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sun along the Claudian | áqueduct, | lighting up its arches || like the bridge of chaos. But, as I climbed || the long || slope || of the Alban || mount, || the storm | swept | finally to the north, || and the noble | outline || of the domes || of Albâno || and the graceful | darkness of its || flex grove rose | against | pure || streaks of alternate || blue and amber, | the upper | sky | gradually | flushing through the last | fragments of rain-cloud, | in deep | palpitating | azure, | half | éther and half | dèw. The noon-day sun came | slanting | down | the rocky | slopes of La Ricca, || and its masses of entangled | and tall foliage, whose autumnal | tints | were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand | évergreens, were penetrated with it | as with rain. I cannot call it cōlor, it was conflagration. Púrple, and crímson and scarlet, | like the curtains | of God's | tabernacle, | the rejoicing trées sank into the valley | in showers | of light, | every separate | leaf | quivering | with buoyant | and burning | life; | éach, | as it turned | to refléct | or to transmít | the sunbeam, | first || a torch, || and then || an emerald.

Are not all natural things, it may be asked, as lovely near as far away? By no means. Look at the clouds and watch the delicate sculpture of their alabaster sides, and the rounded lustre of their magnificent rolling. They are meant to be beheld far away: they were shaped for their place high above your head: approach them and they fuse into vague mists, or whirl away in fierce fragments of thunderous vapor. Look at the crest of the Alp from the far-away plains over which its light is cast, whence human souls have communed with it by their myriads. It was built for its place in the far-off sky: approach it, and as the sound of the voice of man dies away about its foundations, and the tide of human life is met at last by the eternal "Here shall thy waves be stayed," the glory of its aspect fades into blanched fearfulness; its purple walls are rent

into grisly rocks, its silver fret-work saddened into wasting snow; the stormbrands of ages are on its breast, the ashes of its own ruin lie solemnly on its white raiment.

If you desire to perceive the great harmonies of the form of a rocky mountain, you must not ascend upon its sides. All there is disorder and accident, or seems so. Retire from it, and as your eye commands it more and more, you see the ruined mountain world with a wider glance; behold! dim sympathies begin to busy themselves in the disjointed mass: line binds itself into stealthy fellowship with line: group by group the helpless fragments gather themselves into ordered companies: new captains of hosts, and masses of battalions, become visible one by one; and faraway answers of foot to foot and bone to bone, until the powerless is seen risen up with girded loins, and not one piece of all the unregarded heap can now be spared from the mystic whole.

94. AVALANCHES OF JUNGFRAU ALP.-G. B. Cheever. Idem.

Suddenly an enormous mass of snow and ice, in itself a mountain, seems to move; it breaks from the toppling outmost mountain ridge of snow, where it is hundreds of feet in depth, and in its first fall of perhaps two thousand feet is broken into millions of fragments. As you first see the flash of distant artillery by night, then hear the roar, so here you may see the white flashing mass majestically bowing, then hear the astounding din. A cloud of dusty, dry snow rises into the air from the concussion, forming a white volume of fleecy smoke, or misty light, from the bosom of which thunders forth the icy torrent in its second prodigious fall over the rocky battlements. The eye follows it delighted, as it ploughs through the path which preceding avalanches have worn, till it comes to the brink of a vast ridge of bare rock, perhaps more than two thousand

feet perpendicular; then pours the whole cataract over the gulf, with a still louder roar of echoing thunder, to which nothing but the noise of Niagara in its sublimity is comparable.

Another fall of still greater depth ensues, over a second similar castellated ridge or reef in the surface of the mountain, with an awful, majestic slowness, and a tremendous crash in its concussion, awakening again the reverberating peals of thunder. Then the torrent roars on to another smaller fall, till at length it reaches a mighty groove of snow and ice. Here its progress is slower; and last of all you listen to the roar of the falling fragments, as they drop out of sight, with a dead weight, into the bottom of the gulf, to rest there forever.

