commanders in Sallust. The upper bridge spans the cataractical performance of the Reuss at an angle in the mountain, where naturally there is not one inch of space for the sole of the foot, but a perpendicular cliff, against which the torrent rages, and in which the only way of blasting the rock, and scooping out a shelf or gallery for the passage on the other side, was by lowering down the workmen with ropes from the brow of the mountain, where, hanging over the boiling gulf, they bored the granite, and fixed their trains of powder.

The old bridge was only one arch thrown across the gorge, and but just broad enough to admit of two persons passing each other in safety, with scarcely any protection at the sides, and at a height of about a hundred feet above the torrent. It was a dizzy thing to pass it, and for persons of weak nerves dangerous, and to get upon it you coasted the gulf of zigzag terraces. The new

bridge is of two arches, with safe and strong parapets, and of ample width for carriages. Till the first bridge was made there was no passing this terrific chasm, no communication possible from one side to the other.

Who could have supposed that into this savage den, amidst its roar of waters, so distant from the world, so unsuitable for a battle field, there could have been poured the conflicting tides of the French Revolution, in a condensed murderous strife between two armies! Twice in the space of a little more than a month was the war campaign of 1799 driven through this pass by the French, Russians, and Austrians, conquering alternately. First in August the French charged the Austrians, and driving them across the Devil's Bridge, rushed pell mell after them, when the arch fell midway and precipitated the wedged masses of the soldiery into the boiling torrent. Then in September, that great war-wolf Suwarrow poured down with his starved Russians from the top of the St. Gothard. They devoured the soap in the village of Andermatt, and boiled and ate the tanned leather and raw hides, and in the strength of these aliments, drove the French across the Devil's Bridge, and rushed themselves to the passage. The French in their retreat broke down the bridge by blasting the arch, but this put no stop to the impetuous fury of the Rus sians, who crossed the chasm on beams of wood tied together

with the officers' scarfs, and in their rage to come at their enemies plunged hundreds of the foremost ranks of their own columns into the foaming cataract. It was more fearful meet

ing the fury of their enemies in this conflict, than having their path over the mountains swept by the dread avalanches. The war of human beings was worse than that of nature, though they had to encounter both. They dared the fight of the avalanches, that they might fight with each other. Such is human

passion, such is war!

Yet the world has deified its warriors, and starved its benefactors and poets. What sort of proportion is there between the benefit conferred upon the English nation by the Duke of Marlborough in the victory of Blenheim, and that bestowed upon England and the world by John Milton in the gift of Paradise Lost? None at all. The work done by the Poet is so infinitely superior to that accomplished by the Warrior, that you can scarcely institute a comparison.

And yet the Parliament and Queen of Great Britain bestowed upon the Duke of Marlborough after the battle of Blenheim a royal domain with royal revenues, besides devoting five hundred thousand pounds sterling to build a palace fit for so great a warrior to live in; while John Milton was obliged to sell the copyright of his great poem for ten pounds, and died comparatively unknown and poor! In England, by that great poem, thousands of people have been literally gaining their subsistence, and making their fortunes, to say nothing of the tens of thousands, whose minds have been invigorated and enlarged by feeding on it, while by the great victory, and the magnificent reward of it, revenues that might have supported thousands have been devoted exclusively to the luxury and splendor of a single family! So went the war-worshipping era of our world. At present it may be hoped, if poetry is not rising, war at least is at a discount.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Legends of the pass. Cowper's Memoria Technica.

AFTER the gorge of the Devil's Bridge, you plunge down the precipitous valley, by well constructed zigzags, crossing and recrossing the Reuss repeatedly, till you come to the savage defile of Schellinen, where for several miles the ravine is so deep and narrow, that the cliffs seem to arch the heavens, and shut out the light. The Reuss meanwhile keeps such a roaring din, making in the short space of four leagues a fall of 2500 feet, almost in a perpetual cataract, that the people have called this part of the way the Krachenthal, or crashing valley. The noise and the accompaniments are savage enough. The mountains seem ready to tumble into the bed of the river. "We tremble," said my companion under the influence of the scenery of the Gemmi, "lest the mountains should crush us; what must be that state of despair in men's hearts, which can call on the mountains to fall on them and bury them, rather than meet the face of God?"

