And far beyond it all sleeps, high in air, the Eifel with its hundred crater peaks; blue mound behind blue mound, melting into white haze.—­ Stangrave has walked upon those hills, and stood upon the crater-lip of the great Moselkopf, and dreamed beside the Laacher See, beneath the ancient abbey walls; and his thoughts flit across the Moselle flats towards his ancient haunts, as he asks himself—­How long has that old Eifel lain in such soft sleep?  How long ere it awake again?

It may awake, geologists confess,—­why not? and blacken all the skies with smoke of Tophet, pouring its streams of boiling mud once more to dam the Rhine, whelming the works of men in flood, and ash, and fire.  Why not?  The old earth seems so solid at first sight:  but look a little nearer, and this is the stuff of which she is made!—­The wreck of past earthquakes, the leavings of old floods, the washings of cold cinder heaps—­which are smouldering still below.

Stangrave knew that well enough.  He had climbed Vesuvius, Etna, Popocatepetl.  He had felt many an earthquake shock; and knew how far to trust the everlasting hills.  And was old David right, he thought that day, when he held the earthquake and the volcano as the truest symbols of the history of human kind, and of the dealings of their Maker with them?  All the magnificent Plutonic imagery of the Hebrew poets, had it no meaning for men now?  Did the Lord still uncover the foundations of the world, spiritual as well as physical, with the breath of His displeasure?  Was the solfa-tara of Tophet still ordained for tyrants?  And did the Lord still arise out of His place to shake terribly the earth?  Or, had the moral world grown as sleepy as the physical one had seemed to have done?  Would anything awful, unexpected, tragical, ever burst forth again from the heart of earth, or from the heart of man?

Surprising question!  What can ever happen henceforth, save infinite railroads and crystal palaces, peace and plenty, cockaigne and dilettantism, to the end of time?  Is it not full sixty whole years since the first French revolution, and six whole years since the revolution of all Europe?  Bah!—­change is a thing of the past, and tragedy a myth of our forefathers; war a bad habit of old barbarians, eradicated by the spread of an enlightened philanthropy.  Men know now how to govern the world far too well to need any divine visitations, much less divine punishments; and Stangrave was an Utopian dreamer, only to be excused by the fact that he had in his pocket the news that three great nations were gone forth to tear each other as of yore.

Nevertheless, looking round upon those grim earth-mounds and embrasures, he could not but give the men who put them there credit for supposing that they might be wanted.  Ah! but that might be only one of the direful necessities of the decaying civilisation of the old world.  What a contrast to the unarmed and peaceful prosperity of his own country!  Thank heaven, New England needed no fortresses, military roads, or standing armies!  True, but why that flush of contemptuous pity for the poor old world, which could only hold its own by such expensive and ugly methods?