Figure to yourself a cataract like that of Niagara, poured in foaming grandeur, not merely over one great precipice of two hundred feet, but over the successive ridgy precipices of two or three thousand, in the face of a mountain eleven thousand feet high, and tumbling, crashing, thundering down with a continuous din of far greater sublimity than the sound of the grandest cataract. The roar

of the falling mass begins to be heard the moment it is loosened from the mountain; it pours on with the sound of a vast body of rushing water; then comes the first great concussion, a booming crash of thunders, breaking on the still air in mid-heaven; your breath is suspended, and you listen and look; the mighty glittering mass shoots headlong over the main precipice, and the fall is so great that it produces to the eye that impression of dread majestic slowness of which I have spoken, though it is doubtless more rapid than Niagara. But if you should see the cataract of Niagara itself coming down five thousand feet above you in the air, there would be the same impression. The image remains in the mind, and can never fade from it; it is as if you had seen an alabaster cataract from heaven.

חויות

The sound is far more sublime than that of Niagara, because of the preceding stillness in those Alpine solitudes. In the midst of such silence and solemnity, from out the bosom of those glorious, glittering forms of nature, comes that rushing, crashing, thunder-burst of sound! If it were not that your soul, through the eye, is as filled and fixed with the sublimity of the vision as, through the sense of hearing, with that of the audible report, methinks you would wish to bury your face in your hands, and fall prostrate, as at the voice of the Eternal.

95. THE FIRST VIEW OF THE HEAVENS.-O. M. Mitchel.

Often have I swept backward, in imagination, six thousand years, and stood beside our great ancestor, as he gazed for the first time upon the going down of the sun. What strange sensations must have swept through his bewildered mind, as he watched the last departing ray of the sinking orb, unconscious whether he should ever behold its return.

Wrapped in a maze of thought, strange and startling, he suffers his eye to linger long about the point at which the sun had slowly faded from view. A mysterious darkness creeps over the face of Nature; the beautiful scenes of earth are slowly fading, one by one, from his dimmed vision.

A gloom deeper than that which covers earth steals across the mind of earth's solitary inhabitant. He raises his inquiring gaze toward heaven; and lo! a silver crescent of light, clear and beautiful, hanging in the western sky, meets his astonished gaze. The young moon charms his untutored vision, and leads him upward to her bright attendants, which are now stealing, one by one, from out the deep blue sky. The solitary gazer bows, wonders, and adores.

The hours glide by; the silver moon is gone; the stars are rising, slowly ascending the heights of heaven, and sol

emnly sweeping downward in the stillness of the night. A faint streak of rosy light is seen in the east; it brightens; the stars fade; the planets are extinguished; the eye is fixed in mute astonishment on the growing splendor, till the first rays of the returning sun dart their radiance on the young earth and its solitary inhabitant.

The curiosity excited on this first solemn night, the consciousness that in the heavens God had declared his glory, the eager desire to comprehend the mysteries that dwell in their bright orbs, have clung, through the long lapse of six thousand years, to the descendants of him who first watched and wondered. In this boundless field of investigation, human genius has won its most signal victories.

Generation after generation has rolled away, age after age has swept silently by; but each has swelled, by its contributions, the stream of discovery. Mysterious movements have been unravelled; mighty laws have been revealed; ponderous orbs have been weighed; one barrier after another has given way to the force of intellect; until the mind, majestic in its strength, has mounted, step by step, up the rocky height of its self-built pyramid, from whose star-crowned summit it looks out upon the grandeur of the universe self-clothed with the prescience of a God.

96. CHAMOUNY.-Samuel T. Coleridge.

Moderately low pitch.

Hast thou a charm | to stay | the morning | star |
In his steep | cóurse? so lòng || he seems | to pause |
On thy | bald, | awful | frònt, || Oh, | sovereign | Blànc;
The Arvé and Arveiron | at thy base |

Rave || ceaselessly; || but thóu, || most | awful | form, |
Risest from forth | thy silent | sea | of pines |
How silently! Around thee | and above, |
Deep is the air, | and dark; substantial | black, |
An ebon mass: || methinks | thou pièrcest it |
As with a wedge! | But, when I look | agáin, |

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