honds, so soon as he should reach Scotland;" and said, though he did not know the young laird, he had kenn'd the auld ane fu' weel; and that he leeved little mair nor twenty mile fra' his Feyther's hoose.' Thus ended our three interviews with the Scotch poet, having, with the utmost difficulty, finally succeeded in refusing his anxiously reiterated offer, to escort us over the Furca. But the Furca must have a letter to itself— so good night! CHAPTER XXVI. THE FURCA. I am a man So weary with disasters-tugged with fortune, SHAKSPEARE. O sad is my fate, cried the heart-broken stranger, CAMPBELL.. LETTER XXVIII. CAROLINE ST. CLAIR TO MRS. BALCARRIS. THERE is certainly nothing half so dull as de scription. To the describer, indeed, his description is enjoyment-because it recalls to him the picture of the scene which charmed his fancy-but to the unlucky describee, all the epithets, and assemblages of images, which are accumulated, serve only to convey vague and general ideas,-and vainly is his mind tormented with a confused jumble of woods, rocks, rivers, mountains, and vallies, which form no distinct picture in his imagination; so that all he can do, after the most elaborate description, is to take it upon credit, that the thing described, must be something very fine. The glaciers of the Aar, which we visited from the Grimsel, present a scene which, I am convinced, the world cannot equal; which none who have beheld it can ever forget, and none who have not seen it, can ever conceive. I will not mock you with a futile attempt at description. You cannot picture the scene ;-but you can form some idea of the awe-struck astonishment which filled our minds, when, after surmounting all the difficulties of the way, we found ourselves standing amidst a world of ice, extending around, beneath, and above us-far beyond where the straining sight, in every direction, vainly sought to follow the interminable frozen leagues of glaciers, propped up in towering pyramids or shapeless heaps; or opening into yawning gulphs and unfathomable fissures. The tremendous barren rocks and mountains of the impenetrable Alps, amidst which the terrific Finsteraarhorn reared his granitic pyramid of fourteen thousand feet, alone appeared amidst this world of desolation. Eternal and boundless wastes of ice-naked and inaccessible mountains of rock-which had stood unchanged and untrodden from creation, were the only objects which met our view. Hitherto, with all we had seen of horror and desolation, there was some contrast-some relief. The glaciers of Chamouni are bordered by glowing harvests;-the glaciers of Grindelwald are bounded by its romantic vale ;-the glaciers of the Schiedeck shine forth amidst its majestic woods. Even among the savage rocks and torrents of the Grimsel, though animal life is seen no more, the drooping birch and feathery larch protrude their storm beaten branches from the crevices of the precipices; and the lonely pine tree is seen on high, where no hand can ever reach it. But here there is no trace of vegetation, no blade of grass, no bush, no tree; no spreading weed nor creeping lichen invades the still cold desolation of the icy desert. It is the death of nature. We seemed placed in a creation in which there is no principle of life :translated to another orb, where existence is extinct; and where death, unresisted, holds his terrific reign. The only sound which meets the ear, is that of the loud detonation of the ice, as it bursts open into new abysses, with the crash of thunder-and reverberates from the wild rocks, like the voice of the mountain storms. 'I protest,' said Lady Hunlocke, as we were returning from the glaciers of the Aar,† to the * This phenomenon, which constantly takes place in all glaciers during summer, is probably caused by the expansion of the air and water contained in the ice. From these glaciers, the Aar takes its source, and 6 hospital of the Grimsel; that scene is like the cave of Trophonius, it is enough to make one never smile again.' We had heard so much of the perils of the descent of the Mayenwand, that we were agreeably disappointed in finding that, though long and excessively steep, and covered with a thick short slippery turf, there was neither ice nor snow-and very little danger and difficulty to encounter so that, having a careful trustworthy guide from the hospital, we soon found ourselves in perfect safety at the bottom, and were well rewarded by the sight of the stupendous glacier of the Rhone-by many thought the finest of the Alps-its lofty transparent pyramids of ice, rising high above each other like fairy palaces. The varied colours of bright blue, which its fissures exhibited, and the deep pink or rose colour, which overspread its surface, particularly attracted our attention. It was the second time I had seen this rich rose hue upon the ice of the Alps, and in both cases it appeared when its surface was wet with recent rain. The first time was upon St. Bernard, when the sleet began to fall, of which we had just had a heavy shower in descending the Mayenwand ;--and our guides assured me they rushing down the wild descent of the Grimsel, through the valley of Hasli, it forms the lake of Brientz; from which it issues to water the short but enchanting vale of Interlachen-fills the lake of Thun-flows onward to Berne and Soleure, and bearing fertility through the heart of Switzerland, and receiving all the tributary streams from the High Alps, it unites its equal waters with the Rhine at Coblentz. frequently observed the same appearance during rain, but that it uniformly disappeared when the ice or snow became dry;--an instance of which I had myself witnessed; for in descending the St. Bernard the following day, no trace of rose colour was left. This is a phenomenon I pretend not to explain.* We visited the fountain which is said to be the principal source of the mighty Rhone. Close to it stood a miserable hovel, where three or four men, as black as night, were distilling coarse spirits from the roots of the Gentiana, which grows in great profusion on these mountains. While we waited for our clumsy palfreys, which the other guide had led round by another path, the direct pass down the Mayenwand being impracticable for horses, we enjoyed the grand view of the glacier of the Rhone,† during half an hour of clear sunshine, the last we were destined to see for many a dreary hour;--for scarcely had we mounted, and commenced our long ascent of the trackless and snow-covered Furca, by the edge of the glacier, *That the pink colour frequently observable on the snows of the Alps, which was first described by Saussure, arises from the same cause as the red tinge of the ice of the Polar regions, brought home by Captain Ross, we could scarcely doubt-were it not for the evanescent nature of the colour of the former, and the permanency of the hue of the latter. †The glacier of the Rhone, instead of progressively advancing like most of the glaciers of the Alps, has gradually receded--as the Moraines, or accumulations of stone, earth, or rubbish, it has left behind on its retrogade path for many hundred paces, sufficiently evince. Its decrease is said still to continue. |