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fore God could not be proved benevolent unless, in a world of sin, there were the ingredient of misery.

Then as to the other problem: Given, a race of sinful creatures: What sort of a world shall they be placed in? You would certainly answer, Not a world of unmingled softness and beauty, not a Paradise of enjoyment, not the early and undiseased Eden of innocence and love, but a world, in which there shall be enough of storm and tempest, enough of painful climate, and of the curse of barrenness, and of the element of disaster and ruin, to show God's frown and evident curse for sin; but yet enough of the means of enjoyment, if rightly used to draw men to industry, to show God's kindness and love, and enough of beauty and sublimity to impress, delight, and educate the soul. It is just a world so mingled, a world scarred with evil, as well as bright with good, that we, a sinful race, do really inhabit.

The view which men take of the argument for the goodness of God from the works of creation will vary much according to their own states of mind. A man suffering the consequences of sin, or a man under a cloud of care, and destitute of faith, or a man burdened with present miseries, without any consolation from divine grace, would see things very differently from a calm mind, a quiet mind, a happy mind, a mind at peace with God. The universe takes its colouring from the hue of our own souls; and so, in a measure, does the solution of the question whether the universe, so far as we are acquainted with it, proves a God of love. A heart that loves God, and rejoices in the happiness that fills the world around it, will say instinctively that it does, and will sympathize with God in his own feelings of delight in the happiness of creation. A misanthropic heart, a sinful heart, a rebellious heart, will perhaps be disposed to say No, or will overlook, and cannot understand and appreciate the power of the argument. For a mind disposed to make difficulty, plenty of difficulty exists. For a mind humbly disposed to learn of God, there is confirmation of the soul's faith even in difficulties themselves, which are as 'buttresses supporting the spire that sublimely points to heaven.

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CHAPTER LXVI.

PASS OF THE SPLUGEN INTO ITALY.-THE CARDINELL AND MACDONALD'S ARMY, CAMPO DOLCINO AND CHIAVENNA.

FROM the little wild village of Splugen, overhanging the young Rhine-river, where there is an excellent mountain inn, having supped, slept, and breakfasted, 4711 feet above the sea, you take your departure at pleasure for either of the two Alpine passes into Italy, the Splugen or the Bernardin. Both of them, carry you across scenes of the greatest wildness, winter, and sublimity, into almost perpetual loveliness and summer. You pass the snowy recesses, where Nature holds the nursling rivers to her bosom of glaciers, feeding her infants with ice; you go down into Elysian fields, where the brooks sparkle and dance like laughing children amidst flowers and sunshine. The whirlwind of war has poured across each of these passes, in the most terrific of the seasons, driven by the French General Lecourbe at the Bernardin, and by Macdonald at the perillous gorge of the Cardinell. They marched in the midst of fierce tempests and falling avalanches that swept whole phalanxes as into the depths of hell, as if the avenging genii of Switzerland were up in arms, the ministers of wrath against the oppressor. The pass of the Splugen, rising more than 2000 feet above the village of Splugen, and 6814 above the sea, brings you out at Chiavenna and the Lake of Como. That of the Bernardin rising 7115 feet above the sea, and about 2400 above Splugen, opens upon Bellinzona and the Lakes of Magiore and Lugano.

We take the Splugen road, and following it through four miles and three quarters of laborious ascent, come to the narrow mountain ridge, which traces the boundary line between Switzerland and Lombardy. The steepest ascent is effected by a great number of zigzags, so gradual, that they turn almost parallel on one another. The pedestrian will do well to scale across them, as one might cut a coil of rope across the centre, instead of running round it; and climbing from crag to crag, he will speedily see his carriage and friends far below him, toiling slowly along, while he himself seems to be mount

ing into heaven. the road above these zigzags, constructing a tunnel or gallery for safety from the avalanches, so as to let them shoot over the roof into the gulf below without harm to the passengers. But a man would not wish to be present either in the tunnel or on the zigzags, when an avalanche thundered down. One would suppose it would sweep gallery and all before it, tearing a trench in the mountain, like the furrow of a cannon ball across rough ground.

