pentance, the habitation of Remorse. Nemesis dwells there, and Erinnys with her snakes. Nor is there any help for this, but in the mercy of Jesus Christ; nothing that will remove the red images of avenging Justice from the mind, but the washing of the guilty soul in the blood of the slain Lamb. Blessed be God, that will do it for the chief of sinners.

"There is a Fountain filled with blood,

Drawn from Immanuel's veins,

And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains."

Leaving out Mont Blanc, the romantic wildness and grandeur of the Valley from Ivrea up to Aoste, about fifteen leagues, are more exciting than in the other half of the way from Aoste to Courmayeur. There is the utmost luxuriance combined with sublimity, and savage desolation with beauty. Rich vines are trellised amidst rocks, hanging out their purple fruit over the precipices. The torn and thunder-rifted gorge at Fort Bard and beyond, is almost equal in wildness to the Via Mala in the passage of the Splugen. Precipices rise above you into perpendicular mountains, while a village hangs in the moonlight beneath the parapet of the road on the other side, and beyond and below the village, rushes the river. The combination of Italian and almost tropical vegetation with the grandeur of these mountains, is what especially strikes the mind.

Fort Bard appears like a white castle hanging in the air. It was such an impregnable position, crowning a pile of crags, over which alone there was any possibility of passing up or down the Valley, that the Austrians, who held it in 1800, were very near checking the progress of Napoleon, and so routing his army, before the battle of Marengo. But the fort must be carried. Some hundreds of daring soldiers scaled the dangerous and almost inaccessible mountain of the Albaredo, overhanging the castle, and there, with a single cannon, silenced the dread battery which prevented all approach to the passage. Then, in the conflict at midnight, the soldiers in the fort, under the fire of another cannon, which was poured over their heads from a belfry near the gate,

were compelled to surrender, and so the storm of victory passed on, to burst upon the plains of Italy.

At one of the small villages on our route, two young girls took passage for Aoste, whom I could not but admire for the modesty and beauty of their faces and manners. I had taken the front

seat or coupée of the coach, for the sake of clear vision; they were obliged to take the same, because there was none other left, the cool night air keeping the inside seats full. They seemed unwilling to acknowledge any disposition to sleep, but at length the youngest of the two fell asleep on her sister's arms, and the elder reclined and slept against the corner. When they awoke, they betook themselves to their devotions, and it was affecting to witness the simplicity and earnestness with which, whenever we passed an image of the Virgin by the roadside, they crossed themselves and prayed. Is it not sad to have this strong religious tendency, this yearning after the repose of the soul in faith, turned thus from its rightful object, and perverted into a sinful superstition? O, if the gospel could be clearly preached in Italy, how would the people, the common people, flock to the joyful sound! If Christ could there be lifted up, he would draw all men unto him. The Scribes and Pharisees would rage, undoubtedly, but the common people would hear him gladly, as of old. Well! the time is coming.

Have you ever been travelling in the diligence by night through a lovely country, and experienced the dilemma of the conflict between sleeping and waking at that hour of prime, when the dawn is breaking, and all the processes of nature are so exquisitely beautiful, that you wish for every sense to be on the alert to watch them? At length you decide the matter by getting out in the cool morning twilight, and walking till your frame is warm with exercise, and your eyes are opened. A delicious cup of coffee awaits you at the next post, and you feel refreshed as if the diligence had been to you a comfortable elastic mattrass, or, at the worst, a bed of heather in the wilderness, from which you rose to see the pale brow of the morning, as saith Dante, looking o'er the eastern cliff, lucent with jewels.

"Where we then were,

Two steps of her ascent the night had past,

And now the third was closing up its wing,

When I, who had so much of Adam with me,

Sank down upon my couch, o'ercome with sleep."

But the morning air is gently stirring the dew-laden leaves towards the breaking dawn, and bidding them drop their coronet of pearls upon the grass, in honor of the approaching sun, already making the East glow like a sapphire; and the birds are singing their sweet early hymn of praise; and the stars, that all night long spangled the firmament with fires, are dimly withdrawing into the blue ether; and between all this, and the fragrance of the aromatic eastern berry, if we too are not awake, and singing our morning hymn of gratitude and love, we shall make nature herself ashamed of us.

