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.

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CHAPTER XXXVIII.

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 the St. Gothard, the other from the pass of the Splugen, to form the 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 emblem 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 fly from Baumgarten in 1793, he brought a secret letter of introduction to M. Jost, the Principal of the burgomaster Tscharner's school, and being appointed a teacher, he found a refuge for near a year, unknown, in this employment. A season of much meditation it must have been to him, of hard and profitable thinking, of useful trial, and of much enjoyment in nature. Sometimes he stopped in the midst of his Algebraic solutions, as one surrounded in a dream by the din and smoke of the armies of his country, and sometimes he was himself in a reverie in the palace of the Tuileries, in Paris, while the boys were following his compasses and calculations round the wooden globe. Many a pleasant walk he must have had among the mountains, many a refreshing swim in the blue and grey waters of the Rhine. The schoolmaster may have been happier than the Monarch, and probably was. Fifty-four years ago, how little could he have dreamed the scenes, through which his life of the next half century, as the Actor, instead of the Teacher of history, was to be drawn! The young pedestrian, with a bundle on his back and a pilgrim's staff, calling himself Monsieur Chabot, knew not that he was on his way to the throne, instead of from it, or that the extremes of his life, almost his first and second childhood, should be the instruction of half a dozen Swiss children, and the governing of thirty millions of French.

On our way towards this village we passed in sight of the hamlet of Feldsberg, threatened with destruction from the fall of an overhanging mountain more perpendicular by far than the Rossberg. The danger was so imminent, that the inhabitants, some months before, had begged to be received into a neighboring commune, and united with it. But the people of Feldsberg were

Protestants; so the authorities of the Romish commune refused to grant their request, unless they would renounce the Protestant Faith, and become Roman Catholics! This was truly characteristic; and the determination of the poor people to abide by the gospel under the falling mountain, rather than take refuge in Romanism from the Avalanche, was equally so. What disposition has been made of the inhabitants, I know not; but it is very clear that the religious charity and freedom, applauded in some parts of the Canton, have no place in the neighborhood of this threatened convulsion of nature. There is in this very region a mixture of the two opposite systems of religion quite unexampled, the village of Reichenau, for instance, being Romish, while just the other side of the river the hamlet is Protestant. languages are quite as distinct, one village speaking German, while its next neighbor talks in the Romansch patois.

The

The world has made the greatest mistake against its own interests in being so intolerant, that ever was made. Sometimes one portion of it has driven away from its bosom the most vital elements of its industry and prosperity, because they could not conform to its hierarchical and religious despotisms. Spain impoverished herself by driving out the Moors and Jews. France put back her own advancement in agriculture and manufactures irretrievably by burning out the Huguenots, and at the same time enriched other countries at her own expense. Italy impoverished and debilitated herself in like manner by the peremptory banishment of some of her best manufacturers, because they were Reformed, and in that measure took the most direct course possible to build up the Protestant City of Zurich, where the banished ones from Locarno found a hospitable refuge with all their wealth, arts, and industry. They who will leave a country for their faith, rather than desert their faith, are likely to be the best of its citizens, and when you draw them off, you take away the life-blood of the country. This is one way in which, by the constitution of Divine Providence, men's sins come down upon their own pate, and nations reap the fire of their own persecutions. They sow their fields with fire, and gather the fire into their own garners. They sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind. But men do not learn this, until they see it in history, and even

there they rarely turn the light of their own experience upon the future, so that selfishness and passion often beguile one generation to a plunge into the same mistakes that have ruined the preceding.

From Reichenau we posted the same evening to Thusis, a village of about seven hundred inhabitants, situated against the jaws of the wildest, most tremendous defile in Switzerland, on a mountain terrace or projection of unequal height, from which you enjoy down the open valley the loveliest variety of prospect, in river, plain, mountain, castle, and hamlet. By one of those great calamities, which so often overwhelm the Swiss villages, this thriving little town has been but recently destroyed by a conflagration. No man can measure the distress which must fall upon the inhabitants; indeed, there seems no possible resource, by which they could recover from so desolating a blow. It is most melancholy to think of the misery that must be endured by them.

The romantic country through which we have now been travelling possesses more remembrances of feudal tyranny and war in the half-ruined castles, so thickly scattered along the Rhinevales, than any other part of Switzerland. Sometimes they can scarcely be distinguished from the rocks on which they are built, they have become so storm-beaten, old, and moss-grown. Some of them surmount the crags in such picturesque boldness, apparently inaccessible and impregnable, that you wonder both how they were constructed, and how they were conquered. They are remnants of a despotic, warlike, social state, like the huge fossil remains of a past world of all-devouring monsters. The landscapes commanded by them are scenes of the greatest grandeur and beauty, though that was the element least thought of in their construction. Now the traveller winds his way along, and thinks of the powerful spirit of beauty in Nature, which has subdued them to herself in their decay, and dropping a veil of lone and melancholy grandeur over them, has enshrined the forms of men's tyranny for the delight of man's imagination.