The labourers were at work upon

You reach the summit of the pass, the highest ridge, and as usual there is little or no intermediate space, no debateable level, but you descend as instantly, almost, as from one side of the steep roof of a house to the other. The fierce wind cutting your face, and sometimes blowing as if it would hurl you back bodily into the inn at Splugen, or the thundering Rhine, tells you at once, as well as the extreme cold, when you have reached the culminating point, for you get nothing of Italy here except an Austrian bayonet, sharp and watchful as the ice-breeze. Perhaps you may have been expecting to meet the warm breath of the South, and to look down from the peaks of winter into the verdure of sunny Italian landscapes. As yet the Italian side is as savage as the Swiss, and there is an element of gloom besides, almost sensible in the air itself, and visible as a symbol, in the awful desolation around you,-grim despotism, vigilant, insolent, remorseless. So pass on, if you please, and enter some of its guard-houses, built as much like dread prisons as may be, and where you feel as if in prison yourself, while your passport and your baggage are under examination, How different this, from the pleasant, hospitable reception on the Grand St. Bernard!

The old road from this point passed through the terrific gorge of the Cardinell, where Macdonald, at the will of Napoleon, undertook a five days' fight with the rage of the elements. It was winter and storm, but there was no retreating. He advanced with his army in the face of a cannonade of avalanches, on the brink of unfathomable abysses, where many a score of despairing men and struggling horses, buffeted and blinded by the wings of the tempest, and wrapped in a winding

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sheet of ice and snow, were launched off by the crashing mountain masses, and buried for ever. Over this gorge the avalanches hang balanced and brooding, so that a whisper may precipitate them. They have sometimes fallen like a thunderbolt, and swept away one traveller, leaving another in safety by his side. The mail carriers have seen their horses shot into the abyss, not indeed from under them, but when they had dismounted for an instant. It seems to be a pass shrouded in more absolute terrors than any in Switzerland.

There are indeed more avalanches annually in this Canton of the Grisons than in any other, and a greater number of lives lost every year. There is no avoiding the peril, because no foreseeing when it may fall. A story is told, with all the evidence of truth, of the whole village of Rueras in 1749 being swept off by an avalanche so immense, taking such vast deep masses of earth all at once, that the inmates in some of the houses were not even awakened by the rush of the mountain, and when they did awake buried, lay abed and wondered that the night was so long! Tired mountaineers sleep very soundly, but I do not demand credit for this, though it is not absolutely incredible. There are incidents enough, terrible and grand, and escapes almost miraculous, which do not so tax faith's faculties.

In the passage of Macdonald's army through this frightful region, so far from being surprised at the number of men swept to destruction, we only wonder that whole regiments were not buried at once; the amazement is, that passing in a winter's storm, with avalanches repeatedly shooting through these columns, so large a portion of the army escaped, not more than a hundred men and as many horses, being lost. One of the drummers of the army, having been shot in a snow bank from the avalanche into the frightful gulf, and having struggled, forth alive, but out of sight and reach of his comrades, was heard beating his drum for hours in the abyss, vainly expecting rescue. Poor fellow! the roll of his martial instrument had often roused his fellow-soldiers with fierce courage to the attack, but now it was his own funeral march that he was beating, and it sounded like a death summons for the whole army

into this frightful Hades, if another avalanche should thunder down. There was no reaching him, and death with icy fingers stilled the roll of the drum, and beat out the last pulsations of hope and life in his bosom !

Macdonald was struggling on to Marengo. The army suffered more from fatigue and terror in the passage than in all their battles. Had they perished in the gorge of the Cardinell the victory at Marengo would perhaps have been changed into a defeat, which itself might have changed the whole course of modern history. What might not have been, had such and such things not been! and what mighty things might never have been if such and such things had been. Give me but the power to have put a pin where I might choose, twice in the last forty years, and I could have revolutionized all Europe. IF is a great word. How many at this moment are saying, If I had but done so and so, or, if this circumstance were only so, or, if I had but avoided doing so and so! Sometimes ifs are fearful things, especially on a dying bed, when they balance the soul between hell and heaven. One half the sentence presents it at the gates of Paradise, the other thrusts it through the portals of the world of wo.

We passed now above the village of Isola, with the deserted and unused zigzags leading to it, which you overlook completely, as if you could jump down upon the clustered houses. The laborious constructed roads and great galleries tell you, if you are at all sceptical, what dangers lie in wait from the avalanches, which you find it difficult to conceive, when crossing the pass in the depth of summer and in fine weather. A space of about three thousand feet, where the avalanches roar across the passage every year, and would plough up an open road like the wedge of the descending pyramids of Dgizeh, is nearly covered with these massive galleries, one of them 700 feet in length, a second 642 feet long, and a still longer gallery of 1530 feet by fifteen high and wide. The solid smooth roofs slope outwards, and the traveller beneath them, if he is there at a proper time, may hear above him the sublime roar of the descending masses of ice and snow, impetuously sweeping the roof and shooting into the gulf like a tornado.

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