says, "fixed his vocation." A being susceptible of the least idea of God seemed to him worthy of every care and every sacrifice. "These stricken individuals of our race," said he, "these brethren beaten down, are they not more worthy of our efforts than those races of animals which men strive to bring to perfection? It is not in vain formulas, but, in charitable efforts that we must find that divine love which Jesus Christ has taught us.'

Dr. Guggenbühl went immediately to work. The attempt had never been tried, of which the idea had come to him, but he found encouragement and sympathy. He fixed upon a Mountain in the Oberland called the Abendberg, elevated about three thousand feet above the level of the sea, and seeming to him to combine all the requisites for the foundation of his establishment. Having issued his appeals and subscriptions, he soon received funds sufficient for the support of some twenty children, and consecrated all his efforts to the moral and physical development of his interesting family. He placed them in the circle of a simple but comfortable domestic life, so distant from the world as not to be distracted by its noise, so near to it as to be accessible to all the good resources of a civilized society.

The mountain air was pure and sweet for them to breathe in. The mountain streams gave them pure running water for drinking, bathing, and washing. The forests afforded wood for the construction of their asylum, around which the land was laid out in gardens. The farm gave them plenty of butter and milk, eggs and poultry. Regular means of communication were established with Unterseen, Interlachen, and other subja cent villages.

The first medical efforts of Dr. Guggenbühl with his interesting patients were applied to the education, and, in a manner, the regeneration, of the physical organs attacked first by the malady, which plays such frightful ravages afterwards upon the mind. The sensitive form is first to be restored to its na tural strength and delicacy, and then the conscience and the wandering faculties shall be won back, as it were, to abide within it. The change from the hot, damp, and stagnant at

mosphere of poor filthy hovels in narrow valleys, to the clear, cool, bracing air of the mountain summits, is itself enough to create a gradual regeneration in the whole physical being. The patient breathes the principle of a new life, and this is powerfully aided by a simple, healthful nourishment, exercise in the open air, varied and encreasing in proportion as strength is regained. Cold bathing, frictions, and various games adapted to fix the attention, and inspire quick voluntary movement, are added to this routine of discipline.

When thus he has succeeded in modifying the physical organs, and giving them a direction towards health and activity, Dr. Guggenbühl begins upon the mental faculties. Probably the degrees of idiocy, towards which the disease has advanced, are various sometimes, but the commencement sometimes sadly confirmed. The report from which I draw these particulars states that Dr. Guggenbühl possesses an admirable assistant in his labours of instruction. I have watched this person descending, says the writer, with the sweetest patient benevolence, to the level of these little idiots, and there striking with perseverance upon the hard stone within, till some little sparkle of fire shall be elicited, some sparkling indication of intelligence. And when he has once succeeded in seizing the least end of the thread of thought, with what infinite precautions does he unroll it, lest it be broken. Then at length are multiplied in the depths of the previous intellectual obscurity a series of fruitful, thought-awakening images.

How delightful is this! It is almost worth the suffering of the calamity, to have so truly benevolent an institution sprung from it. This indeed, if not one of the final causes of calamity in this world, is one of its compensating blessings, to give men opportunity for the growth and discipline of charity and love. For the benefit of this Mountain Hospital contributions have been made at Geneva, at Bâle, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London. The King of Prussia with many foreigners of distinction have interested themselves in it. Its successful and benignant influence is but a type of what would wait upon the whole Valley if all its families could be blest with a truly Christian education. Indeed, if all the ignorant and degraded children

of the Canton du Valais could be taken to the mountains and freely and fully educated, the Canton itself would speedily be free; all the Jesuitism in Uurope could not bring back the people to their old bondage of ignorance and superstition.

CHAPTER XXX.

GORGE OF THE DALA.

