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great uses, and easily passed into an object of worship. Hence the god Terminus amongst the Romans. This religious observance towards rude stones is one of the most ancient and universal of all customs. Traces of it are to be found in almost all, and especially in these Northern nations; and to this day in Lapland, where heathenism is not yet entirely extirpated, their chief divinity, which they call Stor Junkare, is nothing more than a rude stone.

Some writers, among the moderns, because the Druids ordinarily made no use of images in their worship, have given in to an opinion, that their religion was founded on the unity of the Godhead. Bu this is no just consequence. The spirituality of the idea, admitting their idea to have been spiritual, does not infer the unity of the object. All the ancient authors who speak of this order agree, that, besides those great and more distinguishing objects of their worship already mentioned, they had gods answerable to those adored by the Romans. And we know that the Northern nations who overran the Roman Empire had in fact a great plurality of gods, whose attributes, though not their names, bore a close analogy to the idols of the South

ern world.

The Druids performed the highest act of religion by sacrifice, agreeably to the custom of all other nations. They not only offered up beasts, but even human victims; a barbarity almost universal in the heathen world, but exercised more uniformly, and with circumstances of peculiar cruelty, amongst those nations where the religion of the Druids prevailed. They held that the life of a man was the only atonement for the life of a man. They frequently enclosed a number of wretches, some captives, some criminals, and, when these were wanting, even innocent victims, in a gigantic statue of wicker-work, to which they set fire, and invoked their deities amidst the horrid cries and shrieks of the sufferers, and the shouts of those who assisted at this tremendous rite.

There were none among the ancients more eminent for all the arts of divination than the Druids. Many of the superstitious practices in use to this day among the country people for discovering their future fortune seem to be remains of Druidism. Futurity is the great concern of mankind. Whilst the wise and learned look back upon experience and history, and reason from things past about events to come, it is natural for the rude and ignorant, who have the same desires without the same reasonable means of satisfaction, to inquire into the secrets of futurity, and to govern their conduct by omens, dreams, and prodigies. The Druids, as well as the Etruscan and Roman priesthood, attended with diligence the flight of birds, the pecking of chickens, and the entrails of their animal sacrifices. It was obvious that no contemptible prognostics of the weather were to be taken from certain motions and appearances in birds and beasts. A people who lived mostly in the open air must have been well skilled in these observations. And as changes in the weather influenced much the fortune of their huntings, or their harvests, which were all their fortunes, it was easy to apply the same prognostics to every event by a transition very natural and common; and thus probably arose the science of auspices, which formerly guided the deliberations of councils, and the motions of armies, though now they only serve, and scarcely serve, te amuse the vulgar.

The Druid temple is represented to have been nothing more than a consecrated wood. The ancients speak of no other. But monuments remain which show that the Druids were not in this respect wholly confined to groves. They had also a species of building, which in all probability was destined to religious use. This sort of structure was indeed without walls or roof. It was a colonnade, generally circular, of huge rude stones, sometimes single, sometimes double; sometimes with, often without, an

architrave. These open temples were not in all respects peculiar to the Northern nations. Those of the Greeks which were dedicated to the celestial gods, ought in strictness to have had no roof, and were thence called Hypathra.

Many of these monuments remain in the British islands, curious for their antiquity, or astonishing for the greatness of the work; enormous masses of rock, so poised as to be set in motion with the slightest touch, yet not to be pushed from their place by a very great power: vast altars, peculiar and mystical in their structure, thrones, basins, heaps or kearns; and a variety of other works, displaying a wild industry, and a strange mixture of ingenuity and rudeness. But they are all worthy of attention; not only as such monuments often clear up the darkness, and supply the defects, of history, but as they lay open a noble field of speculation for those who study the changes which have happened in the manners, opinions, and sciences of men, and who think them as worthy of regard as the fortune of wars, and the revolutions of kingdoms.

The short account which I have here given does not contain the whole of what is handed down to us by ancient writers, or discovered by modern research, concerning this remarkable order. But I have selected those which appear to me the most striking features, and such as throw the strongest light on the genius and true character of the Druidical institution. In some respects it was undoubtedly very singular; it stood out more from the body of the people than the priesthood of other nations; and their knowledge and policy appeared the more striking by being contrasted with the great simplicity and rudeness of the people over whom they presided. But, notwithstanding some peculiar appearances and practices, it is impossible not to perceive a great conformity between this and the ancient orders which have been established for the purposes

of religion in almost all countries. For, to say nothing of the resemblance which many have traced between this and the Jewish priesthood, the Persian Magi, and the India Brachmans, it did not so greatly differ from the Roman priesthood either in the original objects, or in the general mode of worship, or in the constitution of their hierarchy. In the original institution, neither of these nations had the use of images; the rules of the Salian as well as Druid discipline were delivered in verse; both orders were under an elective head; and both were for a long time the lawyers of their country. So that when the order of Druids was suppressed by the emperors, it was rather from a dread of an influence incompatible with the Roman government, than from any dislike of their religious opinions.

THE WITCH'S DAUGHTER.

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BY JOHN G. WHITTIER.

T was the pleasant harvest time,
When cellar-bins are closely stowed,
And garrets bend beneath their load,

And the old swallow-haunted barns-
Brown-gabled, long, and full of seams
Through which the moted sunlight streams,

And winds blow freshly in, to shake

The red plumes of the roosted cocks,

And the loose haymow's scented locks

Are filled with summer's ripened stores,
Its odorous grass and barley sheaves,
From their low scaffolds to their eaves.

On Esek Harden's oaken floor,

With many an autumn threshing worn,
Lay the heaped ears of unhusked corn.

And thither came young men and maids,
Beneath a moon that, large and low,
Lit that sweet eve of long ago.

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