted uncertainty sat beside the wall, or looked out from one of the darker openings upon the sea; there a broken skeleton seemed grovelling upon the floor. There was a wild luxury in calling to mind, as one gazed from the melancholy interior on the pale wake of the moon, that for miles on either hand there was not a human dwelling, save the deserted hut of a fisherman who perished in a storm. The reader may perhaps remember, that in exactly such a scene does the poet Collins find a home for his sublime personification of Fear.

Say, wilt thou shroud in haunted cell,

Or in some hollowed seat,

'Gainst which the big waves beat,

With shuddering, meek, submitted thought,

Hear drowning seamen's cries in tempests brought?"

I spent the greater part of a week among the fossiliferous deposits of Dudley, and succeeded in procuring a tolerably fair set of fossils, and in cultivating a tolerably competent acquaintance with the appearances which they exhibit in their various states of keeping. It is an important matter to educate the eye. Should there be days of health and the exploration of the Scottish Grauwacke in store for me, I may find my brief

sojourn among the English Silurians of some little advantage. Fossils in our ancient southern deposits are exceedingly rare; and there is, in consequence, a lack of data by which to ascertain the age of the formations in which they occur, and which they fail sufficiently to mark. The tablets are devoid of inscriptions, save that we here and there find a half-effaced character, or the outline of some sorely worn hieroglyphic. And yet, had the few fossils hitherto discovered been preserved and brought together, their joint testimony might be found to amount to something. The Graptolites of Peebles-shire and Galloway are tolerably well known as identical with English species, the Graptolithus Ludensis and Graptolithus foliaceus,

which possess, however, a wide range in the more ancient rocks, passing downwards from beds of the Upper Silurian, to deposits that lie deep in what was once termed the Cambrian series. In Peebles-shire, at Wrae-hill, says Mr. Nicol, shells have been detected in a Grauwacke limestone, now unluckily no longer accessible. It is stated by Mr. Maclaren, in his elaborate and singularly satisfactory Treatise on the Geology of Fife and the Lothians, that he succeeded in disinterring two organisms, a small orthoceratite, and what seemed to be a confused accumulation of the shattered fragments of minute trilobites, from out of one of the Grauwacke patches which occur among the Pentlands. I have been informed by the late Mr. William Laidlaw, the trusted friend of Sir Walter Scott, that he once disinterred a large bivalve from amid the Grauwackes of Selkirkshire. The apparent remains of broken terebratulæ have been found in various localities in the Grauwacke of Galloway, and atrypæ and tentaculites in a rather equivocal deposit at Girvan, deemed Silurian. Were the various scattered fragments of the fossiliferous record to be brought carefully together, they might be found sufficiently complete to give

one at least a few definite ideas regarding the times which preceded in Scotland the age of the Coccosteus and Pterichthys.

There wons a barber in Dudley, who holds a sort of fossil agency between the quarrier and the public, of whom I purchased several fine trilobites, one of them, at least, in the most perfect state of keeping I have yet seen: the living creature could not have been more complete in every plate and joint of the head and back; but, as in all the other specimens of trilobite known to the geologist, it presents no trace of the abdominal portion. I procured another specimen rolled up in the peculiar ball-form so often figured, with the tail in contact with the head. It seems not unworthy of remark, that the female lobster, when her spawn is ripening in an external patch on her abdomen, affects for its protection the same rolled form. Her dorsal plates curve round from the joint at the carpace, till the tail-flap rests on her breast; and the multitudinous dark-colored eggs, which, having no hard shell of their own to protect them, would be otherwise exposed to every hungry marauder of the deep, are thus covered up by the strong mail with which the animal is herself protected. When we take the fact into account, that in no specimen of trilobite, however well preserved, do we find abdominal plates, and that the balllike form is so exceedingly common, may we not infer that this ancient crustacean was shelled on but the back and head, and that it coiled itself round, to protect a defenceless abdomen, in the manner the female lobster coils itself round to protect its defenceless spawn? In yet another specimen which I purchased from the barber, there is an eye of the Asaphus Caudatus, which presents, in a state of tolerable keeping, its numerous rows of facets. So far as is yet known, the eye which first saw the light on this ancient earth of ours gave access to it through four hundred and fifty distinct spherical lenses. The barber

had been in the way of selling Dudley fossils, he told me, for a good many years; and his father had been in the way of selling them for a good many more; but neither he nor his father had ever seen among them any portion of an ichthyolite. The crustaceans, with their many-jointed plates and many-windowed eyes, are, so far as is yet known, the highest organisms of the deposit.

CHAPTER VI.

Stourbridge. Effect of Plutonic Convulsion on the surrounding Scenery. - Hagley; Description in the "Seasons."- Geology the true Anatomy of Landscape. - Geologic Sketch of Hagley. - The Road to the Races. -The old Stone-cutter. Thomson's Hollow. - His visits to Hagley. - Shenstone's Urn. Peculiarities of Taste founded often on a Substratum of Personal Character. Illustration. Rousseau. Pope's Haunt. - Lyttelton's high Admiration of the Genius of Pope. - Description. Singularly extensive and beautiful Landscape; drawn by Thomson. - Reflection. - Amazing Multiplicity of the Prospect illustrative of a Peculiarity in the Descriptions of the "Seasons."- Addison's Canon on Landscape; corroborated by Shenstone.

I LEFT Dudley by the morning coach for Stourbridge, and arrived, all unwittingly, during the bustle of its season of periodic license, the yearly races. Stourbridge is merely a smaller Wolverhampton,- built on the same lower deposit of the New Red Sandstone, of the same sort of red brick, and roofed and floored with the same sort of red tiles. The surrounding country is, however, more pleasingly varied by hill and valley. Plutonic convulsion from beneath has given to the flat incoherent formation a diversity of surface not its own; and we see it tempested into waves, over the unseen trappean masses, like ocean over the back of some huge sea-monster. In passing on to the south and west, one finds bolder and still bolder inequalities of surface; the hills rise higher, and are more richly wooded, until at length, little more than three miles from Stourbridge, in a locality where the disturbing rock has broken through, and forms a chain of picturesque trap eminences, there may be seen some of at once the finest and