nexion with human sympathies and feelings, which seem so peculiarly characteristic of the refined age in which we live? In what deep recesses of human nature has a sentiment, so confined to a particular time and particular classes of men, its remote fountain? Antiquity knew nothing of it. Without bewildering the reader with references to what has been written on this subject, including the brilliant and fantastic paradoxes of Mr. Ruskin, suffice it to say, with the latter, that though there is not a single spot of land in Greece or Italy from which 'mountains are not discernible,' yet neither Greek nor Roman writer ever conceived the picturesque' in connexion with them. He loved them, perhaps, for their kindred with that Ether and its brilliant inhabitants which were the subjects of his passionate admiration,--he peopled them with graceful beings of the fancy, and regarded them with superstitious reverence as the resort of the Immortals, but he never admired them, much less cherished them, after the modern sentimental fashion, for any supposed attraction of their own. As we trace the history of mankind lower down, we find the mountainsentiment continue equally absent from literature almost down to our own time; although the gradual influence of this class of scenery on pictorial art is very perceptible, and probably led the way to the other. Dante, the epitome, as we are told, of the Middle Ages, Shakspeare, the universalist of the moderns, — had not a taste of it. Of Shakspeare, indeed, Mr. Ruskin predicates, that Destiny preserved him from this particular infection with a view to his greater triumphs. No 'mountain passions were to be allowed to Shakspeare. Shakspeare could be allowed no mountains-not even any supreme 'natural beauty. He had to be left with his kingcups and 'clover; pansies; the passing clouds; the Avon's flow, and the ' undulating hills and woods of Warwick; lest it should make him in the least overrate their power on the strong, full'fledged minds of men. Even now, when Wordsworth, and

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Though not concerned with it at present, we cannot help noticing another extraordinary specimen of a whole fabric of notions built on false premises, or rather no premises, in the last volume of this singular writer's Modern Painters. He is discussing Shakspeare's freedom from the modern infection of the picturesque, and thinks he has discovered an exception. There was only one thing belonging to hills 'that Shakspeare seemed to feel as noble, and that was because he had seen it in Warwickshire, clumps of pine occasionally rising on little sandstone mounds, as at the place of execution of Piers Gaveston, above the lowland woods. He touches on this tree fondly " again and again.

Scott, and Byron, have so thoroughly popularised this feeling among ourselves, we are uncertain whether it has really taken root, except in the Germanic race. Frenchmen and Italians have borrowed the trick of describing mountain scenery from their neighbours; we are seldom sure that they really feel it; and whether a Frenchman, not on his guard, is not just as likely to term the Alps bien gentilles' (a phrase which horrified some sentimental tourist a few years ago) as to use any other epithet. They lack the word itself, which we never utter without some sense of grandeur- for the French montagne' is equally applicable to Mont Blanc and to a hill on a post road requiring the drag. This argument, however, admits of being carried too far; for it has been said, with equal truth, that France has but one word to express the passion of love and a preference for a leg of mutton.

The best image which the world can give of paradise,' says the writer to whom we have just referred, is the slope of the 'meadows, orchards, and corn-fields on the sides of a great Alp, 'with its purple rocks and eternal snows above.' Nor let it be supposed that devotion to the highest order of mountain scenery excludes the appreciation of similar beauty on a smaller scale; on the contrary, it sharpens the perception of it. It is the practised Alpine tourist above all others who will fully appreciate the grandeur of the rifted walls of Glencoe, or those strange igneous peaks, unconform to other hills,' which bristle above the black waves of Lake Coruisk. Still, the sentiment inspired by the

"The strong-backed promontory

Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up

The pine and cedar."

'Where note his observance of the peculiar horizontal roots of the 'pine, spurred as it is with them like the claws of a bird, and partly 'propped as the aiguilles, by those rock promontories at their bases 'which I have always called their spurs' (as if Mr. Ruskin was the first to use this common word). And so forth, through many more fanciful lines. Now, we are not going to give the historical reasons for our opinion, but will merely say that we do not believe Shakspeare ever saw a 'pine' any more than a 'cedar,' except, possibly, a few saplings planted for curiosity: that the Scotch fir, the only 'pine' in the case, was extirpated from the South of England many an age before Shakspeare if, indeed, it was ever indigenous there, and has only been reintroduced by modern planters; and that Shakspeare, in naming it, merely employed the common poetical diction. If we are right, which the reader can examine for himself, the cutting away of this frail support brings down a whole scaffolding of theory beautifully fringed with tropes; and all because the writer was too clever to think twice.

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crowning scenery of all-the snow region itself, with its wilderness of glacier, bare peaks, and dazzling névé — is of a different order from the rest, as are the objects themselves. The snowregion of the Alps is still for the most part, in the enthusiastic language of Tschudi,

'An unknown land, rife with marvels and legendary glory: a connecting link, where man and the nature linked to him find no home: but, overpowered by the sense of his impotence, the lord of earth dares only approach for a moment, an occasional pilgrim, to gaze on its mightiest wonders. . . . A vague idea of endless cold and desolation is associated with the realm of snow, and people are content to live on without casting a thought on the grand elemental movements, the wondrous forms, or the vegetable and animal life which is secretly wrestling there with scarcity and death. This unknown world lies midway between the corn-fields of Germany and Lombardy. Who has ever thoroughly explored and described it? who is there that knows it as intimately as it deserves to be known? Now and then an amateur climbs for a few days over the fields of ice and snow to the summit of some famous peak, or an inquiring philosopher thoughtfully ascends the desert uplands: no one else is there save the ibex and the chamois-hunter, the mountain-haymaker and the mineralogist. No living man is acquainted with the whole world of snow and ice which lies within the Swiss mountains only: few know more than a comparatively small portion of it. Within the last ten years, however, a marked progress has been made in this most interesting field of discovery.'

