BATHS OF PFEFFERS. 327 CHAPTER LXII. BATHS OF PFEFFERS.-GORGE OF TAMINA.-COIRE AND GRISONS. IT rains in torrents. We can no more tell where we are than if it were midnight. No morn has come, as on the Righi, in russet mantle clad, disclosing in heaven and earth a wide, wondrous, exciting scene of glory and beauty, but rain, rain, rain, grave, determined, steadfast, concentrated rain, and nothing else sensible or visible. You could not guess that there was either mountain, village, or horizon in Switzerland, but now and then, as at breathing intervals, the huge dark masses dripping in mist, loom out of the storm, like the hulks of a wrecked creation. It is, to say the least, a very vigorous break upon the monotony of fair weather, and inasmuch as we have no mountain excursion to make to-day, but a gorge to visit, in which Danté might have chained the tenants of the sixth hell, if the rain holds up, so that we can get to the mouth of it, it may pour on afterwards, without disturbing our progress towards the earth's centre. The object for which most travellers stop, as we have done, at Ragatz, is the celebrated cavern of the Baths of Pfeffers, the most extraordinary scene for its compass in all Switzerland. It is a gorge and cavern combined, a remarkable split in the mountain, deep, dark, ragged, and savage, the sides of which cross their jagged points far above you, so closely, like the teeth of a saw, that only here and there you can see the day-light at the top, and the sky, through the rift, with the trees of the external world peeping down upon you. As far below a torrent is thundering, and you creep, hanging midway to the dripping shelves of the cliff, along a suspended footpath, a couple of planks wide, nearly a quarter of a mile into the heart of the great fissure. There, in a crypt in the deep rock, lies the hot fountain, where a cloud of steam rises round you like a vapour bath, and the gush of hot water pours its cascade into the roaring cold torrent below. This torrent, for the convenience of which the mountain seems to have been sundered, is called the Tamina; it bellows through the gorge with terrific din and fury, shoots past the base of perpendicular and overhanging mountains seven or eight hundred feet high, and after plunging from precipice to precipice in grand cataracts along its deep channel, pours itself into the Rhine. From Ragatz to the Baths, it is a constant gradual ascent of about an hour, through scenery romantic and grand, and deepening into sublimity as you reach, beneath the overhanging mountain, by the sound of the deep struggling thunder of the Tamina, the grim old Bath-buildings, that rise like a portal in the jaws of hell. From hence up to the hot spring, along the wet, shaking, crazy, old plank bridge, which I have described, with the torrent boiling at the bottom of the chasm, about forty feet beneath you, and the serrated, craggy, intertwisting, overlapping marble walls rising several hundred feet above you, the passage is such an one as Bunyan might have taken for the type of his Valley of the Shadow of Death. It is a most tremendous scene, before which all your previous experiences of the wild, terrible, and fantastic freaks of nature have to give way in submission. You will never forget this gorge of the Tamina, and these Baths of the Pfeffers. It is said they were discovered about the year 1000, and that patients used to be let down by ropes from the cliffs into the very fountain, to be steeped there for hours, and drawn up again. The next progressive step in comfort was a number of cells like magpies' nests, pinned to the walls around the fountain, where patients might abide the season. Far gone a man must be in disease, and wo-begone in spirit, before an abode in that frightful dripping chasm would do him good. In the next age men's ideas in therapeutics were so advanced, that they conducted the hot medinical water by conduits out of the gorge, and built the grisly bath-houses at the entrance; and still later they have come to the perfection of the system, by conveying the water down to the comfortable inn at Ragatz. Its temperature at the spring is about 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It enjoys a wide and thorough reputation for its healing efficacy. If it had not been for the rain we might have enjoyed, from the heights above this terrific gorge, a view as vast and beautiful, as the ravine itself is deep and dreadful. The sketch of it by the artist forms one of the finest landscapes in the Swiss portfolio. Here the Poet Montgomery might have stood at REVERIE OF THE ALPS. 329 day-break, as we have done upon the Righi, in bright weather, and dreamed that reverie of the Alps, of which the two opening and closing stanzas are so impressive and sublime. "The mountains of this glorious land sons. Are conscious beings to mine eye, That gilds their diadems of snow, The same as they have ever been, And O ye everlasting hills! Buildings of God, not made with hands, Till tears of