MOUNTAIN MOODS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2622, 15 June 1904, Page 77

MOUNTAIN MOODS.

Jove strikes the Titans down, Not when they set about their mountain piling, But when another rock would crown their work. — Eobert Browning. Undoubtedly the spirit grows, feels its thews as it were, takes hold of the planet, the universe, the infinite, the ages, eternity, and cannot return to the things of yesterday. Those who have broken from the pettinesses of life, and are climbing slowly, with tears, and blood maybe, from their olden selves, will realise this when God leads them forth among His mountains. I regret that we natives of a mountainous land should feel so little of the spirit that pervades and emanates Irom those glorious works of God. Are we not all, in our little ways, mountain pillars, and, alas ! who of all the Titans has set the crowning rock to this structure? Burns, the lyrist of the ages, whose spirit thrilled like the soul of a sensitive woman to the humblest call for sympathy, who might have crowned the rustic life of a noble land with perfect song, was smitten down by the fumes of a bowl, the seductions of a shallow spirit. Milton, the bard divine, the God-like builder of our grandest epic, "in darkness, and by dangers compassed round, and solitude," would' shape a poem to survive the ages ; and, alas, it is marred by the Puritanic narrowness of his times. Tennyson, the poet of the- Victorian, era, a time of Titans, sends his grandest work forth into God's infiinite, " when all his mind is clouded with a doubt," and mars

many a noble verse with morbid melancholy. Not one ! — not one of all the poets, ihose voices of God to a darkened world, but fails on the verge, and has some grave or altogether regrettable -weakness. But turn to the mountains, the works of God. Far back into the pas>t, far forward into the future, they stood ; they will stand. Age after age the stoims assail ; but, magnificent still, they await the coming storm. About their rocky ribs the ocean thunders ox* the torrent booms, but calmly they tak3 the sunshine or tha cloud, and feet their hoary brows among the stars. To we pigmy mountain pillars they proclaim the eternal truth — not in a day, ai year, an age will our -work be perfected, but in the eternal hereafter of God, and the tender mists and light will enfold those glorious mountains whereon the sun of God's righteousness will shine for ever. Rock of Ages cleft for me, Let me hide myself in thee. Charles Oscar Palmes.

I — Many animals possess more than two ' eyes, which do not act together. A leech, ■ for example, has 10 eyes on the top of its ■ head, -which do not work in concert, and a kind of marine worm has two eyes on the head and a ' row down each aide of the " body. Some lizards have an extra eye on the top of the head, which does not act 1 with the other two. A bee or wasp has two large compound eyea which possibly help each other and are used for near vision, and also three little simple eyes on the top of the head', which are employed for seeing* things , a long way off.