sublime in nature. The Alps are the poetry of inorganic creation, and a
week or two spent on their lakes, in their valleys and gorges, amid the
high waterfalls or upon their snowfields and glaciers, teaches one to
associate new meanings to the words, grand, sublime, lofty, inspiring,
overawing, romantic, wild, precipitous and bewildering, &c. It took me two
days to ascend as high as the Rhone glacier, during which time I walked
over 30 miles up hill along old military roads which the Romans
constructed through Switzerland. I saw the snow and ice on the first day
already, and it seemed as if I was but a little below it, but in place of
reaching the snow line in the afternoon as I judged I might, I did not
reach it until the next afternoon at 5:00 o'clock. The valleys are narrow
and the mountains rise in some places almost perpendicularly at the sides,
so that the snow and ice which melts near the tops of the mountains, falls
down thousands of feet into the streams below. Water-falls that are from
several hundred to a thousand feet in height are numerous among the Alps.

The Giessbach Falls which I ascended on the 6th of September, descends in
a series of seven cascades 1,148 feet, and the Handeck Falls, which I
passed on the 5th, precipitates in an unbroken sheet from the height of
250 feet! Rainbows stand over all the falls of the Alps, whenever the sun
shines.

On the second day (Sept. 4th) of my ascend of the Alps, I could look
upwards and see the eternal snows, or look down into the valleys, and see
the people in the meadows and fields making hay or cutting grain!
Haymakers may drink the water that was an hour before part of the mass of
ice and snow which they see hanging near the top of the mountains several
thousand feet above their heads! Avalanches slide down into the valleys
every month of the year, and I passed through tunnels and bridges that are
purposely constructed that the snow may thus slide over the roads without