avalanches, crashing ice-bergs, chained lightning, leaping from crag to crag, and thunder bellowing through the vast and boundless deep, might be exhausted, and yet fail to convey to the mind an adequate impression of this sublime pass. Four or five miles of it are called the VIA MALA, constituting one continued, tortuous, black, jagged chasm, split through the stupendous mountain-ridge from the summit to the base, in perpendicular, angular, and convoluted zig-zag rifts, so narrow in some places that you could almost leap across, yet so deep that the thunder of the Rhine dies upon the ear in struggling and reverberating echoes upwards.

Sixteen hundred feet at least the precipices in some places rise perpendicular to heaven, so serrated and torn, the one side from the other, that if the same Almighty Power that rent them should spring them together, they would shut as closely as a portcullis in its sockets, as a tomb upon its lid. Down in the depths of this fearful fissure thunders the mad river, sometimes lost from sight and scarcely audible in its muffled, subterranean, booming sound, sometimes desperately plunging, sometimes wildly, swiftly, flashing in white foam, sometimes whirling like a maelstroom.

You enter upon this savage pass from a world of beauty, from the sunlit vale of Domschleg, under the old Etruscan Castle of Realt, spiked in the cliff like a war-club, four hundred feet above you, and totally inaccessible on every side but one. Passing this from Thusis, you are plunged at once into a scene of such concentrated and deep sublimity, such awe-inspiring grandeur, such overwhelming power, that you advance slowly and solemnly, as if every crag were a supernatural being looking at you. The road is with great daring carried along the perpendicular face of crags, being cut from the rock where no living thing could have scaled the mountain, and sometimes it completely overhangs the abyss, a thousand feet above the raging torrent. Now it pierces the rock, now it runs zig-zag, now spans the gorge on a light dizzy bridge; now the mountains frown on each other like tropical thunder-clouds about to meet and discharge their artillery, and now you come upon mighty insulated crags, thrown wildly together, covered

with fringes of moss and shrubbery, and constituting vast masses of verdure.

I must here speak of the folly of passing through a scene so magnificently grand in any other way than leisurely on foot. My friend being an invalid, we took a barouche at Thusis, and a fat, surly guide for a driver, but we had no sooner started than with my friend's consent I cleared myself of this incumbrance, and resumed my old lonely pilgrimage, letting the carriage pass on out of sight before me. Mr. H. soon followed my example, and I could see him now and then with his sketchbook in his hand, leaning over the parapet, and endeavouring to transfer with his pencil some little likeness or portrait of the sublime scene. Now and then I got up with him, and found him vexed with the impatient hurry of the coachman, who was very much disposed to drive on alone without us. Without me

he did go, and I enjoyed the pleasure of walking back again, to the opening of the gorge at Thusis, admiring the grand fea tures of the scene in the reverse order. And nothing can be finer than the effect, where you look through the ravine as through a mighty perspective, with the Realt Castle hanging to the cliff at its mouth, and the sunny air and earth expanding in such contrast with the frowning, gloom-invested, tremendous passage behind you. We leaned over the parapet, and by dropping stones in the roaring torrent below, and computing by our watches the time they took to reach the water, endeavoured to guess at the depth of the chasm. It was dizzy to look at it. The tall black fir forest on the mountain shelves, and the blasted pines on inaccessible peaks, seemed to gaze gravely at us, as if we had come unauthorized into a sanctuary of nature too deep and awful to be trodden by the foot of man.

Just after the entrance from Thusis, the mountain is pierced by the first gallery, at a point where of old the chasm was impassable and never passed. The peasants gave the unfathomed profound abyss at this place the name of the Verlohren Loch, or Lost Gulf, because no man could trace it, and to get to the valley above they had to ascend high mountains from Thusis, and come down in a long fatiguing circuit. After some hundreds of years, the engineer of the present road, Pocobelli, un

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dertook to cut through the overhanging mountain along this Lost Gulf a dark tunnel of 216 feet, and then blasted a groove for a thousand feet farther, under the rocky canopy, where your carriage passes as on a shelf, with the tremendous gulf beneath you at your left. Now and then the precipices on one side actually hang beetling over the road on the other, and looking up to heaven, it is as if you gazed out from the keep of a dungeon, and one would think you might almost see the stars at noon-day as from the bottom of a well.

