fresh as Adam's when he woke and for the Of the vast number of tourists who visit first time looked out upon the world and Switzerland every year, there are few who do asked himself what it was and what he was,- not go up to or even upon some of the more such a sensation comes to us in its full force famous glaciers; and it is, indeed, strange, in the upper Alps, and may be felt by one that of all these scarcely one in a thousand who but a few hours before was in Paris or brings away the slightest notion of what the London. No one, perhaps, can say how com glaciers of the higher level are like. The pletely this shock can be felt until one has true néve, such as that which forms the basin enjoyed a very common incident in mountain- of the Aletch or the Findalen or the Lysjoch, eering, the bivouac at some of the greater is as much superior in strangeness and vastheights. It falls to ordinary men rarely to ness to the ordinary ice-falls as the billows taste the marvellous on this earth so deeply of the Atlantic surpass the chopping seas of as when camped at night in the midst of one the Channel. It is only in the grander forms of the loftier snow-fields far above the region of the neve that the glory of the snow-world of life or vegetation. As one watches the is revealed. There, indeed, in some huge colors of the sunset fade, and peak after peak amphitheatre of mountain ranges not less grow cold and bare, but for some weird lights than twenty or thirty miles in circuit, butover the distant ridges, the full mystery of tressed by peaks each rising to thirteen or the solitude is borne in upon the mind, and fourteen thousand feet, the sweeps of the icethe stillness grows almost intolerable. The sea roll on unbroken, yawning in places into total absence of sound, motion, change, or chasms that stretch for miles, each broad and life of any kind, the gradual stiffening of the deep enough to engulf a navy. There only glacier and the freezing of its streams, the the dazzling purity of the true snow-region hushing even of the avalanches or the tum-can be felt, freed from the debris, the mobling rock, the bare expanse unstreaked by a cloud, the strange lustre of the stars, the immensity around one staring mutely and unchangeably, and which cannot be shut out, seem quite to possess one with the sense of having ventured into some region of nature which is held spellbound in an unbroken night.

raines, the incrustations of the lower glaciers; it is absolutely spotless, and, as far as the eye can reach, without a vestige of any coarser substance than the driven snow. Fanciful as are the contortions of the lower ice-falls, they can give scarcely an idea of the marvels of the true regions of the neve. There the whole body of the glacier for miles appears as if, by the craft of some superhuman race, it had been moulded and reared into stupendous castles, palaces, cathedrals, and cities of pure ice,-half ruined, half unfinished,– gorgeous Palmyras, as it were, or Colosseums of crystal; with column piled on column, and arch above arch; buttressed towers, pinnacles, and minarets, porches, corridors, cloisters, and halls, in vista beyond vista lengthening out; transparent lakes of clear water deeply imprisoned amidst towering icebergs; all, from base to crest, blazing with frosted filagree and fretwork; dropping down

A few weeks of life such as this, thrown into the midst of a laborious or anxious employment, is certainly the most powerful stimulant and reviving influence which it is possible to apply. There is, perhaps, no single mode of making holiday in which a busy man can enjoy it in anything like the perfection, with anything like the readiness, one can when in the Alps. Quite apart from the effect of air, exercise, and enjoyment, physical and mental, this powerful renovation of the natural forces is, perhaps, the most valuable thing to a hard-worked man. Men whose whole lives are passed in brain-work with frozen festoons, tracery, and shafted for a short season find themselves realizing the condition of the millions who labor for their daily bread, and whose lives depend on their manual activity. Men whose existence is so utterly artificial that social forms acquire to them the force of laws of nature are suddenly placed in positions where these social forms are as preposterous as they would be in a battle or a shipwreck.