There are curious legends in this part of the valley. Enormous fragments of rock are strewn around, as if they might have fallen here from the conflict of Titans, or angels, when they plucked the seated hills with all their load to throw at each other. One of them, almost a mountain by itself, nearly in the road, goes by the name of Teufelstein, or Devil's Stone, having been dropped, it is said, by the overworked demon, in attempting to get it across the St. Gothard pass. The legend runs that he set out to convey this crag across the valley for a wager, but let it slip, and lost the game. The manner in which the traveller gazes upon this rock, in consequence even of this foolish legend, the peculiar interest he feels in it, is a curious example of the power of imaginative association, the craving of the mind for some intelligent moral or meaning. In all things possible you must have

a human or a supernatural interest. The principle is universal. A child in the nursery would not be half so much interested by a simple engraving of a house, ever so well done, with merely the announcement, This is a house, as when you come to say, This is the house that Jack built; then what an interest! Then how the imagination peoples it! There is Jack, the malt, the cat, the rat, the priest, the milk-maid, and this is the cosy house, where all the wonders of the linked story had their existence. What a place of interest! Just so with the Devil's Crag. Ridiculous as the legend is, no man can pass that stone, without being interested in it, and perhaps seeing his disappointed Infernal Majesty in idea, with sail broad vans in the air above him, sweating like a day laborer, and ineffectually struggling to float beneath the weight. The common legends concerning the Devil do almost always represent him as outwitted, foiled, and cheated, instead of being successful in his villainy ;-it is a good sign. and prediction, for he must go down.

At Wasen I found a comfortable, excellent inn, a good, cheerful happy family, and a kind, hospitable host. They seemed well to do in the world, and were Romanists, as are most of the people of the Canton Uri. I went to bed thinking of the Capuchin's promise of bad weather, and glad that I had seen the St. Gothard pass in bright day. In the morning the Friar's prediction was still unaccomplished. Again the morning was fair, though the clouds were clinging to the mountains up and down the valley, sometimes in long ridges, sometimes in thick fleecy volumes, now surrounding the base half way down, now revealing only the lofty peaks, and now swept from the whole face of the gorge, and admitting the bright sun to fill it. At this moment, on the edge of the mountain top beside us, so lofty and perpendicular that it seems ready to fall, the sun is struggling with the fleecy masses of cloud glowing like silver, and the trees upon the verge of the cliff seem on fire as in a burning focus, while all around is grey mist.

We are now coming into a region trodden of old by great patriots, and consecrated at this day, to liberty, in history. We are getting upon the borders of the country of William Tell; we must not look at the scenery alone, for grand as it is, the

great thoughts and struggles of freedom are grander. In truth, a man ought not to travel through such a region without a fresh memory of connected localities and incidents. How much a man needs to know, to make a good traveller! Or rather, how much he needs to remember, and how vividly! The Poet Cowper, in one of his beautiful letters, recommends pedestrianizing as good for the memory. "I have," says he, "though not a good memory in general, yet a good local memory, and can recollect, by the help of a tree, or a stile, what you said on that particular spot. For this reason I purpose, when the summer is come, to walk with a book in my pocket; what I read at my fire-side, I forget, but what I read under a hedge, or at the side of a pond, that pond and that hedge will always bring to my remembrance." But suppose the gentle Poet wishes to recall the passages in some other part of the country. It would certainly be somewhat clumsy to have to carry about with you a pond or a hedge as a memoria technica; it would be less inconvenient to carry your whole library. And besides, what art shall there be to quicken the memory in knowledges already forgotten? The memory is a most perverse faculty; it treasures up things we could wish to forget, and forgets things we could wish to retain; but there is one chain, that no man can escape, except he goes to Jesus Christ, and that is, the memory of his own sins. To many a man, to all men "in their sins," the art of forgetting, could it but last for ever, would be the greatest of all blessings.

What an affecting page in the history of an individual mind is presented in those melancholy remorseful stanzas, said to have been written in a blank leaf of the Pleasures of Memory. They trace the human being; they present a more universal experience of our fallen nature by far, than the more agreeable, but more superficial recollections of childhood and of later days. They are as a fossil leaf, in which you observe the fibres, that characterized a whole living family of the vegetable creation. So do these stanzas read the experience of our species, not indeed, always so clearly acknowledged, even to one's own consciousness, but always existing, though sometimes like sympathetic letters, to be only revealed when brought to the fire.