Looking up the pass from below the second bridge, perhaps the view is finer than in any other part. The bridge itself, with the appalling depth spanned by it, adds to the sublimity. You gain this bridge by a gallery in an overhanging projection of the mountain, and then cross to the other side, looking down and up, as in the central position of the gorge. Owing to the recent heavy rain while we were at Ragatz, the river was now higher than usual, and from the beetling precipices above us the white streams, new born, were leaping like jets of foam. We passed a most singular and daring, but very simple air bridge that hung above us for the purpose of getting the timber from one side of the gulf, where almost perpendicularly it clothes the mountain, over to the road on the other. A range of cables was suspended from the trunks of enormous pines, some hundreds of feet above the road, and being fastened securely on the other side of the gulf, the timber being cut and trimmed for the purpose, was thus swung high in its cradle of air to the place of landing for transportation.

How tremendous would a falling avalanche be in this place! But here the mountains, one would think, are too steep for the snow and ice to congregate in sufficient masses. In a dread

ful storm in 1834, the river being dammed up by the fragments of rock and timber wedged into the jagged narrow cleft, the water rose nearly four hundred feet. It poured down the gorge as if an ocean had burst into it, but its ravages were committed principally in the vales above and below the Via Mala. At the village of Splugen twelve houses were swept away, so sudden and violent was the inundation, in some of which, an hour before, the peasants had been quietly seated at their sup

per. The same terrific storm and inundation covered some ether of the valleys with a half century of desolation.

At Andeer I rejoined my friend, whose care had provided a good dinner, besides making all arrangements for getting on to Splugen for the night. There was nothing for me to do but to sit down and rest myself. I had passed and repassed almost the whole of the Via Mala, and would have been glad, if possible, to return through the same stupendous pass the next day, but our course was direct for Italy.

CHAPTER LXV.

NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE SPLUGEN.

Now, dear friend, what thinkest thou of the moral of this stupendous scene in the preceding chapter? Dost thou set down this mountain-rift, in thy natural theology, as a chapter of the scars and vestiges of sin, one of the groans of nature in this nether world, wrung out by man's fall, or is it to thee an instructive, exalting, exciting scene of Power, magnificently grand, almost as if thou hadst witnessed the revealed Arm of Omnipotence, and lifting thy heart, mind, soul, thy whole being, up to God?

Methinks you answer, that if God meant the world to be a great solemn palace for the teaching of his children, on the very walls of which there should be grand inscriptions and hieroglyphics productive of great thoughts, rousing the mind from slumber, rearing the imagination with a noble discipline, he would have scattered here and there just such earthquake-rifts of power and grandeur. We are immortal children in the school-house of our infancy. It is not necessary to suppose that every scar on the face of Nature, deep entrenched and jagged, is an imperfection or a mark of wrath; for it may be a scene where an angel passing by would stop and admire it as a symbol of God's power, a faint comma, as it were, in the revelation of his attributes; it may be a scene which awakens great thoughts in an angel's bosom, as a hidden lowly daisy

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does the more gentle ones; the daisy being a flower which an angel might stop to gaze at as an emblem of sweetness and humility.

And in this view, as a hieroglyphic of Power, this fathomless dread gorge is also a proof of Love. It was Love that appointed it as an emblem of Power. So is the great wide Sea, and that Leviathan whom Thou hast made to play therein. So are the volcanoes, the ice-continents, and the burning deserts. All may be works of Love, though they show nothing but Power. And even if it be Power in exercise for the avenging and punishment of sin, even then it is Love; for every lesson of God's wrath is Love, and where there is sin, wrath is a proof of Love, of Love saving by wrath the lookers on from rushing into wrath.

There are places in our world where we may suppose that beings from another planet, conversant with the history of ours, would stop and gaze solemnly, and speak to each other of God's retributive justice. Such is that black dead sea with arid shores that rolls where Sodom stood. If angels went to take Lot from the city that was to be burned, how often, when angels pass the place, scarred now with retribution, do they think with shuddering of the evil of sin! Yet even that retribution Love, and had not God

was invested with the atmosphere of been Love, he might have let Sodom stand, he might have let the guilty go unpunished. If God were not Love, then there might be no future retribution of misery to the wicked. But justice only does the work of Love, and Love works for the purity and blessedness of the universe. Where there is sin, Love without wrath would only be connivance with iniquity.

It is a fact, therefore, that in your natural theology sin being given, pain is absolutely necessary, in order to prove the benevolence of God. So that the problem and the answer might be stated thus: Given, the fact of sin, how will you demonstrate that God is a good being? Answer: Only by proving that God punishes sin. In this view, the misery with which earth is filled, so far from being a difficulty in God's government, goes to establish it as God's. A malevolent being would have let men sin without making them miserable; there