SUMMIT OF THE PASS.

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heights, you can only stand and look up at them. Oh, how you would have liked, from these heavenkissing peaks, to have surveyed the Alps—to have seen the horizon, embracing in its vast circle gleaming mountain peaks in multitude like the stars of heaven-or, turning to the south, had a glimpse mayhap of Italy, afar off, with the bright light upon her green robe, and appearing, by contrast with the naked and desolate wastes around you, like the celestial plains seen in vision! But if you miss the pleasure of such an enterprise, you escape its dangers. And these are by no means insignificant. Radiant as the mountain seems, with all at rest about it, it abounds with thick-set snares, which lurk unseen beneath its dazzling surface, and lie in wait, as it were, for the traveller. There are fathomless crevices-there are blinding tempests there are precipices which run sheer down many hundred fathoms-and there are whelming avalanches, which the slightest disturbance of the air may draw down upon you, consigning you to a tomb never to be opened till the Great Day. Rest satisfied, then, with the pass, and tempt not heights which it was not meant the human foot should climb.

The great passes into Italy are four-the Splugen, the St Gothard, the Simplon, and the Mount Cenis. We mention them in the order in which they lie from east to west. There are a great many minor passes, traversable on mules or in light chars, with green nooks and white peaks lying all along them like pearls. But these four are the great passes, and the most commonly sought by the traveller, by reason both of the excellence of their roads and the magnificence of their scenery. It is the genius of conquest which we have to thank for these great highways, which a better age will doubtless turn to nobler uses than the original ones. The Mount Cenis route the author has traversed oftener than once. It has its fine points, but, on the whole, is the tamest of the four great Alpine routes. It rises 6780 feet above sea level, and, of course, falls short, by some four or six thousand feet, of the snow-clad summits beside it. Its chief charm, and it is no small one, is the abruptness of the descent towards Italy, enabling the traveller to accomplish an almost instantaneous transition from the bare wilds and wintry climate of the mountains to the eternal summer at their feet. For, let the traveller come

PASSES INTO ITALY.

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at what season he may, even when winter enchains northern Europe, he will find summer waiting here to conduct him over plains bathed in light-such light as can come only from an Italian sun-and fields strewn with perpetual flowers.

This is

The St

The Simplon pass, the next on the east, is about two hundred feet lower than Mount Cenis. Its highest point is 6578 feet above sea level. Higher than either is the pass of the Splugen. The person who scales the sixteen zigzags that lead up the face of that mountain will find himself at a height of 6814 feet above the sea. but a few feet lower than the St Gothard. Gothard the author traversed on foot last autumn. The pathway on either side is one long walk of grandeur and sublimity. It is entitled to be called the centre of Europe, for from thence its four great rivers go forth. Within a radius of twenty miles, from the St Gothard as a centre, the following rivers have their rise:-The Rhone, which runs westward, and waters France; the Rhine, which, taking a northerly course, pours its milky stream through the valleys of Switzerland and the flats of Belgium and Holland; the Danube (more remotely), whose dark waters roll eastward, and lave

the plains of Germany and the cities of Austria; and finally, the Ticino, which flows rapidly off to the south, as if impatient to reach its own bright land of sunny Italy. It is the St Gothard route which the author has had in his eye mainly in his present sketch of the Alps, and the passage across them.

We were on the summit of the pass, standing in the midst of its terrors and splendours, and it is hard to say whether terror or splendour predominates. We were putting the question whether we did well to regret that we could not climb higher, and from these naked peaks gaze on sublimities and terrors greater still. We think we do well not to regret this. The highest point in the landscape is seldom the best for seeing its beauties. It is like the highest station in society, which of all positions is perhaps the least advantageous for surveying the scenery of the moral and social world. In both cases gradation is lost, and what a charm gradation imparts to both physical and moral scenery we need not explain. To stand in the vale and see the quiet green slopes overtopped by the pine forests, the pine forests surmounted by the naked nodding cliffs, the cliffs by the sharp wavy ridges

of the mountain, and these again by the white summits which rise sublimely above all, is fine indeed is surpassingly grand; but it is not nearly so fine, it is in fact comparatively poor, to stand on these summits and look downwards. Many have ascended Mont Blanc. Here, on the highest stand-point that Europe furnishes, and with a vast and glorious panorama around, one might think the prospect would be magnificent and the description correspondingly glowing. With France, Italy, and Switzerland at the feet of the spectator, the tamest pencil might catch fire, and the most prosaic pen might become poetic. So one should think; yet we know of no description of the view from Mont Blanc that is more than passable. And for this we suspect there is a good reason, even that there is no good prospect to be had. You have overshot the mark: you have ascended too high: below you is only a shadowy picture, a confused blending of all forms and colours, of lakes and cities, of mountains and plains, without sublimity, and even without order. And so in the moral world: to stand on a throne and look down upon society, must be something very like standing on the summit of Mont Blanc