too much enveloped with the slow-retiring fogs to detect them. On the side of the Righi under the eastern horizon you behold the little Lake of Lowertz, with the ruins of the village of Goldau, destroyed by the slide of the Rossberg, and you trace distinctly the path of the destroying avalanche, the vast groove of bare rock, where the mountain separated and thundered down the vale. A little beyond are the beautiful peaks of Schwytz I called the Mitres.

All this wondrous panorama is before us. Whatever side we turn, new points of beauty are disclosed. As the day advances, every image, fully defined, draws to its perfect place in the picture. A cloudless noon, with its still solemnity, would make visible, for a short time, every height and depth, every lake, mountain, town, streamlet, and village, that the eye could reach from this position, and then would pass again the lovely successive transitions of shade deepening into shade, and colors richlier burning, into the blaze of sun-set, and the soft melancholy twilight, till nothing could be seen from our high position but the stars in heaven. In a few hours we have witnessed, as on a central observatory, what the Poet Young calls

"the astonishing magnificence

Of unintelligent creation,"

from the numerous worlds that throng the firmament at midnight,

"where depth, height, breadth

Are lost in their extremes, and where to count

The thick sown glories in this field of fire

Perhaps a seraph's computation fails,"

to the beauty and sublimity of our own small world, revealed when theirs is hidden, in the break of dawn, and revealed with such an array of morning splendor, that not even Night and the Universe of stars can be for the moment a more entrancing spectacle!

And for whom hath God arranged all this? Not for the Angels alone, but for every eye that looks to him in love, for the bumblest mind and heart, that can look abroad and say, My

Father made them all! He made them, that his children might love him in them, and know him by them.

"The soul of man, His Face designed to see,
Who gave these wonders to be seen by man,
Has here a previous scene of objects great
On which to dwell; to stretch to that expanse
Of thought, to rise to that exalted height
Of admiration, to contract that awe,
And give her whole capacities that strength,
Which best may qualify for final joy.

The more our spirits are enlarged on earth
The deeper draught they shall receive of heaven.
Thou, who didst touch the lips of Jesse's son,
Rapt in sweet contemplation of those fires,
And set his harp in concert with the spheres,
Teach me, by this stupendous scaffolding
Creation's golden steps, to climb to Thee!"

YOUNG.

Before such a scene how ought the heart to expand with the love of God, and the adoration of his glory! Waken, O my soul, to morning worship with the whole creation around thee, and breathe forth, with all the works of God, the breath of gratitude and praise. What a scene is this! How beautiful, how beautiful! And if our hearts were in perfect unison with it, if there were within us a spiritual scenery, the work of divine grace, as fitting as this material, the creation of divine power, heaven with its purity and blessedness would not be far off from every one of us. And why should the light of the rising sun kindle earth and heaven into a smile so transcendently beautiful, and our souls not be enkindled in like manner in their horizon of spiritual glory? We need Divine Grace to take away our blindness. This rosy flame, into which the cold snowy mountain tops seemed suddenly changed by the sun upon them, was a symbol of what takes place with the truths of the Word of God, when the Spirit breathes upon them, and brings them to the soul. Then how they shine, with what lovely warmth of coloring, with what intense exciting brightness, with what interpenetrating glory, by which the soul itself is transfigured and raised to heaven!

So must God shine into our hearts to give us the light

of the knowledge of his glory, as it shines in the face of Jesus Christ. When this is done, then all things are filled with meaning and love.

And this whole scene of Night giving place to Morning, pouring like a flood over the wide earth, viewed from a height so commanding, may bring forcibly to mind the glory of the rising of the Sun of Righteousness upon the nations, the light and holiness of the gospel poured over the world and transfiguring its tribes and institutions with blessedness. From their post of observation in heaven, methinks Celestial Intelligences enjoy something such a view, as they see Christ's kingdom advancing, the troops of Darkness fleeing, the mists of Error rolling from the earth, the shrines of idolatry falling, the true temples of God everywhere rising, nation after nation coming to the light, the world awakening to God's praise resounding. From every clime they come, in every zone they kneel, from continents and islands, in sun-burned Ethiopia and ice-clad Greenland, Eastern Java and the natives of the farthest West, unfettered Africa and China from the thraldom of her gods.

