repulsive landscape, externally, to be found in any of the pas ses of Switzerland. The peaks of the mountains rise above it about a thousand feet, it being itself at a bleak elevation above the sea of more than seven thousand ;-the rocks around it might remind you of some of Danté's goblins damned, like crouching hippopotamuses, or like gigantic demons chained and weeping, with the tears freezing in their eyelids. There is a little tarn, or black lake, directly behind the Hospice, which looks like Death, black, grim, stagnant, a fit mirror of the desolation around it. No fish live in it, but it is said to be never frozen though covered deep with snow all winter. A boat like Charon's crosses it to get at the bit of green pasture beyond, where the cows of the Hospice may be fed and milked for one or two months in the summer. There are admirable materials for goblin tales in this Spitzbergen landscape.

Within the building, everything is nice and comfortable; a fine little library, enriched, probably by English travellers, with some admirable religious books, a well furnished refectory and abundant table, eighty beds or more, and everything in excellent order. What a fine testimony it is, that the truly religious books one meets with are mostly in the English language. There are, indeed, in our tongue, perhaps more devotional books, more streams running from the Bible, than in all other languages put together. It was delightful to meet these familiar and loved companions in this desolate pass of the Grimsel. We sat down, about twenty visitors in all, to a plentiful evening meal, with a cup of tea, most refreshing to such a tired traveller as I was. The number of visitors daily at table is from thirty-six to forty. A few days since one hundred persons were here at once, for the night, with half as many guides in addition.

I liked mine host at the Grimsel; he seemed to take a fatherly interest in the stranger, and pressed my hand warmly at parting, with many good wishes for my pleasant journey. How it takes away from the mercantile, cold, mercenary character of an inn, when the keeper of it is blessed with cordial, hospitable manners! Whether he have the heart of a good Samaritan or not, if he seems to take an interest in he

you,

HOSPICE OF THE GRIMSEL.

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gets double interest from you; it invests the bought fare with a home feeling; you pay for it ten times as readily as you would to a grumbler, and you leave the house as that of a friend.

I paid a more hasty visit to the Aar glacier than I could have wished, for it would be worth a sojourn of two or three days to study it; but I was afraid of the weather. From the Grimsel you may walk to the lower glacier in about three quarters of an hour, and see at its very source the wild river, up whose furious torrent you have been all day climbing. The termination of the glacier in the valley is of the colour of a rhinoceros' hide, from the mixture of rocks and gravel ground up in the ice; and where the river runs out of its mouth, it may give you, as you stand below its huge masses, the idea of a monstrous elephant disporting with his proboscis. The rocks protrude from the ice, constantly dropping as fast as it melts, and forming chaotic masses of fragments beneath.

This enormous glacier is said to be eighteen miles long, and from two to four in breadth. The great peak of the FinsterAarhorn, the Aar-peak of Darkness, rises out of it, probably the loftiest of the Oberland Alps, a most sublime object. This is the glacier so interesting for the studies and observations of Agassiz and Hugi, carried on upon it, and for their hôtel under a huge rock upon its surface. This is the glacier on which the hut was built by Hugi in 1827, to measure the movement of the masses, and it was found that in 1836 they had advanced 2184 feet. Think of this immeasurable bed of ice, nearly eighty square miles in extent, and how many hundred feet deep no man may know, moving altogether if it move at all, moving everlastingly, with the motion of life amidst the rigidity and certainty of Death ;-crossed also by another glacier, the two throwing up between them a mighty causeway or running ridge of mingled ice and rocks, sometimes eighty feet high! The Upper and Lower Glaciers together are computed to occupy a space of nearly 125 square miles. They are not so much split into fissures as the glaciers of Chamouny, and therefore they

are much more accessible.

The Hospice of the Grimsel is tenanted from March to No

vember by only a single servant, with provisions and dogs. In March, 1838, this solitary exile was alarmed by a mysterious sound in the evening, like the wailing of a human being in distress. He took his dog and went forth seeking the traveller, imagining that some one had lost his way in the snow. It was one of those warning voices, supposed by the Alpine dwellers to be uttered by the mountains in presage of impending storms or dread convulsions. It was heard again in the morning, and soon afterwards down thundered the avalanche, overwhelming the Hospice, and crushing every room save the one occupied by the servant. With his dog he worked his way through the snow, thankful not to have been buried alive, and came in safety down to Meyringen.