If the reader has under his eyes a coloured geological map, or, still better, a good model of the Alpine country of Switzerland and Savoy, he will observe, amidst the labyrinth of peaks and ridges, four very distinct protuberances, or bosses, of white; not representing to the eye snowy ranges, but rather snowy patches, whole districts, in which the upheaval has been greatest, or in which the causes of degradation, the breaking down and grinding away of the mountain summits, which have been going on for such vast geological cycles of time, have had rather less effect than elsewhere. These patches represent four mountain regions, in which the loftiest peaks of the Alps are to be found, and the most extensive glaciers; and, rich as other provinces may be in beauty and sublimity, it is to these that the real Alpine amateur is constantly tempted to resort when he is able, and to which his memory most constantly recurs in absence. Through that disciplined tone of imagination which is always acquired in the zealous pursuit of any study of facts and realities, although he may perhaps be personally familiar only with a few scenes of this description, he becomes so well able to picture to himself others which he has not seen, that a good

map or a good description -the page of a handbook, almostwill bring them so vividly before him, that the reality, when visited, shall scarcely appear new. Those measurements of height, bearings, and distance, which to the uninitiated make such descriptions complicated and tedious, all help, in his mind, to complete a conception. He models the district described, as it were, in his brain; and every rough name of peak or glacier has in his ear a poetical clang, as the sonorous vocabulary of classical geography had in that of Milton. It is for readers of this special class that Alpine books, such as those now before us, are chiefly written; and this is a taste quite distinct from mere fancy for the picturesque, or mere love of natural science, though often happily associated with both.

Of these four districts, the westernmost (situated wholly in Savoy) is the most frequented and the most famous, comprising Mont Blanc, the loftiest summit of all. It is, however, very inferior in extent to at least two others. It is very accurately bounded by the valley of Chamouni and Courmayeur, connected at the western and eastern ends by the transverse passes of the Col de Bonhomme and Col Ferret. The Mont Blanc region, therefore, stands forth as an island of no great extent, separated from all other heights by considerable depressions—the wellknown Tour of Mont Blanc' being an easy circuit, nowhere reaching the snow in summer, except a patch or so which may be found on the Col de Bonhomme. Besides the superiority which it possesses in the height of its single majestic summit, this district has other features of sublimity which can scarcely be found elsewhere. The Aiguilles' which bristle round Mont Blanc have no rivals in their fantastic grandeur. The Mer de Glace, as it extends upwards to the Col du Géant, seems still to present, after all recent discoveries, the most perfect of all glacier scenery; uniting all its horrors with its beauties in a degree scarcely equalled elsewhere, and presenting, moreover, the finest field for studying its scientific character. But of the thousands who annually visit this region, very few carry away with them more than the first indistinct impression, grand, no doubt, and long remembered, but how widely different from that which 'il lungo studio e'l grande amore' finally fix in the treasurehouse of the mind! What Alpine traveller will not recognise the full truth of the following remarks of Professor Forbes? Speaking of one well-known peculiarity of this scenery, he says,

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'There is nothing more practically striking, or more captivating to the imagination, than the extreme slowness with which we learn to judge of distances, and to recognise localities on the glacier surface. Long after icy scenes have become fetly familiar, we find

that the eye is still uneducated in these respects, and that phenomena the most remarkable when pointed out, have utterly escaped observation amidst the magnificence of the surrounding scenery, the invigoration which the bracing air produces, and the astonishing effect of interminable vastness with which icy plains outspread for miles, terminated by a perspective of almost shadowless snowy slopes, impress the mind. I cannot now recall, without some degree of shame, the almost blindfold way in which I was once in the habit of visiting the glaciers. During three different previous summers I had visited the Mer de Glace, and during two of them, 1832 and 1839, I had traversed many miles of its surface: yet I failed to remark a thousand peculiarities of the most obvious kind, or to speculate upon their cause; or else the clearer impression which I now have of these things has wholly driven from my mind the previous faint impression. Of the existence of the moraines generally, and their cause, as well as of the fact of the descent of the glaciers, I was aware; but I can scarcely recall another of the many singularities which they present as affecting my imagination then in a lively manner - the wear and polish of the rocks the vast masses of travelled stone thrown up, high and dry, far above the present level of the ice, like fragments of rock, indicating by their elevation on the beach the fury of the past storm- the pillars of ice, with their rocky capitals, studded over the plain like fantastic monuments of the Druid ageor the beautiful veined structure of the interior of the ice apparent in almost every crevasse these things, so far as I now recollect, were passed by unobserved. . . . We are not aware, in our ordinary researches in physical geography, how much we fall back on our general knowledge and habitual observation in pursuing any special line of inquiry; or what would be our difficulty in entering as men upon the study of a world which we had not familiarly known as children. The terms of science are generally but translations into precise language of the vague observations of the uncultivated senses. Now the ice-world is like a new planet, full of conditions, appearances, and associations alien to our common experience; and it is not wonderful that it should be only after a long training, after much fatigue, and dazzling of eyes, and weary steps, and many a hard bed, that the Alpine traveller acquires some of that nice perception of cause and effect the instinct of the children of nature — which guides the Indian on his trail, and teaches him, with unerring philosophy, to read the signs of change in earth or air.' (Tour, p. 106.)

It is strange-or would be so, if tourists were not essentially a race moutonnière, following each other like sheep through a gap

that a region so limited in extent and so accessible should still have large portions of unexplored ground. No traveller had ever attempted a passage across its main chain anywhere but by the Col du Géant, until Forbes crossed the Glacier de la Tour in 1842; and we have not heard of a repetition of the experiment.