CHAPTER I.

Up the Alps.

Alps compared with the Himalayas and Andes-Their Combination of Charms-Lakes-Gorges-Pastoral Uplands-Herdsmen -William Tell-The Waldenses-A Contrast.

ITALY is bounded on the north by a wall of mountains so goodly of stature, so perfect in symmetry, and so rich in their apparelling of pine forest and meadow, of glacier and rock, that the like is not to be found again on earth.

The Himalayas and the Andes are loftier, but in everything save mere height above sea-level, these celebrated mountain chains are inferior to the Alps. Neither the Himalayas, though the glory of Asia, nor the Andes, though the pride of the South American continent, can boast that fine combination of opposite charms-that blending of

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softness and terror-that union of exquisite loveliness with savage sublimity—which are the glory of the Alps.

Whatever your taste, it will here be gratified. Is it the beautiful you delight in? How soft these meadows, and how bright their verdure! These crystal waters, how noiselessly they glide along! Not so when they sported amid yonder crags, and leaped with the wild shout of young freedom from precipice to precipice; but now they have caught the spirit of the scene in which they are moving, and steal onwards with softened flow, as if they feared to break the deep stillness of the vale which their presence gladdens. That lake, how transcendently lovely? White towns gleam out upon its strand, the vine dips its branches in its waters, and the hushed mountains stand around it, and, as Dante has it,

"From the bottom eye

Their image, mirror'd in the crystal flood,
As if to admire their brave apparelling

Of verdure and of flowers."

Or is it the wild and romantic that pleases you? Fear not, before evening closes in you shall be gratified to the full. Ever as you go, spots of

romantic grandeur, nooks of fairy wildness and beauty, will all day long be suddenly starting up before you. The mountains will open ever and anon, and disclose far-retreating ravines, with the torrent dashing through them, and the silent pine forest hanging on their sides, and châlets nestling on their cliffs, and the tumultuous glacier rolling its frozen billows for ever downwards from yonder naked peaks, yet never able to advance, and chafing perpetually in impotent fury against the invisible power that holds it back from devastating the beauty of the vale beneath.

Or is it the terrible and grand only that can stir you? Well, here are gorges, across which savage rocks fling their black shadows, making it, even at noon-day, dark as night. The light is all around, bathing the valley, tinting the mountain peak, but no ray can enter here: eternal gloom nestles in the pass. Bunyan must have passed this way, and borrowed the doleful images and hideous terrors with which he has painted his "Valley of the Shadow of Death" from this region of shadows. But fear not the darkness; pass on. You have threaded the gorge, but no sooner have you done so than new terrors salute you. Along

the edge of this dizzy precipice, with the mist of the foaming cataract darkening it, lies your path. One heedless step will precipitate you into these boiling waters and black rocks at the bottom. Now you are safely across, and have caught no harm, save only a wetting from the a wetting from the spray, which rises in a perpetual cloud from the cauldron below.

Grander yet grows the region. Terror is heaped upon terror; till, at last, the mountains rise around you the very perfection of naked, desolate, savage, appalling sublimity. Surely this must have been the scene of some fearful war in days gone by. It was, in truth. Mightier combatants than man have here striven in fierce conflict. How shortlived, comparatively, are the marks of man's strife! The greatest battle that ever was fought has left no prints which a few months could not blot out. Spring comes with her buds, and summer with her flowers, and erase with kindly touch the red stains, and the unsightly scars, which the shock of armies and the hideous engines of war have left on the spot. The flowers grow where the warrior's blood was spilt. The vine now flourishes on the plain of Marengo; the corn waves on the field of Waterloo. The heights of the Alma, and the vales

ELEMENTAL CONFLICTS.

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of Inkerman, have resumed their verdure, and are green and flourishing as before the iron showers of that terrible winter which so often stained their turf with gore, and piled the slain upon them in ghastly heaps.

But this region, after untold centuries, remains scathed and blackened, as if the conflict that so devastated it had ended but yesterday. None but Heaven's bolts could have imprinted scars like these. Yes, earthquake, and tempest, and lightning -three redoubtable wrestlers-have here tried their strength in the attempt to overturn these giants of earth. But the giants have conquered, though they have come not unscathed out of the conflict. Look here! You see that hideous gash in the mountain. Earthquake only could have cleft it

so.

How it must have been buffeted and tossed, rocked and strained, in the gripe of its terrible enemy, before it submitted to be so wounded! You see these pinnacles, so torn and jagged, that shoot into the sky! These tell of the tempests of unnumbered winters. Cast your eye on these masses that strew the vale below. None but the artillery of the heavens could have torn them from the mountain's crest, and left them where they are.