THE monuments which human art has raised to human pride or power may decay with that power, or survive to mock that pride; but sooner or later they perish-their place knows them not. In the aspect of a ruin, however imposing in itself, and however magnificent or dear the associations connected with it, there is always something sad and humiliating, reminding us how poor and how frail are the works of man, how unstable his hopes, and how limited his capacity compared to his aspirations! But when man has made to himself monuments of the works of God; when the memory of human affections, human intellect, human power, is blended with the immutable features of nature, they consecrate each other, and both endure together to the end. In a state of high civilization, man trusts to the record of brick and marble-the pyramid, the column, the temple, the tomb :

"Then the bust

And altar rise-then sink again to dust."

In the earlier stages of society, the isolated rock-the mountain, cloud-encircled-the river, rolling to its ocean-home

* This little tale is founded on a striking incident related in Humboldt's narrative. The facts remain unaltered.

the very stars themselves-were endued with sympathies, and constituted the first, as they will be the last, witnesses and records of our human destinies and feelings. The glories of the Parthenon shall fade into oblivion; but while the heights of Thermopyla stand, and while a wave murmurs in the gulph of Salamis, a voice shall cry aloud to the universe-"Freedom and glory to those who can dare to die!-woe and everlasting infamy to him who would enthral the unconquerable spirit!" The Coliseum with its sanguinary trophies is crumbling to decay; but the islet of Nisida, where Brutus parted with his Portia-the steep of Leucadia, still remain fixed as the foundations of the earth; and lasting as the round world itself shall be the memories that hover over them! As long as the waters of the Hellespont flow between Sestos and Abydos, the fame of the love that perished there shall never pass away. A traveller, pursuing his weary way through the midst of an African desert-a barren, desolate, and almost boundless solitude--found a gigantic sculptured head, shattered and halfburied in the sand; and near it the fragment of a pedestal, on which these words might be with pain deciphered: I am Ozymandias, King of kings; look upon my works, ye mighty ones, and despair!" Who was Ozymandias?—where are now his works?—what bond of thought or feeling links his past with our present? The Arab, with his beasts of burthen, tramples unheeding over these forlorn vestiges of human art and human grandeur. In the wildest part of the New Continent, hidden amid the depths of interminable forests, there stands a huge rock, hallowed by a tradition so recent that the man is not yet grey-headed who was born its contemporary; but that rock, and the tale which consecrates it, shall carry down to future ages a deep lesson-a moral interest lasting as itself-however the aspect of things and the conditions of people change around it. Henceforth no man shall gaze on it with careless eye; but each shall whisper to his own bosom "What is stronger than love in a mother's heart ?—what more fearful than power wielded by ignorance?

-or what more lamentable than the abuse of a beneficent name to purposes of selfish cruelty?"

Those vast regions which occupy the central part of South America, stretching from Guinea to the foot of the Andes, overspread with gigantic and primeval forests, and watered by mighty rivers--those solitary wilds where man appears unessential in the scale of creation, and the traces of his power are few and far between-have lately occupied much of the attention of Europeans; partly from the extraordinary events and unexpected revolutions which have convulsed the nations round them; and partly from the researches of enterprising travellers who have penetrated into their remotest districts. But till within the last twenty years these wild regions have been unknown, except through the means of the Spanish and Portuguese priests, settled as missionaries along the banks of the Orinoco and the Paraguay. The men thus devoted to utter banishment from all intercourse with civilized life, are generally Franciscan or Capuchin friars, born in the Spanish Colonies. Their pious duties are sometimes voluntary, and sometimes imposed by the superiors of their order; in either case their destiny appears at first view deplorable, and their self-sacrifice sublime; yet, when we recollect that these poor monks generally exchanged the monotonous solitude of the cloister for the magnificent loneliness of the boundless woods and far-spreading savannahs, the sacrifice appears less terrible; even where accompanied by suffering, privation, and occasionally by danger. When these men combine with their religious zeal some degree of understanding and enlightened benevolence, they have been enabled to enlarge the sphere of knowledge and civilization, by exploring the productions and geography of these unknown regions; and by collecting into villages and humanizing the manners of the native tribes, who seem strangely to unite the fiercest and most abhorred traits of savage life, with some of the gentlest instincts of our common nature. But when it has happened that

these priests have been men of narrow minds and tyrannical ̄ tempers, they have on some occasions fearfully abused the authority entrusted to them; and being removed many thousand miles from the European settlements and the restraint of the laws, the power they have exercised has been as far beyond control as the calamities they have caused have been beyond all remedy and all relief.

Unfortunately for those who were trusted to his charge, Father Gomez was a missionary of this character. He was a Franciscan friar of the order of Observance, and he dwelt in the village of San Fernando, near the source of the Orinoco, whence his authority extended as president over several missions in the neighbourhood of which San Fernando was the capital. The temper of this man was naturally cruel and despotic; he was wholly uneducated, and had no idea, no feeling, of the true spirit of christian benevolence: in this respect, the savages whom he had been sent to instruct and civilize were in reality less savage and less ignorant than himself.

Among the passions and vices which Father Gomez had brought from his cell in the convent of Angostara, to spread contamination and oppression through his new domain, were pride and avarice; and both were interested in increasing the number of his converts, or rather, of his slaves. In spite of the wise and humane law of Charles the Third, prohibiting the conversion of the Indian natives by force, Gomez, like others of his brethren in the more distant missions, often accomplished his purpose by direct violence. He was accustomed to go, with a party of his people, and lie in wait near the hordes of unreclaimed Indians: when the men were absent, he would forcibly seize on the women and children, bind them, and bring them off in triumph to his village. There, being baptized and taught to make the sign of the cross, they were called Christians, but in reality were slaves. In general, the women thus detained pined away and died; but the children became accustomed to their new mode of life, forgot their woods, and