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power. It is as if we perceive the breadth of the earth and enter into the treasures of the snow. "Lift up your eyes to the heavens and look upon the earth beneath; for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner, but my salvation shall be forever and my righteousness shall not be abolished."

The hour of sunset offers the greatest enchantment. The town and environs are full of chosen points of view. From the belvederes of the principal hotels, from the balconies to the various platforms, overhanging the edge of the precipice on which the city rises; from the terrace of the observatory which peeps down into the streets; or from the tower of the minster as from a balloon, groups of travelers stand gazing for hours. Let us mount the eminence called the Euge, overlooking the valley of the Aar, about fifteen minutes from the gate, and take our place beneath this avenue of ancient elms. We are on the edge of a precipice. About a hundred feet beneath, the green, limpid river rushes between its close high banks. From the surface of the water, the eye measures with a new impression the stupendous stature of each giant pinnacle. The old town, close built, of massive stone, with its antique walls and towers, its steeples, cathedral and beautiful belfry, is built upon precipitous hights, and shines and sparkles in the afternoon sunshine. It recalls Jerusalem, from the Mount of Olives, as seen by Him who would have gathered its inhabitants as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings and they would not. The surrounding landscape, sometimes abruptly swelling into quite lofty hills, has the blue range of the Jura on the north, and on the south a rich mass of mountains and precipices looking in the two lakes of Thun and Brienz, themselves invisible, but their presence betrayed by that aerial softness which hangs over distant waters. The landscape is bathed in mellow sunshine, and above rise those fairy snow-realms with their ice-palaces, lately of pure silver, but, as the day draws to its close, steeped in a deeper and ever-deepening hue, almost impossible to describe. From an exquisite rose-tint, it passes to an ensanguined stain, and then to a burning crimson.

The scene below undergoes a gradual transformation. Prismatic hues blend softly into the wide landscape. An ethereal vapor floats over it. The purple hills and azure rocks melt together into the sombre evening shadows. The earth grows darker and darker. But the towering walls and broken pinnacles above become more radiant, and deepen with intenser brightness, as if unaware that the lower earth has yielded to the embrace of night. Their illumined sides reflect a kind of dusky moonlight. The wrapt spectator gazes in profound silence. The damp night shadows steal slowly up. So death creeps upon some majestic victim still contending, but in vain, against his mighty hand. Now their lower portion is dimmed, while the summits are yet kindling with triumphant splendor; when suddenly the warm glow completely relapses into a bluish, ghastly white, as if a human soul had just taken its departure.

I remember to have once taken a friend, who had been but a few hours in Berne, to the terrace of the observatory for a view at sunset. It was too late,to his great disappointment. We had caught some glimpses of those shining tops, as we went, glowing as if in the bloody light of a furnace; but, when we reached the observatory, the solemn giants lay cold and dead in the damp night-mists. We waited awhile, to watch their gloomy outlines disappear in the thickening shadows, when suddenly they were overspread with a warm blush, and their extinguished tops kindled again into rosy fire. For one or two minutes we watched the not unusual phenomenon.

This is only one of the many optical effects. Sometimes the setting sun sheds over them only the most delicate rosecoloring, and sometimes steeps them in a broad golden illumination. I have seen them reflect the lurid glare of domes and steeples in the red light of a midnight conflagration. Perhaps no two sunsets were ever the same. Then comes the enchantment of the morning, the transformations of moon and the wonderful magnificence cast about them by clouds. It is when half revealed that they most astonish. Here the soul acknowledges the sweetness of the divine artist. Sometimes in my walks they are entirely invisible. The landscape is half veiled by sunshine mist. Î look in vain for the stupen

dous spectacle, and almost forget, as we are apt to do, great spiritual truths, the eternal grandeur and beauty so often revealed. As the soft vapor rises from river and hill, I pause again, for the hundredth time, incredulous, overwhelmed, and amazed at that broad world built up above our world, as if, in its ample silver sides, I caught glimpses of some other planet, gleaming slopes and shining mountains, leaning far upwards into heaven, not having the least apparent connection with our earth.

These wonderful snow-peaks, forever above the clouds, are nature's grand work-halls. Here she forms and pours, to remote coasts and oceans, the great rivers of Europe: the Po, the Tessino, the Rhone, the Rhine, and the Danube. Here she fabricates those lovely lakes, whose shores fill the mind with a sense of beauty, and in whose transparent depths populations find the means of life.