What pictures of beauty are the villages that lie nestled above us in the verdant nooks of the mountains! Ah yes, in the distance they are the very perfection of the romantic and picturesque, but the charm disappears when you ride through them as through a row of beggars on a dunghill. Both in the moral and material world, so far as man mingles his work with it, distance has always much to do with enchantment. Now up the broad valley, the secluded city of Aoste, nigh buried among mountains, opens upon us, the approach to it from the south as well as the north being most beautiful, through the rich foliage of magnificent chestnuts and walnuts. Romantic castles crown, here and there, the crags that rise from the bosom of the luxuriant vegetation.

CHAPTER XVIII.

The Grand St. Bernard by Moonlight.-Flood of the Drance.

It was about noon on Friday that I set out from Aoste on foot for the Grand St. Bernard, in order, by passing the mountain that night, to make a possible day's march to Chamouny before the Sabbath. Mine host gave me a miserable, drunken guide, a fat, bloated, hairy, savage looking wretch, whom, however, he recommended so highly, that between his word, and my anxiety to get on in season, I was persuaded to commit my knapsack to him, and we marched. But I almost had to drag the creature after me. He would drink nothing but wine, and quenched his thirst as often as he could get the opportunity; he was like a full hogshead attempting to walk. Then, at the last village below the Hospice, he stopped and ordered supper, saying that they would give him nothing but soup and water on the mountain, and he chose to have something solid and palatable. The poor fellow might have got a very sufficient supper at the Hospice gratis, but he could not forego his wine. In order to hurry him, I took my knapsack on my own shoulders and hastened on, leaving him to follow, if he chose. It was night-fall, and we arrived at the Hospice about eight o'clock by the light of the rising moon.

The view of the lovely lake and the Hospice by moonlight, with the surrounding mountains, makes one of the wildest and most impressive scenes, that can possibly be conceived of. There is a deep and awful stillness and solemnity, with the most gloomy grandeur.

"The moon, well nigh

To midnight hour belated, made the stars
Appear to wink and fade; and her broad disk
Seemed like a crag on fire, as up the vault

Her course she journeyed."-Dante.

The day being Friday, as before, I could get no meat, though I had walked seven mortal hours and the air was keen; not even an egg, though I was actually hungry. No wonder my drunkard was determined to eat at St. Remy; the devout instinct of his stomach taught him that it was fast-day at the Hospice, which I had forgotten. But the coffee was delicious. Such a cup of Mocha, with the richest boiled milk, I never tasted. The material elements of life provided by the good monks are of the best kind, and doubtless it was my fault being hungry on Friday. It was a very heretical appetite, for which I could not get even the absolution of an egg.

I persuaded a stout young herdsman at the Hospice to accompany me down the mountain, dismissed my drunkard, and after getting quite rested and enlivened by the hospitable coffee of the fast-keeping monks, we started about ten o'clock. Before leaving, I went once more over the magnificent collection in the Museum Egyptiacum at the Hospice, with the gallery of paintings. One of the paintings is a very remarkable piece, a blind fiddler by Espagnoletto.

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The moonlight descent of the mountain, in so glorious a night, is an excursion of the greatest enjoyment, the air being cold and sparkling, inspiriting, and bracing the frame for exercise. With what majesty and glory did the moon rise in the heavens! With what a flood of light, falling on the ancient grey peaks, crags, and rugged mountain ridges, glittering on the glaciers, shining on the white foaming torrents, gilding the snowy outlines with ermines of pale fire, robing the fir-forests with a veil of melancholy, thoughtful, solemn beauty In such an hour, in the stillness of midnight, the voices of the torrents, to the sky, the moon, and the mountains, go down into the soul. The wild gorges, the deep, torn ravines, the jagged precipices, the whi glaciers, are invested by this moonlight of harvest, amidst ther stern and awful desolation, with a charm that is indescribable. The little stone refuges by the path-side for storm-beaten travellers, and burial vaults for dead ones, slept quietly under the moc, with their iron grated windows, singular objects, of which no man could guess the purpose.

The lonely area of the Cantine, or house of refuge, so desolate