the Jungfrau seemed hanging over into the valley, and the moon rose with a single star by her side, lending to the glaciers a rich but transitory brilliancy, and shining with her solemn light, so still, so solemn, down into the depths of the broad ravine, upon meadow, rock, and torrent. From the window of my room in our hôtel I could see in one view this moon, the glittering Jungfrau, and the foaming Staubach on the other side. The night was very beautiful, but soon the mists rose, filling the valley, and taking away from a tired traveller all apology for not going immediately to bed. We had had a charming day, and were once more out of the world of artificial and dawdling idlers, and in the deep heart of nature's most solitary and sublime recesses. How great, how pure, how exquisite, is the enjoyment of the traveller in these mountain solitudes! He scarcely feels fatigue, but only excitement; it is a species of mental intoxication, a joyous, elevated, elastic state, which is as natural an atmosphere for the mind, in these circumstances as the pure, bracing mountain air is for the body.

CHAPTER XL.

STAUBACH CASCADE AND VALE OF LAUTERBRUNNEN.

THE first sound I heard on waking in the morning, indeed the sound that waked me, was the echoing Alpine Horn, breaking the stillness of the valley with its long drawn far off melody. I threw open my window towards the east; the sun was already on the snowy summit of the Jungfrau, the air sparkling and frosty, giving a sharp, decisive promise of a clear day; and the Staubach, which was such a dim and misty line of waving silver in the moonlight of the evening, was clearly revealed, almost like a bird of paradise throwing itself into the air from the brow of the mountain.

It is the most exquisitely beautiful of waterfalls, though there are miniatures of it in the Valley of the Arve almost as beautiful. You have no conception of the volume of water, nor of the grandeur of the fall, until you come near it, almost be

neath it; but its extreme beauty is better seen and felt at a little distance; indeed we thought it looked more beautiful than ever when we saw it, about ten o'clock, from the mountain ridge on the opposite side of the valley. It is between eight and nine hundred feet in height, over the perpendicular precipice, so that the eye traces its course so long, and its movement is so checked by the resistance of the air and the roughness of the mountain, that it seems rather to float than to fall, and before it reaches the bottom, dances down in ten thousand little jets of white foam, which all alight together, as softly as a white-winged albatross on the bosom of the ocean. It is as if a million of rockets were shot off in one shaft into the air, and then descended together, some of them breaking at every point in the descent, and all streaming down in a combination of meteors. So the streams in this

fall, where it springs into the air, separate and hold their own as long as possible, and then burst into rockets of foam, dropping down at first heavily, as if determined to reach the ground unbroken, and then dissolving into showers of mist, so gracefully, so beautifully, like snow-dust on the bosom of the air, that it seems like a spiritual creation rather than a thing inert, material.

"Time cannot thin thy flowing hair,

Nor take one ray of light from thee,
For in our fancy thou dost share

The gift of Immortality.

Its literal name is Dust-fall, and to use a very homely illustration, but one which may give a man, who has never seen any-thing like it, some quaint idea of its appearance in part, it is as if Dame Nature had poured over the precipice from her horn of plenty a great torrent of dry white meal! One should be more mealy-mouthed in his figures, but if you are not satisfied with this extraordinary comparison, take the more common one of a long lace vail waving down the mountain; or better still, the uncommon one of the Tail of the Pale Horse streaming in the wind, as painted so beautifully in Lord Byron's Manfred.

"It is not noon-the sunbow's rays still arch
The torrent with the many hues of heaven,

STAUBACH CASCADE.

And roll the sheeted silver's waving column
O'er the crag's headlong perpendicular,
And fling its lines of foaming light along,

And to and fro, like the pale courser's tail,
The giant steed to be bestrode by Death,
As told in the Apocalypse."

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It makes you think of many things, this beautiful fall, springing so fearlessly into the gulf. It is like the faith of a Christian, it is like a poet's fancies, it is like a philosopher's conjectures, plunging at first into uncertainty, but afterwards. flowing on in a stream of knowledge through the world. For so does this fall, when it reaches the earth in a mere shower of mist, gather itself up again in a refreshing, gurgling stream, for the meadows and the plains to drink of. It may make you think of Wordsworth's Helvetian Maid, the blithe paragon of Alpine grace:—

"Her beauty dazzles the thick wood;
Her courage animates the flood;
Her step the elastic green sward meets,
Returning unreluctant sweets,

The mountains, as ye heard, rejoice
Aloud, saluted by her voice."