stalactites of ice. It is a region in which, by some magic, all that is beautiful and impressive in form seems piled with profuse abundance, and transfigured into every hue of azure and every tone of living light. Not to be looked upon, but to be felt, are these gigantic and dazzling masses as one is engulfed in them, or threads the snow-bridge delicately poised over a chasm, or follows the

unerring instinct of the guide through end-amination, glaciers are, of all the mundane less labyrinths and icy ruins. forces, among the most constant and the most There is, perhaps, no ground on which the accessible. There is something about the amwonderful instinct which long physical train-biguous character of the glaciers-half solid, ing produces can be so perfectly watched-half fluid that is very fascinating. There is not even in the Deal pilot steering his boat something so difficult to grasp in the scan of through a gale-as in the superior Alpine huge tracts of earth, as broad and lofty, perguide winding his course across an ice-tor- haps, as one of our English mountain ranges, rent, following with herring sagacity the yet heaving and working with all the ceaseonly possible line of crack, foreseeing every-less life of an ocean. To the experienced obthing, watchful of everything, and fertile in server the glacier seems to have its waves, its everything. His boldness can be matched only tides, and its currents, like a sea, both on its by his patience, and his unwearied providence surface down to its basin. In no other only by his lightning quickness of eye and mode can be watched the heaving of the hand. There is about the climbing of the earth's crest visibly, and the machinery of higher glaciers such inexhaustible variety of geologic change in actual operation. And it incident and condition. There is a charm in is this union of vast extent with movement each; but the greatest charm is in their con--of force and vitality-which makes the tinually changing combinations. Eye, ear, study of the glacier so ever fresh and so imand brain are constantly called into play. picive to the merest scrambler as to the There is the perpetual demand for new plans high of science.

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and expedients; ever fresh surprises in th1 per laciers, as is well known, form but one path, the atmosphere, and the scene; ve, the anch of the Alpine studies. The animal cessions of strange sights and sou menov anch is naturally the least abundant in roar of the subglacial river, the ripp e material, but in that it possesses the mark of surface rills, and the plunge of the cier speciality as retaining yet in the midst of wells, the boom of the avalanches, and the Europe some traces of long bygone animal peal of the glacier rents all day long; the eras. But the vegetation at once affords the whistling of the hewn fragments down an ice incline; the snow whirlwinds eddying round a windy crest; the white, treacherous storm-cloud, whisked up suddenly from the valley, and again as suddenly torn open, and revealing the whole gleaming panorama as if the curtain of heaven's gate were being drawn back; the cry occasionally of an eagle, or the distant glimmer of a chamois, and every sight and sound, from the most majes. tic to the most familiar, from the tempest reverberating round the chain of peaks down to the weird blaze of azure light which shoots up from beneath each print of the foot or of

the axe.

So great an abundance of material for study and thought is there in the Alps, in the geological, vegetable, and animal worlds, that it would well occupy a life of observation and reading. On the glaciers alone a whole literature, a whole branch of science has been bestowed. As ever-moving and changing agents of vast geological movements, they possess an interest which perhaps no other natural force but volcanoes affords. And whereas volcanoes are singularly capricious and bear hardly any personal ex

matter for first-rate investigation. If other spots in the world offer more extraordinary types, there are, perhaps, no regions in Europe where in so small an area such a varying series of climates and consequently of plants can be seen. But quite apart from the richness or beauty of its flora or its fauna, an Alp offers a peculiar character to all observation. The conditions under which both exist are for the most part so special that both fill the least observant with new interest and the student with new suggestions. There is a poetry and a pathos in an Alpine rose or gentian, as we see it the sole organic thing amidst vast inorganic masses, the sole link of life between us and the most gigantic forms of matter. At home, the brightest of birds or insects scarcely awakens a thought in a summer's walk, but a stout man's heart and even eye may be softened by the sight but of a poor stranded bee, blown forth and shipwrecked amidst those pitiless solitudes.

In all the aerostatic phenomena, the Alps, as is well known, take the first rank as the observatories of science. It is as difficult for the student to fail of new ideas in their midst as for the most heedless tourist to fail to learn