In those mysterious solitudes the daring traveler has scaled the frozen hights which nature seems to have formed impregnable, and amid those defiles, from precipice to precipice, and torrent to torrent, science has cast the solid road; ambition has led proud armies, and religion has built the hospitable convent. How many a weary pilgrim, overtaken by the snow-storm, has left his nameless bones beneath yonder colossal monument; how many an eager hunter has fallen into a bottomless chasm; or, by a fatal misstep, plunged headlong down a precipice, such as, says John Miller, sometimes turns giddy the head of the wild beast.

The effect of the Alps is, I think, hightened by a mental illusion. It is well known that the increased apparent size of the moon, at the period of her rising, is an error of the reason. To the eye, she really appears no larger on the horizon than in the zenith. The belief in her expanded orb, is formed by an unconscious process of the mind. This fact any man of science will explain. On the same principle, the Alpine range appears much more stupendous to the imagination than to the eye. A daguerreotype view, merely carrying out the rules of perspective, would afford no adequate idea of the impression received from nature. In order to produce that impression, an artist ought to magnify their real dimensions upon the canvas, as the only mode of satisfying those who have studied them. They

really seem to grow and expand after frequent observation, and continually assume more astonishing proportions, bearing away the mind beyond the sober reality, vast as that is. This contributes to render them a perpetual source of wonder and delight, something unfathomable and magical.

There are periods of bad weather, 'during which they entirely disappear for weeks, so that the eye becomes accustomed to the delightful and magnificent landscape, without this, its mightiest feature. It captivates by elements of the richest scenery. The inferior mountains in the foreground rise majestically into the sky, and those far loftier which form the shores of the the lakes Thun and Brienz, strike with all the grandeur of an Alpine range. When the weather clears, leaving only some masses of opaque blue cloud upon the horizon, the eye measures the nearer summits, the Niesen and Stockhorn, believing it has discovered in them the monarchs of the earth themselves, when lo! as the heavy vapor slowly sinks or breaks apart, above its black edge, at a hight apparently impossible, projects a pointed image-a silvery fragment, cutting the blue sky too sharply with its broken outline to be a cloud, and yet too near the stars to belong to our lower earth. You gaze some moments, lost in doubt and struck with wonder, as at a miracle. Noiselessly and imperceptibly the heavy thick cloud-veil falls away, and with a slow grand movement, one after the other, pinnacle and pyramid of solid silver rise into view, the Wetterhorn, or Storm Peak; the Finsteraarhorn, the dark Aar Peak, the gloomy father of a beautiful daughter, the river Aar; the Schreckhorn, or the Peak of Terror; the Jungfrau, or the Virgin, and the Blumlisalp, or the Flower Peak.

At Berne, of course, these mountains are the prominent objects of earth and heaven. They are always gleaming upon you at some unexpected place or moment, and in an aspect surprisingly new, or ravishingly beautiful and grand. Now they lie engulphed in one lid mass of azure clouds, whose upper perfectly horizontal outline resembles the surface of an ocean. From its tranquil and level bosom rise only the tops of each peak. This beautiful appearance recalls the period of the deluge, or, perhaps, the anterior primeval ages of the earth before man became an inhabitant of it,

when the present continents formed the bottom of an universal flood, nine thousand feet in depth, and yonder summits were actually islands. Now they look down into the streets of the old medieval town, far evertopping the summit of the Minster tower, and now float, like a vision of glory, over sweeps of forest foliage. Now they open upon you from a tender mist, as if the Creator's hand had, at that moment, first called forth their ethereal tops of soft, rosy fire. Now their base dissolved and lost in vapor, they seem suspended above, like "that great city, the Holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God"

Their effulgent beauty derives a new interest from its association with the idea of liberty. It is singular how the hand of poetry and history has crowned Switzerland with this halo, and how she has maintained it through a long series of centuries, amid the wars, revolutions, and selfish diplomatic territorial arrangements of Europe. Even the iron heart of Napoleon softened towards her. After his downfall, when the Holy Alliance had everything in its own hands, a certain liberty was still left to Switzerland. The great attempt of the people, in 1848, to break from their tutelage, was commenced by Switzerland. Her hand first struck the chord which vibrated through the continent. For a moment, Europe proclaimed the principle that no governmental pow can be legitimate which does not flow from the people, but in 1854, Switzerland is the only country where the republic really exists. Liberty appears to be her birth-right, and her de

termination. Is it not remarkable that, in the centre of Europe, without seacoasts, fleets, or colonies, locked in by powerful military monarchies, where the word liberty would be treason, she should have founded a constitution, modeled upon the ideas of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton; that she should maintain a perfectly free press in three languages, that she should be in the full enjoyment of those rights of man, with which the Almighty invested every human being, and of which none can be deprived without a violation of his laws and the introduction of confusion and discord into the plan of Providence-in short, that she should keep the banner of the Republic, float ing broadly on the breeze, upon the very pinnacle of the European continent?

