thundering far beneath you, down black, jagged, savage ravines; behind you, at one end of the valley, a range of snow-crowned mountains; before you, the same vast and magnificent perspective which arrested your admiration at first, with its infolding and retreating ranges of verdure and sunlight, and at the close, Mont Blanc flashing as lightning, as it were a mountain of pure

alabaster.

The fleecy clouds that here and there circled and touched it, or like a cohort of angels brushed its summit with their wings, added greatly to the glory; for the sunlight reflected from the snow upon the clouds, and from the clouds upon the snow, made a more glowing and dazzling splendor. The outlines of the mountains being so sharply defined against the serene blue of the sky, you might deem the whole mass to have been cut out from the ether. You have this view for hours, as you pass up the valley, but at this particular point it is the most glorious.

It was of such amazing effulgence at this hour, that no language can give any just idea of it. Gazing steadfastly and long upon it, I began to comprehend what Coleridge meant, when he said that he almost lost the sense of his own being in that of the mountain, so that it seemed to be a part of him and he of it. Gazing thus, your sense almost becomes dizzy in the tremulous effulgence. And then the sunset! The rich hues of sunset upon such a scene! The golden light upon the verdure, the warm crimson tints upon the snow, the crags glowing like jasper, the masses of shade cast from summit to summit, the shafts of light shooting past them into the sky, and all this flood of rich magnificence succeeded so rapidly by the cold grey of the snow, and gone entirely when the stars are visible above the mountains, and it is night!

Now again let me collect some images from the burning pen of Dante, who, if he had been set to draw from an earthly symbol, what his imagination painted of the figurings of Paradise, might have chosen this mountain at this evening hour. For, indeed, it seems as if this must be the way travelled by happy spirits from earth to heaven, and this the place where the angels of God are ascending and descending, each brighter than the sun.

"A lamping as of quick and volleyed lightning,
Within the bosom of that mighty sheen
Played tremulous.

And as some cliff, that from the bottom eyes
Its image mirrored in the crystal flood,

As if to admire its brave apparelling

Of verdure and of flowers; so, round about,
Eyeing the light, on more than million thrones,
Stood, eminent, whatever from our earth
Has to the skies returned.

Behold this fair assemblage, snowy white,

How numberless. The city where we dwell
Behold how vast; and these our seats so thronged
"Twixt gladness and amaze,

In sooth no will had I to utter aught,

Or hear. And, as a pilgrim, when he rests
Within the temple of his own, looks round
In breathless awe, and hopes sometime to tell
Of all its goodly state; e'en so mine eyes
Coursed up and down along the living light,
Now low, and now aloft, and now around,
Visiting every step.

Emboldened, on
I passed, as I remember, till my view
Hovered the brink of dread infinitude."

PARADISE, Cantos xxv and xxxi.

The feelings are various in viewing such a scene. It lifts the soul to God-it seems a symbol of his invisible glory—you are almost entranced with its splendor! Wonderful! that out of the materials of earth, air, ice, rock and mist, with the simple robe of light, such a fit type of the splendors of eternity can be constructed. It is the light that makes the glory. Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment! Who dwellest in light inaccessible and full of glory! It is God that makes the light; it is God that with it makes such shadows of his own brightness. But if such be the material, what is the immaterial ?—if such be the earthly, what is the spiritual ?—if such be the hem, as it were, of God's robe of creation, what is God? And if he can present to the weak sense of men in bodies of clay such ecstasy of material glory, what must be the scenes of spiritual glory presented to the incorporeal sense of those that love him?

"If such the sweetness of the streams,

What must the Fountain be,

Where saints and angels draw their bliss
Immediately from Thee?"

But the view of such a scene also makes one sensible of his own insignificance and sinfulness; it makes one feel how unfit he is for the presence of a God of such inaccessible glory. The one powerful impression made upon my mind was this: if out of such material elements the Divine Being can form to the eye a scene of such awful splendor, what mighty preparation of Divine Grace do we need, as sinful beings, before we can behold God-before we can see his face without perishing-before we can be admitted to his immediate spiritual presence! Ah, Mont Blanc, in such an hour, utters forth that sentence, Without holiness no man shall see God!

CHAPTER XXIII.

Pass of the Col de la Seigne.

AFTER a day or so of much enjoyment, I arrived at Courmayeur, thankful that I had been led to persevere in my pedestrian excursion. There are at this village some most salutary mineral springs, very like the Congress spring at Saratoga, resorted to by many of the Piedmontese. The water pours directly out of the rock, in a natural grotto, with which a rude building is connected, and in each tumbler deposits a good deal of flinty sediment. One might have enjoyed a fortnight at these refreshing waters, with such sublime scenery around, and I had a great mind to stay awhile, for I know of no such glorious watering-place in the world; but the difficult passes of the Col de la Seigne and the Col de Bonhomme were before me, and who could tell how long the fine weather I was enjoying might last, or how soon it might change? Courmayeur is close beneath Mont Blanc; ten minutes' walk from the village brings you to a full, magnificent view of him, much more perpendicular on this side than on that of Chamouny. You may step from a sward of the greenest delicious grass enamelled with flowers, into ice-bergs as old as the creation.

After some deliberation I resolved to start at once, with one of the brothers Proment for my guide, and had cause to be grateful for this resolution, since our fine days lasted but just long enough to bring us within three or four hours of Chamouny, and the mountain-passes could not have been crossed in bad weather.

Immediately on leaving the village, you have before you a very grand view of Mont Blanc, with his whole majestic train of sweeping snowy mountains. The Allée Blanche, up which you pass, must have been so named from the stupendous fields of ice and snow, and from those vast white glaciers, on the very borders of which you traverse a long time, as you may on the borders of the

Mer de Glace. There is no situation in which these mighty icecreations are seen to more advantage, or appear in greater sublimity. There is none where your path passes so near to them. You might suppose that it was in crossing one of these Alpine gorges verging on chaos, that Dante gathered first some dim struggling conception of the fantastic craggy circles of his nine hells. It would be easy to people the region with blue-pinched spirits, thrilling in thick-ribbed ice, and ghosts, fiend-like, chained to the splintered rocks, or wrestling in their dismal cloisters.

"The shore, encompassing th' abyss

Seems turreted with giants, half their length
Uprearing, horrible, whom Jove from heaven
Yet threatens, when his muttering thunder rolls."

Here you may see the distorted resemblances of a thousand prodigious things, crouching, deformed, unutterable, of earth, and ice, and subterranean, tortured floods, freezing or fiery, Phlege thon, Styx, Acheron, with all the abhorred brood of Night and Chaos; remnants of a world, where the thick air may have upborne upon its crude consistence winged lizards a league long, now petrified and fixed upright in mummy cases under coats of ice, as the bas-reliefs, and grinning, iceberg Caryatides of the mountains. The cold, hoarse brooks growl when the storm rages, till, fed from ten thousand sluices, they swell into impetuous cataracts, and thunder down, tearing the hills in their passage. Sometimes a whole glacier drops wedge-like into them, when they rise into broad imprisoned lakes, pressing and tugging at their crystal barriers, till at length, bursting all restraint, they are precipitated down into the vales with dreadful ruin.

Sometimes from a great height you look down upon the glaciers, and observe their monstrous minarets, battlements, shivered domes, and splintered, deep, frightful ravines, and sometimes you look up, where they seem as if pouring down from heaven across your path their frozen cataracts. The moraines, or colossal ridges of broken rocks, which they have ploughed up, are truly wonderful. Sometimes you can almost command the whole length and windings of the glacier up to its issue, and down to the point where a river