CHAPTER V.

Gorge of the Dala.

Ar 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 turning a natural bastion of the mountain, there comes sweeping down upon you from above, a gorge of overwhelming grandeur, over

whelming 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 sheer 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 zigzag perilous 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 perilous 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 summits 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 caravan of travellers seems 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 VI.

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 and color, of softness and ruggedness! Here are vast heights above you, and vast depths below, villages hanging to the mountain sides, green pasturages and winding paths, chalets dotting the mountains, lovely meadow slopes enamelled with flowers, deep immeasurable ravines, torrents thundering down them, colossal, overhanging, castellated reefs of granite, snowy peaks with the setting sun upon them. You command a view far down over the valley of the Rhone with its villages and castles, and its mixture of rich farms and vast beds and heaps of mountain fragments, deposited by furious torrents. What affects the mind very powerfully on first entering upon these scenes is the deep dark blue, so intensely deep and overshadowing, of the gorge at its upper end, and the magnificent proud sweep of the granite barrier, which there shuts it in, apparently without a passage. The mountains rise like vast supernatural intelligences taking a material shape, and drawing around themselves a drapery of awful grandeur; there is a forehead of power and majesty, and the likeness of a kingly crown above it.

Amidst all the grandeur of this scenery, I remember to have been in no place more delighted with the profuse richness, delicacy and beauty of the Alpine flowers. The grass of the meadow slopes in the gorge of the Dala had a depth and power of verdure, a clear, delicious greenness, that in its effect upon the

mind was like that of the atmosphere in the brightest autumnal morning of the year, or rather, perhaps, like the colors of the sky at sunset. There is no such grass-color in the world, as that of these mountain meadows. It is just the same at the verge of the ice oceans of Mont Blanc. It makes you think of one of the points chosen by the Sacred Poet to illustrate the divine benevolence (and I had almost said, no man can truly understand why it was chosen, who has not travelled in Switzerland), "Who maketh the grass to grow upon the mountains."

And then the flowers, so modest, so lovely, yet of such deep exquisite hue, enamelled in the grass, sparkling amidst it, "a starry multitude," underneath such awful brooding mountain forms, and icy precipices, how beautiful! All that the Poets have ever said or sung of Daisies, Violets, Snow-drops, Kingcups, Primroses, and all modest flowers, is here out-done by the mute poetry of the denizens of these wild pastures. Such a meadow slope as this, watered with pure rills from the glaciers, would have set the mind of Edwards at work in contemplation on the beauty of holiness. He has connected these meek and lowly flowers with an image, which none of the Poets of this world have ever thought of. To him the divine beauty of holiness "made the soul like a field or garden of God, with all manmer of pleasant flowers; all pleasant, delightful, and undisturbed; enjoying a sweet calm, and the gentle, vivifying beams of the Sun. The soul of a true Christian appears like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the year; low and humble on the ground; opening its bosom to receive the pleasant beams of the Sun's glory; rejoicing, as it were, in a calm rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and lovingly, in the midst of other flowers round about; all in like manner opening their bosoms to drink in the light of the Sun."

Very likely such a passage as this, coming from the soul of the great theologian (for this is the poetry of the soul, and not of artificial sentiment, nor of the mere worship of nature), will seem to many persons, like violets in the bosom of a glacier. But no poet ever described the meek, modest flowers so beautifully, rejoicing in a calm rapture. Jonathan Edwards himself, with his