"Liberté c'est ton jour, ce sol est ton empire; La nulle ambition sous tes traites ne conspire D'un peuple pauvre et fier toi seule armes les mains;

Sur ces pics sourcilleux, vierges de pas humains, L'aigle au vol indompté semble te rendre hom

mage,

Le bleu miroir des lacs réfléchir ta beauté,
Et le bruit des torrents dire à l'écho sauvage:
Liberté Liberté !

"Héritier de ces biens, toi qui les abandonnes,
Et soutiens à prix d'or les lointaines couronnes,
D'où vient qu'aux premier sons d'un air mélo-
dieux,

J'ai vu des pleurs furtifs s'échapper de tes yeux ?
Sans doute, en l'ecoutant tu rêvais te patrie,
Et des vallons natals l'agreste majesté;
Sans douté il murmurait à ton âme attendrie;
Liberté! Liberté !"*

These celebrated lines, by Mad. Tastu, deserve, and have very likely received, a better translation tha the following

Liberty, it is thy day, this soil is thy empire:

No ambition here conspires, disguised beneath thy form;
Thou alone armest the hands of a people poor and proud;
Upon those cloud-capped peaks, untrod by human feet,
The indomitable eagle seems to render thee homage;
The blue mirror of the lakes reflect thy beauty,
And to the savage echo, the thundering torrents shout,
Liberty Liberty!

Heir of this treasure! thou who abandonest it,

To defend, for gold, distant thrones.

Whence the tears which, at some melodious air,

I have seen steal in secret from thine eyes?

Ah! with those strains came images of thy country.

The rural majesty of thy native valleys;

Ah! to thy saddened soul rose the murmured cry,

Liberty! Liberty!

THE DAMES OF VIRGINIA.

THE cocked-hat gentry have had

pre

cedence in these pages, but not justly. Those fascinating figures which filled with such rare life and beauty, hall and bower, in the former days, should surely have been first described:-the pompous, arrogant, and worthy old planter, and his eldest son, should have given place-mere potter's clay and rusty iron as they were, compared with the beautiful vases of porcelain and gold, with which they floated along on the stream of Time. To rectify the error, now,-place aux dames!

See them enter in a long dazzling line, with bright, smiling faces, and musical laughter, and soft voices, like a rippling stream of sound, the "very echo to the seat where love is throned." But what singular dresses! you say: how oddly the hair is decorated; what a laughable sight the patches on their frces, and how high the red heel of the little ghoe, which peeps out from the silken skirt! Yet there is so much grace beneath this singularity of dress, that you cannot turn away, but find yourself unconsciously applying to the gay pageant of so many lovely faces and fair forms, that beautiful description of the Princess Ida and her maidens: -"by them went

The enamored air sighing, and on their curls,
From the high tree the blossom, wavering, fell;
And over them the tremulous isles of light
Slided, they moving under shade!"

What wonder that those fair ladies made our brave grandfathers kneel to them, and pay them homage! What possible match was the stalwart cavalier, the courtly gentleman, with sword, musquetoon, pistol, and all manner of warlike insignia, for one of those little tender personages, whose more deathdealing weapon was a fan, whose more fatal fire-arms were a pair of eyes, that blinded the poor cavalier with their soft mimic lightnings? Who could for a moment compare the strength of the strongest arm that ever grappled with the soldier, breast to breast, and throat to throat, with the all-conquering puissance of the small, tender hand, laid on his sleeve, or given him to kiss? Was it wonderful, that our forefathers knelt to them, and set them up on the high places in their hearts, and almost worshiped them?

