We croffed the river, below the fall, in a boat, and had leifure to obferve the furrounding fcenery. The cataract, however, had for me a fort of fascinating power, which, if I withdrew my eyes for a moment, again fastened them on its impetuous waters. In the back-ground of the torrent a bare mountain lifts its head encircled with its blue vapours; on the right rifes a steep cliff, of an enormous height, covered with wood, and upon its fummit ftands the Caftle of Lauffen, with its frowning towers, and encircled with its crannied wall; on the left, human industry has feized upon a flender thread of this mighty torrent in its fall, and made it fubfervient to the purposes . of commerce. Founderies, mills, and wheels, are erected on the edge of the river, and a portion of the vaft bafon into which the cataract falls is confined by a dyke, which preferves the warehouses and the neighbouring huts from its inundations. Sheltered

Sheltered within this little nook, and accustomed to the neighbourhood of the torrent, the boatman unloads his merchandizė, and the artifan pursues his toil, regardless of the falling river, and inattentive to those thundering founds which feem calculated to fufpend all human activity in folemn and awful aftonishment; while the imagination of the spectator is ftruck with the comparative littleness of fleeting man, bufy with his trivial occupations, contrasted with the view of nature in all her vaft, eternal, uncontrolable grandeur *.

We

* Mr. Cox estimates the height of the cataract of the Rhine at only fifty feet; Mons. Ramond, his elegant French translator, adds the following note to this obfervation:-"The quantity of water, which varies according to the feafon, has fome influence upon the height, and a confiderable effect upon the aspects of this fall. Those who have seen it at the period when the fnows diffolve, will admit that description to be exact which Mr. Cox thinks exaggerated, and only

true

1

We walked over the celebrated wooden bridge at Schaffhaufen, of which the bold and fimple construction is considered as an extraordinary effort of genius in the architect. Being altogether unqualified to judge of, or to describe its merit, I fhall only obferve, that nature seems to have given the Swifs, together with their rapid rivers, and

true of remote times. I have been affured that the height of the cataract, in these circumstances, is not less than eighty feet. A stranger can scarcely, without temerity, judge from his fimple obfervation, and if he does fo, he will be fure to be below the truth. I have ascertained, and Mr. Cox himself makes the fame remark, that it requires the eye of a Swiss to judge of certain dimenfions, which, exceeding all we have before seen, find no model of proportion in the mind. Those who have travelled for the first time in Switzerland, have often found, to their great surprise, that instead of exaggerating the heights and the diftances, they have diminished them one-half, or twothirds, till long habit taught them to expand their ideas, by furnishing them with fit objects of compa rifon."

their torrent streams, an extraordinary genius for erecting bridges, of fuch daring defign, hung upon the cliff, and fufpended over the gulph, that we are not surprised to find fuperftition has fometimes attributed them to fupernatural agency.

Part of our company being furnished only with French paffports, we left Schaffhausen and returned to Zuric, without hav ing vifited the Lake of Conftance, or its renowned and ancient city, which, at that period, was peopled by multitudes who had left France without paffports.

CHAP. V.

Lavater.-Fall of Infidelity, and Triumph of the Religion of our Fathers.-Fashionable Devotees.-La Harpe. -Lectures on Religion at Idalia.-Defertion of the Profelytes.-Theophilanthropifm.

WE ftaid long enough at Zuric to vifit its first literary ornament Lavater. It being known that he is willing to receive strangers, no traveller of any lettered curiofity paffes through the town, without paying him the homage of a vifit. »

He received us in his library, which was hung thick with portraits and engravings, of which he has a confiderable collection, forming a complete study of the ever varying expreffion of the human face divine. Some very wife men, who admit of no fcope to that faculty of the mind called imagination, and are for ever bringing