burgomaster Tscharner's school, and being appointed a teacher, he found a refuge for nearly a year, unknown in this employment. A season of much meditation it must have been to him, of hard and profitable thinking, of useful trial, and of much enjoyment in nature. Sometimes he stopped in the midst of his Algebraic solutions, as one surrounded in a dream by the din and smoke of the armies of his country, and sometimes he was himself in a reverie in the palace of the Tuileries in Paris, while the boys were following his compasses and calculations round the wooded globe. Many a pleasant walk he must have had among the mountains, many a refreshing swim in the blue and gray waters of the Rhine. The schoolmaster may have been happier than the monarch, and probably was. Fifty-four years ago, how little could he have dreamed the scenes through which his life of the next half century, as the Actor instead of the Teacher of history, was to be drawn! The young pedestrian, with a bundle on his back and a pilgrim's staff, calling himself Monsieur Chabot, knew not that he was on his way to the throne, instead of from it, or that the extremes of his life, almost his first and second childhood, should be the instruction of half a dozen Swiss children and the governing of thirty millions of French.

On our way towards this village we passed in sight of the hamlet of Feldsberg, threatened with destruction from the fall of an overhanging mountain more perpendicular by far than the Rossberg. The danger was so imminent that the inhabitants, some months before, had begged to be received into a neighbouring commune, and united with it. But the people of Feldsberg were Protestants; so the authorities of the Romish commune refused to grant their request, unless they would renounce the Protestant faith and become Roman Catholics! This was truly characteristic; and the determination of the poor people to abide by the Gospel under the falling mountain, rather than take refuge in Romanism from the avalanche, was equally so. What disposition has been made of the inhabitants I know not; but it is very clear that the religious charity and freedom, applauded in some parts of the Canton, have no place in the neighbourhood of this threatened convulsion of

nature. There is in this very region a mixture of the two opposite systems of religion quite unexampled, the village of Reichenau, for instance, being Romish, while just the other side of the river the hamlet is Protestant. The languages are quite as distinct, one village speaking German, while its next neighbour talks in the Romansch patois.

The world has made the greatest mistake against its own interests in being so intolerant, that ever was made. Sometimes one portion of it has driven away from its bosom the most vital elements of its industry and prosperity, because they could not conform to its hierarchical and religious despotisms. Spain impoverished herself by driving out the Moors and Jews. France put back her own advancement in agriculture and manufactures irretrievably by burning out the Huguenots, and at the same time enriched other countries at her own expence. Italy impoverished and debilitated herself in like manner by the peremptory banishment of some of her best manufacturers, because they were Reformed, and in that measure took the most direct course possible to build up the Protestant city of Zurich, where the banished ones from Locarno found a hospitable refuge with all their wealth, arts, and industry. They who will leave a country for their faith, rather than desert their faith, are likely to be the best of its citizens, and when you draw them off, you take away the life-blood of the country. This is one way in which, by the constitution of Divine Providence, men's sins come down upon their own pate, and nations reap the fire of their own persecutions. They sow their fields with fire, and gather fire into their own garners. They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. But men do not learn this, until they see it in history, and even there they rarely turn the light of their own experience upon the future, so that selfishness and passion often beguile one generation to a plunge into the same mistakes that have ruined the preceding.

From Reichenau we posted the same evening to Thusis, a village of about seven hundred inhabitants, situated against the jaws of the wildest, most tremendous defiles in Switzerland, on a mountain-terrace or projection of unequal height, from which you enjoy down the open valley the loveliest variety of

prospect in river, plain, mountain, castle, and hamlet. By one of those great calamities, which so often overwhelm the Swiss villages, this thriving little town has been but recently destroyed by a conflagration. No man can measure the distress which must fall upon the inhabitants; indeed, there seems no possible resource by which they could recover from so desolating a blow. It is most melancholy to think of the misery that must be endured by them.

