glory of our Maker. And for the food and enkindling of the imagination they are in the world-creation what such a work as the Paradise Lost is in the domain of poetry; they are what a book of great and suggestive thoughts is to a sensitive mind; they waken it up and make it thrill with great impulses; and as a strain of grand unearthly music, a thunder-burst of sound, or as the ringing of the bells of the New Jerusalem permitted to become audible, they put the soul itself in motion like an inward organ, and set it to singing in the choral university harmony. The next day after this memorable excursion opened with a morning cloudy and misty, but it was clear again at ten. We are at the Pension Baumgarten, in the picturesque town of Thun, under the shadow of a green mountain, with the Lake to the right, the town before us, and the clear rapid Aar shooting like an arrow from the Lake, under old bridges, and past houses and battlements, as the crystal Rhone from the Lake at Geneva. There are about 5000 inhabitants, with a noble old Feudal Castle of the twelfth century towering on a steep, houseclad hill in the centre of the village, and an antique venerable church nearly as lofty. From the church-yard tower and terrace, where I am jotting a few dim sketches in words, you have a magnificent view of the Lake and the Alps. Parties of visi tors, most of them English, are constantly coming and going at this spot. The Lake stretches before you about ten miles long, between lovely green gardens and mountain-ranges fringing it, with the flashing snowy summits and glaciers of the Jungfrau, Finster-Aarhorn, Eigher, and Monch filling the view at its extremity. On the plains of Thun the troops from the various Swiss Cantons are at this moment encamped for review, and passing through a variety of evolutions. How like the garden are the delicious vales and lakes hidden among the mountains! The Poet Cowley observes, as indicating to us a lesson of happiness, that the first gift of God to man was a garden, even before a wife; gardens first, the gift of God's love, cities afterwards, the work of man's ambition. "For well he knew what place would best agree THUN TO INTERLACHEN. And we elsewhere still seek for them in vain, If any part of either we expect, This may our judgment in the search direct, GOD the first Garden made, and the first city, CAIN." 223 CHAPTER XXXIX. THUN TO INTERLACHEN.-INTERLACHEN TO LAUTERBRUNNEN.BIBLE IN SCHOOLS. SEEING that I am to be a solitary pedestrian from Thun through the Oberland Alps as far as Lucerne, my friend being bound homewards through Berne for England, I must make the most of this continued lovely weather; and since there is nothing in Thun to detain me, unless I were fond of looking at the crowds of gay and care-defying visitors, coming and going, in whom, being strangers, I feel no personal interest, and they none in me, I must even start to-day in the little iron steamer of the lake for Neuhaus. I could not persuade my friend to go farther, for he was continually thinking of his wife and children, looking towards home in just the state to have become a pillar of salt. Inwardly mourning, he dragged at each remove a lengthening chain. Besides, a careless herdsman on the mountains had struck him on the leg with a stone intended for one of his unruly cattle, and he remembered, years ago, how one of his classmates with whom he was then travelling in Switzerland, was laid on a sick bed for weeks, in consequence of a similar hurt not attended to. So between the sweet domestic fire-side, and the lame leg, he was compelled to turn his face homewards. I parted from him with great regret, and resumed my pilgrimage alone. The sail from Thun to Neuhaus, at the other end of the Lake, needs the sun upon the mountains, if you would have the full glory of the landscape. For us it shone upon the Lake and on its borders, but on the distant Alps the clouds rested in such fleecy volumes, like a troop of maidens hiding the bride, that it was only at intervals the mountains were revealed to us. Landing at Neuhaus, you may go in a diligence, omnibus, hackney coach, mail carriage, or any way you please that is possible, a couple of miles to Unterseehen, a brown old primitive village; and a little farther to Interlachen, which is a large English boarding house, with streets running through it, shaded with great walnut trees, and paraded by troops of dawdling loungers and lodgers, with here and there a sprinkling of Swiss natives. It is beautifully situated in the midst of a large plain, about mid-way between the Lakes of Thun and Brientz, both these Lakes being visible from a hill amidst the meadow behind Interlachen, with all the lovely intervening scenery and villages. Going from Neuhaus to Interlachen, you are reminded of the passage from Lake George to Lake Champlain. The verdure and foliage of the valley, to where it passes from meadow to mountain, is rich beyond description. It becomes really magnificent as it robes the stupendous mountain masses in such dark rich hues. From Interlachen the way to Lauterbrunnen lies through one of the most beautiful valleys in Switzerland. Entering it from the plain we had a noble view of the Jungfrau rising with its eternal snows behind ridges of the most beautiful verdure, now vailed and now revealed from its misty shroud. The mountain torrent Lutschinen thunders down a savage gorge between