rapture make them dim, By me, when I behold Him not, Or love Him not when I behold, Be all I ever knew forget: My pulse stand still, my heart grow cold; From Ragatz we posted to Coire, in the Canton of the GriIt is an old capital of some 5000 inhabitants, enjoying some peculiar commercial advantages by its position at the confluences of various roads, and on the highway of travel from Italy into Switzerland and Germany. The Canton in the main is Protestant, and the democrative government is of a Council of seventy members at Coire. In the Cantons of St. Gaul, Glarus, and the Grisons, there are some delightful and rare examples of religious toleration and equality between the two systems that divide the population. Sometimes, the Protes tants and Romanists being nearly equal in numbers, the same church is used by them for public worship in turn. This is the case in some parts of the Rheinthal, a valley of the Rhine, which has its three sources in the Canton of the Grisons. In the Canton Glarus, containing about twenty-six thousand inhabitants, though the Protestants number three-fourths of the population, the governmental "council is composed of equal proportions of the inhabitants, Catholics and Protestants," and in some cases the same chapel is used for both congregations. The churches and schools are established and paid by the government, and parents are required, under a certain penalty, to send their children for instruction. If the traveller wishes to know how that rare thing in Europe, the Voluntary System, acts upon the happiness of the people where it prevails, he may turn to Mr. Murray's short description of the Engadine Valley, with its populous and flourishing villages, where they have "nine months of winter, and three of cold weather." What the writer intended as a blot, appears only as a seal of primitive truth and purity. Poverty," he says, "is rare, beggary almost unknown, ano the people, who are, with the exception of one or two parishes, Protestants, are creditably distinguished for their morality, and are exempt from the vices common in other parts of Switzerland. Their pastors are held in great respect, but their pay is miserable, affording a striking proof of the working of a voluntary system. The Sabbath is strictly observed; strangers only are allowed on that day to ride or drive till after church time." A voluntary system that produces such fruits as these, is better than all the will-worship of the most lavishly supported hierarchical or state establishments. CHAPTER LXIII. COURSE OF THE RHINE.-LOUIS PHILIPPE, THE ROYAL SCHOOLMASTER AT REICHENAU.-REICHENAU TO THUSIS. FROM Coire we pass through Reichenau, a little village at the bridges, where the two branches of the Rhine unite, one from COURSE OF THE RHINE. 331 the St. Gothard, the other from the pass of the Splugen, to form one "rejoicing and abounding river," that runs in and out at the Lake of Constance, thunders over the falls at Schaffhausen, feeds the pride, patriotism, and wine-vats of all Germany, and after its long course of grandeur, fuss, and glory, is sponged up by the sands before it can reach the sea. Poor disappointed river! What an emblem it is of the closing life of some men, who have made a great stir in their day, but go entirely out of men's minds before they die! An emblem of some noisy reformers and agitators without heart, who make a great show of patriotism, benevolence, and fearless zeal for a time, but by and by sink down and are heard of no more, in the sand-banks of selfishness and expediency. An emblem more fitly of some truly great men, like Scott and Southey, in whom paralysis overtakes the mental faculties, after they have enriched society with the overflowing treasures of their great genius. But not an emblem of the Christian, who "like the sun seems larger at his setting," and pours as a river of life into the ocean of eternity. Nor is it an emvlem of that River the streams whereof make glad the City of God; for the gladdening and glory of its course here are but things by the way, incidental results, by which it transfigures human society with peace and beauty, while the depth and blessedness of its elements are then only to be fully seen and known, when out of Death it flows a shining Sea of Life through Eternity. There is an inn at Reichenau, formerly a Chateau, which Louis Philippe, King of the French, would perhaps be glad to have transported into the Museum of the Louvre, as a sort of old chrysalis of the living Monarch, more curious in some respects than the Sarcophagi of dead Egyptian kings. In this Chateau at Reichenau, in the days of his adversity, while the French Revolution, with Napoleon as its Star of the Morning, its Lucifer, was sweeping on its swift and awful wing across the nations, Louis Philippe, the friendless young man, the future Monarch, taught mathematics and history in a common school! Compelled to flee from Baumgarten in 1793, he brought a secret letter of introduction to M. Jost, the Principal of the |