The romantic country through which we have now been travelling possesses more remembrances of feudal tyranny and war in the half-ruined castles, so thickly scattered along the Rhine-vales, than any other part of Switzerland. Sometimes they can scarcely be distinguished from the rocks on which they are built, they have become so storm-beaten, old, and mossgrown. Some of them surmount the crags in such picturesque boldness, apparently inaccessible and impregnable, that you wonder both how they were constructed and how they were conquered. They are remnants of a despotic, warlike, social state, like the huge fossil remains of a past world of all-devouring monsters. The landscapes commanded by them are scenes of the greatest grandeur and beauty, though that was the element least thought of in their construction. Now the traveller winds his way along, and thinks of the powerful spirit of beauty in Nature which has subdued them to herself in their decay, and dropping a vail of lone and melancholy grandeur over them, has enshrined the forms of men's tyranny for the delight of man's imagination.

CHAPTER LXIV.

TERRIFIC GRANDEUR OF THE SPLUGEN.-THE VIA MALA.-CREATION AS A TEACHER OF GOD.

Is it not perfectly true that everything which is to have power over man must come to him through a human heart, must have the tone of the heart? To get within him, it must proceed from within some one else; all that is merely external is cold, unap

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pealing, lifeless. This is the case indeed with man's works, but not with God's. There is never an object in God's creation but speaks at once to the heart as well as to the mind, if the heart be prepared to listen. The universe is glorious, because God made it, and it speaks of Him. Whatever object he has touched with the finger of his power shall bear that impress till he has annihilated it. Though it were but a withered leaf driven by the whirlwind, it sparkles with his glory. And there is as much of Him, of his power and love, in a drop of dew trembling on a rose-leaf, if rightly appreciated, as in the snowy summit of Mont Blanc burning at sunset.

All things are steps and links for intercourse with God. Hence, Henry Martyn used to say, when tired of human company and its depravity, and destitute of all Christian communion, that anything whatever of God's works was sweet to him. “A leaf," said he, "is good company," for it brought his Father near to him, and he could talk with God.

It is a blessed, practical, and not merely imaginative habit of mind, by which the things of sense are thus rendered subservient to spiritual purposes, "auxiliar to divine." It is a heavenly faculty, by which the hieroglyphics of himself which the Eternal Being has deigned to write with the finger of his glory upon created things, may be interpreted and read in their splendour and fulness. The universe is a type of spiritual intelligence to the eye that made it thus, disclosing and reflecting at every turn the knowledge of the glory of its illuminating Sun. I have seen, says the poet Wordsworth, in one of his most beautiful strains of imagery,

I have seen

A curious child, that dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell,
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intently; and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy: for murmurings from within
Were heard, sonorous cadences! whereby
To his belief the Monitor expressed
Mysterious union with its native sea.
E'en such a shell the Universe itself
Is to the ear of Faith."

EXCURSION.

The thought thus beautifully expressed (and it is an exquisitely beautiful image) is but the reiteration of repeated decla rations in the Scriptures in regard to the purpose and meaning of the visible creation of God, Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

In all God's works there is heart, God's heart, for God is Love; and he is happy who feels this, for though every man sees God with his mind, his understanding, no man sees him with the heart, or hears the tone of the heart of Love in creation, who has not something of that love within him. In man's works, heart is the rarest ingredient, the most precious, the most costly, the most seldom to be met with. In God's works, love is the universal element, though power is almost the only element which man notices. But love is the element that speaks to the heart, and happy is the heart that hears its blissful language.

Hence the beauty of that sonnet imitated by Montgomery from the Italian of Gaetana Passerini.

"If in the field I meet a smiling flower,
Methinks it whispers, 'God created me,
And I to Him devote my little hour,
In lonely sweetness and humility.'

If where the forest's darkest shadows lower,
A serpent quick and venomous I see,
It seems to say 'I too extol the power

Of Him who caused me at his will to be.'

The fountain purling, and the river strong,

The rocks, the trees, the mountains, raise one song ;
Glory to God!' re-echoes in mine ear:
Faithless were I, in wilful error blind,
Did I not Him in all his creatures find,

His voice through heaven and earth and ocean hear.”

But what poetry can give a human utterance to the voice that speaks from that dread mountain-rift of Switzerland, the Pass of the Splugen? Milton should be here to describe it, as he has the war in heaven, with language, feeling, thought, imagery, all, as it were, winged with red lightning and impetuous rage. All the images of grandeur, power, energy in nature, Oceanic, Titanic, Volcanic, the whirlwind, the fiery tempest, the earthquake, elemental war, deluges, convulsions,