Or of the "sweet Highland Girl," with her "very shower of beauty;" or of a Peri from Paradise weeping; or of a saint into Paradise entering," having shot the gulf of death;" or of the feet upon the mountains of them that bring the news of gladness:

"Or of some bird or star,

Fluttering in woods, or lifted far."

When the poet Wordsworth approached this celebrated cascade, he seems to have been assailed with a young troop of tattered mendicants, singing in a sort of Alpine whoop of welcome, in notes shrill and wild like those intertwined by some caverned witch chaunting a love-spell. His mind was so taken up, and his thoughts enthralled by this musical tribe haunting the place with regret and useless pity, that his Muse left him with but just one line for

"This bold, this pure, this sky-born WATERFALL."

The traveller should see it with its rainbows, and may, if he

choose, read Henry Vaughan's lines before it, which may set forth an image of the arches both of light and water.

"When thou dost shine, darkness looks white and fair;

Forms turn to music, clouds to smiles and air;

Rain gently spreads his honey-drops, and pours
Balm on the cleft earth, milk on grass and flowers.
Bright pledge of peace and sunshine! the sure tie
Of thy Lord's hand, the object of his eye!
When I behold thee, though my light be dim,
Distant and low, I can in thine see Him,

Who looks upon thee from his glorious throne,
And minds the covenant betwixt All and One.'

There are some thirty cascades like this pouring over the cliffs in this remarkable valley, hanging like long tassels or skeins of silver thread adown the perpendicular face of the crags, and seeming to dangle from the clouds when the mist is suspended over the valley. Some of them spring directly from the icy glaciers, but others come from streams, which in the course of the summer are quite dried up. The name of the valley, Lauterbrunnen, is literally nothing but fountains, derived from the multitude of little streams which, after careering for some time out of sight on the higher mountain summits, spring over the vast abrupt wall of this deep ravine, and reach the bottom in so many rainbow showers of spray. Between these prodigious rock-barriers the vale is sunk so deep that the sun in the winter does not get down into it before twelve o'clock, and then speedily disappears. In the summer he stays some hours earlier and longer. The inhabitants of the village are about 1350, in houses sprinkled up and down along the borders of the torrent, that swiftly courses through the bottom of the valley, about 1500 feet above the level of the sea.

CHAPTER XLI.

THE WENGERN ALP AND MORNING LANDSCAPE AND MUSIC.

AND now we leave the village and the lovely waterfall, and rise from the valley to cross the Wengern Alp. We are full of ex

pectation, but the scene on setting out is so indescribably beautiful, that even if dark clouds should settle on all the rest of the day, and shut out the glorious Jungfrau from our view, it would have been well worth coming thus far to see only the beginning of the glory. As we wind our way up the steep side of the mountain, the mists are slowly and gracefully rising from the depths of the valley along the face of the outjutting crags. It seems as if the genius of nature were drawing a white soft vail around her bosom.

But now as we rise still farther, the sun, pouring his fiery rays against the opposite mountain, makes it seem like a smoking fire begirt with clouds. You think of Mount Sinai all in a blaze with the glory of the steps of Deity. The very rocks are burning and the green forests also. Then there are the white glittering masses of the Breithorn and the Mittachshorn in the distance, and a cascade shooting directly out from the glacier. Upwards the mists are still curling and hanging to the mountains, while below there are the clumps of trees in the sunlight, the deep exquisite green of spots of unvailed meadow, the winding stream, now hid and now revealed, the gray mist sleeping on the tender grass, the chalets shining, the brooks murmuring, the birds singing, the sky above and the earth. beneath, in this "incense breathing morn" uniting in a universal harmony of beauty and melody of praise.

"In such a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither;

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore !"

And in such a season, on such a height as this, in such a morning, away from home, as well as in the woodbine walk at eve, that "dear tranquil time when the sweet sense of home is sweetest," may not the sensitive mind experience the feeling spoken of by John Foster as the sentiment of intent and devout observers of the material world, "that there is through all nature some mysterious element like soul, which comes,