66

This is the common story. But I have met with more than this, in an interesting little book of Letters and travelling sketches from a Daughter to her Mother. Miss Lamont tells us that the lonely tenant of the Hospice occupied himself all winter with his art of wood-carving, having no companions but his dogs, and was able, during the perillous seasons, to save the lives of nearly a hundred persons every year. He said he heard the supernatural voice several times before the fall of the avalanche. It was a great storm, and for four days snowed incessantly. 'When he first took out his dog, it showed symptoms of fear; at last it would not go out at all; so when he had the third time heard the low voice, which said, "Go into the inner room," he went in and knelt down to pray. While he was praying, the avalanche fell, and in a moment every place, except the one little room where he was, was filled with snow. He firmly attributed this exception to his prayers -and why might it not be so? Answer not, ye who suppose a world can only be governed by such laws as ye can comprehend.

No! answer not, except you have faith in God, except you know yourself what it is to pray, what it is to live a life of prayer. Then answer, and say that the Power which loosened the avalanche, and directed its path, was the same, and none other, which as a protecting hand encircled the place of prayer. The Divine grace that led the heart thither only preceded the

Divine power that summoned the storm. And what an infidel heart must that be which, having experienced such a protection would not attribute it to prayer!

CHAPTER L.

LAKE OF THE DEAD.-GLACIER OF THE RHONE.-PASS OF THE

FURCA.

THE night was cold and cloudless. By the rising moon, the scene of awful desolation around the Hospice, cold as it was, was covered with a vail of loveliness. It is scarcely possible to convey an idea of the beauty of the moonlight night in such a region. This morning the air was of a crystal clearness, but a fathomless white ocean of cloud fills the valley beneath us, while the grisly sharp peaks and ridges around us and above rise into a bright shining sky.

It

Close at the summit of the pass, about half an hour from the Hospice, 8400 feet above the sea, you coast the margin of a little dark, still lake, into which the bodies of dead travellers, who perished by the way, have been launched for burial. therefore goes by the name of the Dead Sea, or Lake of the Dead. These names are singularly in keeping with the effect of the scenery upon the mind, so wild, so grim, yet so majestic, so seemingly upon the confines of the supernatural world, where it seems as if imprisoned silent genii, still and awful, were gazing upon you, as if the eye of these heaven-scaling mountains watched you, and would petrify and fasten you, as you flit carefully like a spectre across the vast and dream-like landscape. A small glacier which you have to cross falls into this Lake and feeds it, and the peak of the Seidelhorn rises above it, with the snowy Schreckhorn towering through the mountain ridges from the Aar glacier. The magnificent white range of the Gries glacier sweeps glittering on the other side.

A little distance beyond this death-lake you come suddenly upon the view of the glacier of the Rhone, very far below you, a grand and mighty object, with the furious Rhone itself issu

their cages.

ing from the ice, like a whole menagerie of wild beasts from Down it roars, with the joy of liberty, swift and furious through the valley, leaping, dashing, thundering, foaming. Remembering the career it runs, how it sometimes floods the valleys like a sea, by how many rivers it is joined, and how it pours dark and turbid into the lake of Geneva, and out again regenerated as clear as crystal from Switzerland into France, and so into the Mediterranean, it is interesting to stand here far above its mighty cradle, and look down upon its source. The glacier is a stupendous mass of ice-terraces clear across the valley, propped against an overhanging mountain, with snowy peaks towering to the right and left. There is a most striking contrast between the bare desolation of the rocks on the Grimsel side, and the grassy slopes of the mountains in companionship with this glacier. Your path coasts along its margin, amidst a thick fringe of bushes and flowers, from which you can step down upon the roofs and walls of the ice-caverns, and look into the azure crevasses, and hear the fall, the gurgle, and hurrying sub-glacial rush of unconscious streams just born as cold as death. Their first existence is in a symphony of dripping music, a prelude to the babble of the running rill, and then, as they grow older, they thunder like the trumpet of a Far above you herds of cattle are seen browsing on the steep mountain-side, so steep that it seems as if they must hold on to the herbage to keep from falling. The voices of the herdsmen echo down the valley; you half expect to see the whole group slide, like an avalanche, down into the glacier below.

cataract.

There are, more properly speaking, two glaciers of the Rhone, for as you pass up towards the Furca, you see a rapid stream rushing from a glacier that cuts the sky above you to the right, and pouring, cavernous and cataractical, into the Lower Glacier, from whence it afterwards issues in the same stream which constitutes the Rhone. From the pass of the Furca, which costs you a hard climb to surmount, there is a grand and varied view of the Finsteraarhorn and the Schreckhorn, with the more distant snowy mountains. From thence into the valley of the Sidli Alp you have a rapid descent, which