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honestly , though blindly , worshipped , and at his death they ratified the apotheQsis of his grateful subjects and inducted him into their community , and he believed them , that they were the gods of earth , and that he himself had become a partaker of their divinity . He still presided over the destinies of his tribe . He was their Hercules , their Mars ,, or their Odin . In their
migrations from the east to the north they bore his shrine , and his spirit dwelt therein proudly . When Britain was doomed to sustain their fierce invasion , they thought to secure its permanent possession by hewing in its eternal cliff , his image and his altar . And now a wonderful change awaited the hitherto deceived but not utterly depraved deity of their and his own imagination .
Christianity had already sanctified the soil , in which the attempt was made at this unholy consecration . The Bible was in the land , and the spirit who had hitherto only floated over lands where the powers of darkness reigned , at length learned how spirits had deceived him ; how he had been the misleader of men , and the -companion of demons ; and he loathed his own impious honours ; and the material forms , by sympathy , or by the spirits * agency , testified to the transformation of him whom they represented , and the image turned its back upon the altar , and raised the Bible in its hand ; while to his affrighted followers , when next they resorted to the red rock temple , the billows seemed to
murmur , and every rock and cavern to respond , a Miserere , Domine . * Afterwards , when the power which was over me had led me farther towards sanity and soundness , I could begin to bear that the faint shadow of humanity should cross my lengthened and lengthening walks , and the sound of its distant voice , sometimes mingle with the unceasing and peerless music of the billows .
I could master the toilsome ascent to the cliff , where , at a depth of a hundred feet from its summit , ( it rises almost perpendicularly about five times that height from the sea beneath , ) was the cavern called * The Hermit ' s Hole / in which some ascetic , yrho had forsworn the world , is said to have spent the long close of his life without ever ascending to the hill above , or descending to the beach below . It is only accessible by a path most perilous , on which to
turn is impossible , and to slip is destruction . On the downs , which are abruptly terminated by this cliff , there is , hard by , a little deli in whose shelter nestles a precious little colony of trees and bushes , as if they would not have their species altogether excluded from a scene which , in all its bleakness , has so much of beauty .
Here I could read , and even grow critical , upon the never-failing Waverley novels . There is a hermit in one of them , in the motto at least of a chapter in the Monastery , ' who offers some points of resemblance , but more of contrast , to the legepdary recluse of Culver . I have traced both their paths , and here is the m ap * First , for Sir Walter Scott ' s : —
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Sandowtv Bayr . 277
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1832, page 277, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1810/page/61/
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