AT Sierre, a few miles beyond Sion, we were to leave the valley of the Rhone for the wonderful pass of the Gemmi, and here commenced my pedestrianizing in good earnest. It is always a singularly interesting excursion to go by a side pass from one valley, across an apparently impregnable barrier of mountains, over into another. To cross the Gemmi from the valley of the Rhone, you may start from the village of Leuk, or turn off as we did from Sierre by a path of incomparable beauty, winding gradually within the mountains, and rising rapidly by a precipitous ascent, where at every step your view up and down the valley you are leaving becomes more illimitably grand and vast. You clamber over the little village of Varen, which at first was hanging above you, leaving it far below, as well as that of Leuk, which you see farther up the valley, and thus you are toiling on, thinking perhaps that you are witnessing some of the wildest, most picturesque and extensive views to be enjoyed on this excursion, when all at once there bursts upon you a scene, surpassing all previous experience and anticipation. You rise to the summit of a steep ascent, step upon a space of table land, advance a few feet, and suddenly find yawning before you a fearful gulf of some nine hundred feet deep, into which the ridge on which you stand seems beetling over, ready to fall with your own weight. It is the gulf of the Dala, a torrent which rolls at the bottom, but almost too far down for you to see the swift glance of the water, or hear the roar, for even the thunder of the cataract of Niagara would be well nigh buried in its depths.

Advancing a few steps in the direction of this gulf, and turn

ing a natural bastion of the mountain, there comes sweeping down upon you from above a gorge of overwhelming grandeur, overwhelming both by the surprise and the deep sublimity of the scene. You tremble to enter it, and stand fixed in silent awe and admiration. Below you is that fearful gulf down plunging in a sheet perpendicular of almost a thousand feet, while above you is a tremendous overhanging precipice of near an equal height, adown and across the face of which runs, cut out, the zig-zag perillous gallery, by which you are to pass. Whole strata of this perpendicular face of the mountain seem loosened above, and ready to bury you in their fall, and the loose stones come thundering down now and then with the terror of an avalanche. You step carefully down the gallery or shelf, till perhaps you are near the centre of the pass; now look up to heaven along the perpendicular height above you, if you can do it without falling, and see those bare pines that seem bending over the edge; they look as if blanched with terror. What a steep gigantic mountain brow they fringe ! You feel as if the gallery where you are treading were a perillous position, and yet you cannot resist going back and gazing again down into the measureless gulf, and enjoying again the sudden sweep of this sublime gorge upon your vision. Towards the pass of the Gemmi it is closed by a vast ridge of frowning castellated mountains, and still beyond that loftier snowy mountains are shining, such pyramids of pure snow that they seem as if they would fling the hues of sunset that flash upon them down into the farthest recesses of the valley as it darkens in the evening.

It was such a sight as this that suggested that beautiful sonnet of Wordsworth, closing with so fine an image.

"GLORY to God! and to the Power who came

In filial duty, clothed with love divine;
That made his human tabernacle shine
Like Ocean burning with purpureal flame;
Or like the Alpine Mount, that takes its name
From roseate hues, far kenn'd at morn and even,
In times of peace, or when the storm is driven
Along the nether region's rugged frame!

Earth prompts-Heaven urges; let us seek the light,
Studious of that pure intercourse begun

When first our infant brows their lustre won;
So like the Mountain may we grow more bright,
From unimpeded commerce with the Sun,

At the approach of all-involving night!"

But what is it that arrests your eye on the other side of the gulf, overhung, in like manner, with a sheer perpendicular mountain? There seems to be something in motion along the smooth face of the precipice, but it is not possible. You look again steadily; it is actually a line of mules and travellers, creeping like flies along the face of a wall, and you find there is a road there also, cut along this fearful gulf out of the solid rock; but it is so far across that the passing caravans of travellers seem like moving insects. You watch them a few moments, as they perhaps are watching you; and now they pass from the cliff, and enter on the winding fir-covered path, that takes them along the thundering torrent of the Dala down to the village of Leuk.

The view of this gorge might not perhaps have appeared to us quite so sublime, had we been prepared for it, or had we come gradually upon it; but the solemn, sudden, overwhelming grandeur of the view makes it one of the finest passes in all Switzerland. It stirs the very depths of your soul within you, and it seems as if you could remain motionless before it, and not wishing to move, from daylight to sunset, and from sunset to the moon, whose pale, soft, silver light steeps the vales and crags and glaciers with such romantic beauty.

CHAPTER XXXI.

ELEMENTS OF THE LANDSCAPE.-ALPINE FLOWERS. JONATHAN EDWARDS.

PASSING out from this wonderful scene, through a forest of larches, whose dark verdure is peculiarly appropriate to it, and going up towards the baths of Leuk, the interest of the landscape does not at all diminish. What a concentration and congregation of all elements of sublimity and beauty are before you! what surprising contrasts of light and shade, of form