and holier source whence springs eternal truth. In them, Poetry often finds her bright original, and from them, like the Ausonian king from the woodnymph, does she often receive that wisdom, and that vital energy, which the tainted breath of cities can never give. From this fountain-head, Byron and Shelley, Wordsworth and Bryant, drew breathing thoughts and burning words, and transmuted into language which will be eternal that inner life of Nature which none could so well appreciate as they. To faculties like theirs, a view from a lofty mountain-top is full of the deepest and most profitable enjoyment, and who would blame them for incurring some risk to life and limb that they might attain it. There are those that prefer the dreamy and seductive delights of Italy to this barren home of the mountaineer. But fascinating as are the charms which rise like an exhalation on every side in that land of the sun, one is ere long cloyed with such a Capuan existence. Repletion soon recalls purer and more profitable enjoyments. It is pleasing for the moment to yield to temptation, and wander from Elysium to Elysium; but the vigorous and healthy intellect, with natural sympathy and earnest longing, rises from the enervating plains of Italy to the rocky and toilsome heights of Switzerland, and sees them ever spanned with the bow of promise. Yet even that power which cometh from the hills is not all-satisfying, and those who have penetrated most deeply into the grand and mysterious temples that adorn this Forum of Nature, have found even them but the vestibules that led to greater splendors of the mind. They then were conscious of a broader grasp of vital truths, and could expatiate with a wider range o'er all the field of man. Plato resorted to Egypt to study the wisdom of its people. He saw above and beyond it, and made it but the stepping-stone for his own lofty and transcendent genius. The philosophers of our day frequent the Alps, and there find an inspiration of which they never dreamed. Not only have they discovered the living fountains of beauteous and sublime, but the results of all-embracing mental power. How greatly have they been thus aided in that wide and successful study of natural science which is the controlling influence on our age! And not the naturalist alone, but the historian, the poet, the artist, the man of letters, all have here vivified their genius, and hence drawn new truths for our learning. Gibbon, Byron, De Saussure, Agassiz, Tyndall, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Coleridge, Davy, De Staël, Sismondi, De Candalle, Forbes, and a host of others, what of spiritual life and far-reaching wisdom have they not derived from this source! In what eloquent, what majestic language, have they imparted it to the world! Conscious of new faculties, they learned from the inner mysteries unfolded to them that "the strength of the hills is His also." Knowing that their discoveries of hid den law, compared with the illimitable deeps of Nature, were but as bubbles on the ocean's surface, they yet might well glory in their expanding life, and increased sympathy with her workings. Exalted by the glimpses vouchsafed to them of the splendors to come, they might well rejoice that they could find fitting words in which to confide them to their fellow-men. The "various language" which Nature speaks has, in modern times, found many interpreters. How infinitely do our poets gain in this respect over those of ancient Greece and Rome. To them, the voices of Nature were ever mute and her varied features unsuggestive. To them, "great Pan " was, in reality, always dead, and the fantastic creations of rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel, of nymphs and dryads, with which they sought to people the forests and enliven the waste places of the earth, were merely the fruit of a morbid imagination that craved it knew not what. They thus showed rather the shallowness and sterility of their minds, than the rich abundance of an intellect refined and vivified by communion with Nature. Notwithstanding their assumptions and lofty aspirations, they were merely the equals in this respect of the humblest peasant. "A primrose by the river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was only this to them. When the fullness of time was come and "the oracles were dumb;" when the Son of God revealed himself to the eyes of men, and before the brightness of His presence the whole multitude of deified ghosts those "flocking shadows pale". "trooped to the infernal jail," He was not only the Apostle of Religion but of Nature. He availed Himself of her inexhaustible resources in a spirit of the deepest poetry, and ever presented her myriad forms to those who waited upon His words, from the lilies of the field to the cedars of Lebanon. Like our own great minister of truth and friend of Nature, He, too, found "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything," and of their large utterance, He, also, was Lord. And this feature of itself, is no mean recommendation of the Christian religion, that it contains within its bosom those sympathies which ever broaden and deepen more and more with the progress of humanity, and which at the day of revelation, as well as in our own, were the invisible chains by which the whole earth every way "bound about the feet of God;" they shall yet draw us by influences, slow yet sure, into the presence of the great Soul of Nature Himself, and in His light shall we see that light which infinite wisdom has concealed from our feeble vision. 8 is CHAPTER IX. MONT BLANC. LITERARY men have done much for Switzerland, and this seems but natural to those who reflect how great is the gain they have derived from it. The evidences thereof abound on every side. At Ferney Voltaire lived and wrote; at Lausanne they still take pride in pointing out the garden and the site of the arbor in which Gibbon completed the work that immortalized his name; Chillon, the home of ancient splendor, the scene of long continued and undeserved suffering, the centre of one of the fairest prospects that Nature ever offered to the eye of man, derives a further lustre from the great name of Byron, whose stirring lines excite anew our sympathy for human woe. What Childe Harold was to Chillon, that in his way was Albert Smith to Chamonix. Most of my readers have heard of this author; many of them have read his works; some of them, perhaps, have attended his entertainments in London, and still call to mind with interest the irresistibly laughable and humorous air with which he portrayed the attractions of Chamonix and Mont Blanc. These "evenings" were immensely popu |