forest-clad slopes and precipices, along which you pass from the villages of Wylderschwyl and Muhlinen for about two miles, when the valley opens into two deep ravines, one on the left, running to Grindlewald, the other on the right to Lauterbrunnen, each traversed by a roaring stream that falls into the Lutschinen. You may go either to Lauterbrunnen or Grindlewald and back again to Interlachen in a few hours, having witnessed some of the sublimest scenery in Switzerland; but the grand route is through Lauterbrunnen across the Wengern Alps, down into the valley of Grindlewald, and thence across the Grand Scheideck down into Meyringen, from whence you may go to the Lake Brientz on one side, or across the of the Grimsel on the other. pass My German guide from Interlachen was very intelligent, and being an inhabitant of the village of Muhlinen, he commu. RELIGIOUS SCHOOL TEACHING. 225 nicated to us many interesting particulars. He told us of the schools of his native village, and among other things how each parent pays five batz, or fifteen cents., in the winter, and three in the summer, for each child's schooling, and how in the winter the children go to school in the morning from eight to twelve, then home to dinner, then in the afternoon from one to three; but in the summer only from eight to eleven in the morn ing at school, and then the rest of the day to work. He told us also how the school had two masters and one mistress, besides the clergyman of the parish, who takes the children for religious instruction two hours a-day. Upon my word (the traveller may say to himself) here is a good, wise, time-honoured provision. These primitive people are old-fashioned and Biblical enough to think that religious instruction ought to be as much an clement of education, and as constant and unintermitted, as secular. They are right, they are laying foundations for stability, prosperity, and happiness in their little community. The world is wrong side up in this matter of education when it administers its own medieines only, its own beggarly elements, its own food, and nothing higher, its own smatterings of knowledge, without the celestial life of knowledge. Power it gives, without guidance, without principles. It is just as if the art of ship-building should be. conducted without helms, and all ships should be set afloat to be guided by the winds only. For such are the immortal ships on the sea of human life without the Bible; its knowledge, its principles, ought from the first to be as much a part of the educated intelligent constitution, as the keel or rudder is part and parcel of a well built ship. Religious instruction, therefore, and the breath of the sacred Seriptures, ought to be breathed into the child's daily life of knowledge, not put off to the Sabbath, when grown children only are addressed from the pulpit, or left to parents at home, who perhaps themselves, in too many cases, never open the Bible. If in their daily schools children were educated for Eternity as well as Time, there would be more good citizens, a deeper piety in life, a more sacred order and heaven-like beauty in the Republic, a better understanding of law, a more patient obedience to it, nay, a production of it, and a conformable organization to it, and an assimilation with its spirit beforehand. It is by celestial observations alone, said Coleridge (and it was a great and profound remark), that terrestrial charts can be constructed. If our education would be one that states can live by and flourish, it must be ordered in the Scriptures. What suicidal, heterogeneous, Roman madness, in the attempt to exclude the Bible from our public schools! May its authors bite themselves! Our guide told us moreover a very curious regulation of the internal police of the school at Muhlinen, intended to keep the children from playing truant, which they accomplish effectually by working not upon the child's fear of the rod, or love of his studies, but upon the parent's love of his money. That is to say, if the children are absent, and as often as they are absent, a cross is put against the parent's name, and he is made accountable, and is fined, if he does not give satisfactory reason for the child's absence. Of course all the whippings for playing truant are administered by the parent, and therefore it being very sure, if there is a fine for the parent to pay, that the amount of it will be fully endorsed upon the child with a birch rod, the pupils take good care to keep punctual at school. No delinquent can escape, for no false excuse can be manufactured. It is a system which might perhaps be very useful in other arts besides that of school-keeping Coming up the valley to Lauterbrunnen, you cannot cease admiring the splendid verdure that clothes the mountains on each side, as well as the romantic depth and wildness of the gorge, above which your road passes. Just before you enter the village or hamlet, the cascade of the Staubach, at some distance beyond it, comes suddenly into view, poured from the very summit of the mountain, as if out of heaven, and streaming, or rather waving, in a long line of foam, like Una's hair as described by Spenser, or like the comet Ophiuneus in Milton; sweeping down the perpendicular face of the mountain with indescribable grace and beauty. The rising of the moon upon this scene was beyond expression lovely. The clouds had gone, and the snowy summit of |