midst of some of the grandest, most glorious, most exciting scenery in the world.

There is no describing it; at least no possibility of justly conveying its magnificence. The Lake of Wallenstadt, about twelve miles long, is preeminent in beauty and grandeur. It is inferior only to the Lake of Lucerne, and that is saying much.

There is the greatest majesty and glory in the forms of the mountains that rise out of it, while the side gorges that open off from it are picturesque, rich and beautiful. We felt in going from the scenes of open luxuriance around Zurich, that it was good to get again among the mountains, it was like going back into the fortress of the soul. Those mighty towering masses seem to prop and elevate the inward being. They look down upon you so silent, so awful, so expressive; you have the same feelings in entering among them, that you have in going beneath the dome of some vast religious temple, the same that you have in walking on the shore of the ocean. We dined on deck on board the steamer, but it really seemed incongruous to be eating amidst such grand and solemn scenery; the table of a restaurant set in the middle of St. Peter's, would have seemed almost as much in keeping. Nevertheless, men must eat, drink, and sleep, though the scenery be ever so beautiful. In the midst of our dinner, we came opposite the point, where in a mountain more than seven thousand feet high, an immense cavern pierces entirely through the summit, so that even from the lake you can look through it and see the sky, though you would think it was a patch of snow you were looking at.

After a few hours from Wallenstadt through the beautiful scenery of the vale of Scez, we arrived at Ragatz, for a visit to the astounding black glen of the Baths of Pfeffers. The evening threatened a storm, but we had enjoyed a day of great grandeur, and for the night were in good time at the comfortable shelter of an inn, which the guide-books tell you was an old summer residence of the Abbots.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

Baths of Pfeffers.-Gorge of the Tamina.-Coire and the Grisons.

Ir 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 Dante might have chained the tenants of his 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 daylight 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 fisThere, in a crypt in the deep rock, lies the hot fountain, where a cloud of steam rises round you like a vapor bath, and the gush of hot water pours its cascade into the roaring cold

sure.

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 mountains, 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 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 wobegone in spirit, before an abode in that frightfu! dripping chasm would do him good. In the next age men's ideas in therapeutics were so advanced, that they conducted the hot medicinal 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 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
Are conscious beings to mine eye,
When at the break of day they stand
Like giants, looking through the sky,
To hail the sun's unrisen car,

That gilds their diadems of snow,
While one by one, as star by star,
Their peaks in ether glow.

Their silent presence fills my soul,
When, to the horizontal ray
The many-tinctured vapors roll
In evanescent wreaths away,
And leave them naked on the scene,
The emblems of Eternity,

The same as they have ever been,
And shall for ever be!

And O ye everlasting hills!

Buildings of God, not made with hands,
Whose Word performs whate'er he wills,
Whose Word, though ye shall perish, stands;

Can there be eyes that look on you,

Till tears of rapture make them dim,

Nor in his works the Maker view,
Then lose his works in Him?

By me, when I behold Him not,

Or love Him not when I behold,

Be all I ever knew forgot:

My pulse stand still, my heart grow cold;
Transformed to ice, 'twixt earth and sky,
On yonder cliff my form be seen,
That all may ask, but none reply,

What my offence hath been!"

From Ragatz we posted to Coire, in the Canton of the Grisons. It is an old capital of some 5,000 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 democratic government is in a Council of seventy members at Coire. In the Cantons of St. Gall, 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 Protestants 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 vil lages, 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, and 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 until 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.