"One Lord, one Father! Error has no place;
That creeping pestilence is driven away;

The breath of heaven has chased it. In the heart
No passion touches a discordant string.

One song employs all nations, and all cry
Worthy the Lamb, for he was slain for us!
The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks
Shout to each other, and the mountain tops
From distant mountains catch the flying joy,
Till, nation after nation taught the strain,
Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round!"

CHAPTER XXXII.

Lucerne to Einsiedeln.-Dr. Zay's history of the Rossberg Avalanche

WE left Lucerne at five o'clock in the morning, that is, myself and an English clergyman, whom I had promised at Geneva to meet at Lucerne and travel with him into Italy, down the pass of the Splugen. We were dropped by the steamer at the village of Brunnen in the Canton of Schwytz, near the little republic of Gersau, the whole of which occupied one village, and a principality of a few acres. The old town of Schwytz, from which the country of Switzerland takes its name, a town of old heroic remembrances and valorous men, is most romantically situated at the foot of those curious hierarchical mountains called the Mitres. We entered the old church, looked into the town-house with its interesting antique portraits, of real ancestral nobility, passed the Mitres, and the Goldau lake, and the Rossberg avalanche, and wound our way towards the curacy of Zwingle and the Abbey of Einsiedeln. There is much food for reflection, all the way, as well as much natural beauty for enjoyment. A few mornings ago we were overlooking all this scene from the summit of the Righi, how beautiful! But is there one spot in all this world of ours, where the thought of beauty is not linked sooner or later with that of pain and death?

No man can pass this Rossberg mountain without thinking of the dread catastrophe that here only a few years ago overwhelmed in so vast a burial three or four whole lovely villages at once;— one of the most terrible natural convulsions in all the history of Switzerland. Four hundred and fifty-seven persons are said to have perished beneath this mighty avalanche. The place out of which it broke in the mountain is a thousand feet in breadth by a hundred feet deep, and this falling mass extended bodily at least three miles in length. It shot across the valley with the

swiftness of a cannon-ball, so that in five minutes the villages were all crushed as if they had been egg-shells, or the mimic toys of children. And when the people looked towards the luxuriant vale, where the towns had lain smiling and secure, the whole region was a mass of smoking ruins. It makes one think of the sight that met the eyes of Abraham, when "he got up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the Lord," and all the country, where the cities of the plain had been, was as the smoke and scurf of a furnace.

But this history ought not to be related in any other language than the simple and powerful narrative of Dr. Zay, of the neighboring village of Arth, an eye-witness of the tremendous spectacle. I shall give his words, even though they may be familiar to my readers; a paraphrase would not be half so interesting.

"The summer of 1806," says he, "had been very rainy, and on the first and second of September it rained incessantly. New crevices were observed in the flank of the mountain, a sort of cracking noise was heard internally, stones started out of the ground, detached fragments of rocks rolled down the mountain; at two o'clock in the afternoon of the second of September, a large rock became loose, and in falling raised a cloud of black dust. Toward the lower part of the mountain, the ground seemed pressed down from above; and when a stick or a spade was driven in, it moved of itself. A man, who had been digging int his garden, ran away from fright at these extraordinary appearances; soon a fissure, larger than all the others, was observed; insensibly it increased; springs of water ceased all at once to flow; the pine-trees of the forest absolutely reeled; birds flew away screaming. A few minutes before five o'clock, the symptoms of some mighty catastrophe became still stronger; the whole surface of the mountain seemed to glide down, but so slowly as to afford time to the inhabitants to go away. An old man, who had often predicted some such disaster, was quietly smoking his pipe, when told by a young man, running by, that the mountain was in the act of falling; he rose and looked out, but came into his house again, saying he had time to fill another pipe. The young man, continuing to fly, was thrown down several times,