something. The great physical forces form that they form, as it were, an epitome of earth, there the very conditions of existence. The and place before us in the range of a summer veriest scrambler gets to record something of day's walk every form of natural object and atmospheric facts and changes. And here it production in the most striking and immediis but fair to say that Alpine climbers in gen-ate contrast. Within a few hours after leaveral, and the Alpine Club in particular, have ing the most terrible forms of ruin, desolation, given a very useful impulse to popular science, and solitude, where no life is found and man and even in some cases to science proper. It can remain but for a few hours, the traveller is simply ridiculous to suggest that most of is in the midst of all t luxuriant loveliness them climb with any scientific purpose, any of Italian valleys and takes, basking in an more than men hunt to improve the breed of almost tropical heat, surrounded by the most horses. But it is the special value of Alpine delicate flowers, ferns, and shrubs, and climbing that it combines a great ety of charmed into mere rest by ever-varied landobjects. And whereas some men pursue it for health, for exercise, for mere adventure or enjoyment, for the wonderful exhilaration it affords, for the poetry, for the solemnity ble to resist the emotion of grateful delight and the purity of the emotions it awakens, with which one recognizes the overflowing some find there the richest field for their seri- richness of this earth amidst the sights, the ous labors, and nearly all find much The sounds, the perfumes, and the myriad sensagives matter for profitable thought. Inde ions of pleasure with which life on the Itala ground which, if to many it is but one he a lakes is full. No one can taste these recreation and rest, has been the scene of thee the who has not borne the heat and burstudies of the Saussures the Agassizs, the Beaumonts, the Forbeses, the Tyndals, the Huxleys, the Tschudis, the Studers, the Berlepschs, must be one which has equal promise for every mind and every character.

But it is not, after all, as being rich in science, nor simply as being lovely in scenery, that the Alps are chiefly marked. It is more

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scapes, softer and more fairy-like than Tur-' ner ever drew. Indeed, after some weeks of rough work amidst the glaciers, it is impossi

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day, the toil and cold of the Allas. Then only is one able to see the gy and profusion of Nature as a whole, and to conceive in one act of thought, and feel but as one manifold sensation, all that she has most strange and most beautiful, from the Arctic zone to the tropics.

Sermons for the People.-By F. D. Hunting-
ton, D. D., Plummer Professor of Christian
Morals in the College and Preacher to the
University at Cambridge, U. S. Arthur
Miall.

GENERAL M'CLELLAN has accepted the nomi-, nation of the Chicago Convention, but in terms which pledge him as irrevocably as Mr. Lincoln to the preservation of the Union at all hazards. "The existence of more than one government," he says, "over the region which once owned our THESE are in every respect excellent sermons. flag, is incompatible with the peace, the power, The style is clear, forcible, and polished, always and the happiness of the people." He adds, intelligible at the first glance, putting everything very significantly to those who have studied the so as to compel attention, and free from false ornahistory of those Northern statesmen who have ment. If it wants those higher beauties which are been the tools of the South, "The Union was the fruit of genius, it is only the better sample of originally formed for the exercise of a spirit of university culture; for universities cannot give conciliation and compromise. To restore and pre- genius, but can make the most of good sense. serve it, the same spirit must prevail in our Mr. Huntington is also happy in his application councils and in the hearts of the people." In of the Gospel to the every-day life of his hearers— other words, General M'Clellan is as much of a to questions peculiarly fitted for pulpit treatment, Unionist at all hazards as Mr. Lincoln; but his and yet carefully avoided by most clergymen. method for securing Union is the old one,-pros- Good instances of this are the sermons entitled tration before the South. The Baltimore plat- "Woman's Position," "The Law of the House,' form pledges Mr. Lincoln to do all in his power" Children,-How to be Received." We must to uproot forever the cause of war,-slavery; also mention the sermon on the "Divinity of General M'Clellan is self-pledged to offer any sop Christ," in which this vital doctrine is admirably to the South it will accept. And it does not strike put to a Trinitarian congregation; namely, so as us as creditable even to the understanding of the to exhibit the proofs of the doctrine without an North, that in such circumstances the Democratic affectation of argument, which is absurd where party should have a chance of victory.-Specta- there are none to impugn it.-Spectator. tor, 24 Sept.

"Mamma is gone to meet the major!" cried three of the lesser boys, rushing upon them in full cry; then Leoline, facing round, "Not the major, he is lieutenant-colonel now, -Colonel Keith, hurrah! "What-what do you mean? Speak ra- many moments when she would have given tionally, Leoline, if you can."