ous ascents of our adventurous countrymen to the top of the Alps, that would not cheerfully pay the trifling pittance charged for admittance, to be allowed to gaze at his leisure, over the remains, of what might one day, perhaps some thousand years ago, be considered the perfection of feminine beauty,---now, a partly decayed Egyptian mummy! To sigh over these humble but precious relics, that have been brought from the very spot where the city of abomination once stood,--where the proud Nebuchadnezzar committed his enormities, and was afterwards compelled to eat grass like the oxen,-where the cruel Belshazzar held his impious revels, and was made to tremble at the hand-writing on the wall-and to say, while indulging his melancholy reflections, with such striking and awful memorials before him: Where now proud city,-where is now thy power and glory,-where now those lofty minarets,-those stately towers, those solemn temples, which made thy king of old say, in the pride of his heart, "Is not this great Babylon, that I have built, for the house of the kingdom, by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty ?"* All that now remains of thee, according to the testimony of modern travellers, are a few masses of confused rubbish, from which these humble relics were taken,—a few deformed and unsightly mounds,--where the Arabs of the desert roam unmolested, and the wild beasts stalk, in stately but sullen majesty! How different art thou now, in thy state of degradation, from what thou wert in the days of Chal

*Daniel, iv. 30.

dean glory and triumph!-when thy captives sat disconsolate on the banks of thy streams, and the sorrowful and sorrowing descendants of Abraham, hung their neglected and untuned harps upon thy willows.* Who, I say, would not cheerfully pay the trifling sum, to be admitted to the view of such interesting relics as these? To witness the strange and humiliating pitch of degra dation to which the human intellect has been reduced,

"No spot, on the surface of the globe," it has been observed, can be contemplated with more intense, yet melancholy interest than this desolate site of the Queen of Nations. At Persepolis, there is still a splendour in the ruins, to recal distinctly the former magnificence and beauty of its palaces and temples. In the remaining frag ments of architecture and statuary in Greece, we can still adore the divinity of that genius, which has commanded the admiration, and guided the taste of so many nations and ages. But the vast shapeless piles of Babylon, are so many graves, in which, all its former glories are buried for ever from the eye of curiosity; and which indicate only by their extent, the magnitude of the structures which they conceal in impenetrable night That there are still so many of these sepulchral monuments, and of such vast dimensions, may serve to give us some idea of the former greatness of a city which has furnished materials for so many capitals, and which has been a quarry almost incessantly ransacked for more than two thousand years. No spot more impressively proclaims the mutability of human affairs; and on comparing its for mer grandeur with its present desolation,-on viewing the present ste rility of its fields, once the most fertile in the world, we reverence that sure word of prophecy,' by which its awful change was so clearly foretold:" "How is Babylon become a desolation among the nations !" "Come against her from the utmost border, open her store-houses, cast her up as heaps, and destroy her utterly; let nothing of her be left.” "The wild beasts of the desert, with the wild beasts of the islands, shall dwell there, and the owls shall dwell therein; and it shall be no more inhabited for ever."-Jeremiah, 1. 23. 26. 39.

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when it stooped so low as to worship those uncouth and hideous forms, which may well be styled the workmanship of men's hands and fancy, but are the likeness of any thing but that which they were meant to represent. Yes a very transient view of these memorials of fallen reason, must convince the most careless, as he traverses the lower apartment in which those monstrous forms are to be found, of the liveliness and justness of the description given of these gods of the hea then in the book of Psalms. They are, indeed, the "work of men's hands,*-they have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; feet have they, but they walk not; neither speak they through their throat." Nor is the conclusion that the Psalmist draws from his description less just and expressive, "They that make them, are like unto them;-so is every one that trusteth in them."+ And, to gain admittance into those upper depositories of human inge nuity, where are exhibited those exquisite models of Alpine grandeur, and mountain scenery,-by which, without being exposed to the dangers that he encountered, we may still follow the modern Hannibal in imagination, through all his subterraneous excavations,across his aerial bridges, and along the many dangerous paths, and trackless ways he traversed, in his passage over the Great Simplon; and then, after having surveyed the celebrated pass of Mount Cenis, we can, still in idea, accompany one of the parties that gained, with such incredible fatigue, and so much risk to themselves, the most towering summit of those elevated re

* Psalms, cxv. 4. + Verse 8.

gions, that of the great Mont Blanc,-the pinnacle of the Alps, and the mighty monarch of European mountains,—and look down, without dismay, from its hoary heights, upon the trembling avalanches,* the fearful chasms,-the frozen seas,-tremendous glaciers, and frowning precipices that lie below. Or descending lower in our speculations, we can take our stand beside one of those rivulets or purling streams, (for we I cannot well distinguish which, by the faint-coloured lines that portray them in the distance,) that run among, and divide, and intersect, those huge piles of creation, in so many directions; and contemplate, with admiration, as we gaze up their party-coloured sides, the different appearances they assume, in the various gradations of climate: from the broad belt of vegetative green, at and near the base; through the more sombre shades of sterility and unproductiveness in the middle; till we arrive at the line, or region of perpetual snow;

• These avalanches, after they have accumulated, must, owing to the different degrees of temperature in the weather at different times, rest on a very precarious foundation indeed, and this must greatly in. crease the danger to which those adventurous persons are exposed, who take delight in such terrific pastime. What a narrow escape Mr Clissold had in his descent, from the fall of one of those enormous masses, may be learned from the following extract, which we give in his own words:" After stopping three hours on the summit, we set out for the purpose of descending. It was half past eight o'clock. At eleven, we came to the grand plateau, and at half past one, to the grands mulets. When we arrived there, we heard something like the rolling of thunder, which was nothing but the noise of an enormous avalanche which was seen from the Col de Bulme, to cover a part of the space which we had crossed in our descent! A few hours sooner, and we should have all been enveloped and destroyed,"

where, amidst his whitened solitudes, eternal winter may be said to reign.

And if we now choose to walk along the well supplied connecting passage, that leads to the apartment at the other extremity, (for, in this miniature world, as in the larger one that we inhabit, it appears there is no room for empty space) we may indulge ourselves with a look at the wild and picturesque scenery in the valley of Bagnes, so famous for the awful visitations which it met with on the evening of the 4th of June 1595, when the icy barrier which confined the water above the bridge of Mauvoisin gave way, and consigned the inhabitants of the villages, in this ill-fated valley, to all the horrors of a flood; descending in its progress with irresistible fury, carrying along with it enormous masses of rock, and tearing up and laying waste every thing that lay in its way-until after having desolated the plains of Bagnes, St Branchier, and Bovernier ; and sweeping from the earth the town of Martigny; it lost its force by mingling with the Rhone. And again, in the year 1818, when, notwithstanding the precaution that had been taken to prevent the repetition of such a catastrophe, the waters again rushed out, precipitating themselves into the valley, with a force that it is impossible to describe, and destroying every thing that obstructed, or rather lay in the way of their progress.

In this model we see, as it were, the enormous glacier of Getroz again forming, which has repeatedly been the cause of such devastating calamities, by sending down those prodigious blocks of ice, which, by accumulating, completely block up the passage of the river Dranse in the ravine below. Or, we may stand still and gaze