I leave you to conceive the effect of a Te Deum-chaunted, at the command

of the Conqueror, within the chilling recesses of such a Catacomb-when the bloody battle of Marengo had consigned twenty thousand of his Fellow Creatures to an untimely grave.

LETTER V.

A bird's-eye view of Switzerland.

AVING traversed on foot the great

HAV

est part of Switzerland, the prominent features of that romantic country have left an impression on my imagination that can never be obliterated-however faintly I may be able to trace the majestic outlines, in a bird's-eye view, that I cannot forbear attempting to portray.

Ascending then to the necessary elevation-in the pendant cradle of an air balloon (since the discoveries of Montgolfier have enabled the Moderns to realize the fabled flights of Antiquity) the

thirteen

thirteen Cantons of the Swiss Confederacy, extending two hundred miles, from east to west, and a hundred and thirty, from north to south, would lie at the feet of a soaring Eronaut, who might look down with ease and safety upon the tremendous precipices of der Schreckhorn [the peak of terror] surrounded at unequal distances by spiral protuberances of solid granite; whose perpendicular strata would be seen to rise out of a troubled ocean of snow and ice, in the shape of battered pyramids, and broken obelisksnow whelmed in clouds, impregnated with thunder-now penetrating, in unbroken silence, the ambient air.

Far beneath these stupendous crags, would be seen at intervals, green vales, and azure lakes, studded with towns and villages,

villages, whose slender spiracles, plated with tin, would glitter in the sun, while the mountain torrent, or the path-way of the heath, would shew a streak of silver -coursing the winding valley, or traversing (with marked direction) the extended plain.

The lake of Constance would limit the fairy scene, on the north-east; and, on the south-west, the lucid crescent that receives the Rhone from the Pais de Vallais, and imperceptibly conveys it by Lausanne (the calm retirement in which Gibbon contemplated the decay of Empires) to pierce the walls of Geneva, and join the torrent of the Arve.

On the north the green current of the Rhine, like the coloured pencilling of a map,

map, would mark the confines of Germany-on the west, the blue ridge of Mount Jura would distinguish it from France-and on the south, from Italy, the long chain of Alpine summits, whitened with ice and snow.

Among the central peaks of St. Gothard would be seen to issue, from transparent Glaciers, the Rhine, the Rhone, and a source of the Po-descending in bright cascades, by opening ravines, to irrigate the plains of Europe, and empty themselves into the Atlantic-the Mediterranean—or the Adriatic Gulph.

In the heart of this chaos of rocks and woods-in whose profound recesses hardy Swains, descended from Aboriginal Mountaineers, had quietly submitted to

the