You explain the undeniable fact of that lofty consideration, by asserting that the times were chivalric-still tinged with the dying radiance of the knightly age. Such, it is true, was the character of the epoch; the men were chivalric, but is it not plain that the ladies were the cause of it? Gilded by their bright smiles, the world was no longer a cold reality, rather a fairy land of poetry and romance, and those fairies grown to human stature, stamped upon it the impress of their own individuality: it was the graces and conspicuous attractions, personal and mental, of the ladies,

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of those giants, as the world now calls them, our worthy and strong-hearted grandsires.

But to bring to an end this epic chant of fairies and giants,-substituting description for rhapsody, the object of the writer is to furnish some account, however slight and inadequate, of the daily lives of the women of Virginia, at the commencement of the eighteenth century, together with a few hasty reflections upon their peculiarities of character and costume.

And first of the Virginia wife:-after speaking as is proper of the matron first, we shall pass on to the maidens. The wife of the Virginia planter was an important personage, and occupied no insignificant position in the everyday life as well as in the affections of her lord and master. Her husband had not married her by lottery, as is the usage to our own day in some other lands; or by command of his family, as was so frequently the case under the ancient régime in England and on the continent. He had simply fallen in love with her when he was a boy of sixteen summers, and, "dallying with the innocence of love," dreamed his days away like an honest fellow over little favors from her -flowers or other trifles, but worth kingdoms to him. He had ridden on his fine hunter beside the window of her father's old lumbering chariot, prancing gallantly to display his horsemanship-leaping fearlessly every obstacle to 16tain his position, and making his nob charger seriously doubt the sanity of

the individual who bestrode him. He had danced blissful minuets with her to enchanted music on golden floors of Calif-palaces in Bagdat-and ridden with his young queen through Fairy land, which undiscovered country lay between her father's mansion and the ⚫ paternal dwelling. He had worn her glove under his brocade waistcoatstolen her miniature for nightly reverie and rapt meditation-and done many other things affording full proof of Shakspeare's maxim that love and folly are inseparable companions. Then he had gone with dreadful heaviness of heart to England to learn the art of constructing Latin and Greek verses at Oxford, where, among his select friends at wine parties, he gave mysterious toasts in honor of "the fairest of the fair," and commiserated the unhappy youths whose eyes had never feasted on her face. In the dazzling glitter of a London season the image of his faithful Virginia maiden might have been for a time lost sight of, but once more on the wharf at Yorktown, he felt that inane splendor fall from him, and the tender form again take its place. She had been faithful to him and so they were married, and when the old folks were gathered to their fathers-with love and blessings for the little daughterin-law who had brought into the mansion so much sunlight-the honest young fellow and his maiden wife reigned in the family homestead, the same faithful lovers always.

As she grew older, the now buxom mother of a growing flock eschewed minuets and all gewgaws of dress or decoration-wearing her hair in a tower scarcely a foot in hight, and using shoes alarmingly low-heeled. She became an oracle in all matters appertaining to the household, and, indeed, spent much the larger portion of her time in keeping everything neat and orderly— in laying up supplies of pickle, and preserves, and every imaginable delicacy for her lord, and family, and guests. She arrayed her forces in the kitchen and store-room with the precision of a veteran commander, and the armylight and heavy troops-moved under her guidance with a spirit and method fatal to the city of Idleness which she stormed and took, and demolished to the foundation. Grown older, the good lady took extreme delight in discoursing at great length on all the ills that flesh

is heir to:-no description of bodily ailment was unknown to her, and for all she had an infallible remedy. She ferreted out sickness among her neighbors, and sent panaceas to them: she silently encouraged the indolent negroes to report themselves "on the sick list," by sending them, or rather having carried with her on her visits to the quarters, huge platesful of warm toast, and full cans of nourishing and invigorating drinks. She rejoiced in a case of sickness in black or white, as a general rejoices in finding the enemy offer battle with enormously disproportioned forces; and it is simple justice to say that in many cases her system of therapeutics, founded as it was on long experience, met in practice with eminent success.

Then, grown older still, the good dame took to wearing glasses, and would sit plying her busy needle in the comfortable chair by the corner of the fire; and discuss, pleasantly gossiping, the affairs of the neighborhood-the deaths, and births, and marriages-her sons and daughters around her in a merry group, and the portly planter, her erewhile boy-husband, for whom she had never ceased to feel, an admiring, changeless, profound affection, sitting with his feet upon the fender, reading, opposite to her. When the true-hearted lady dies, be sure that not her household alone will weep for her: a gloom will fall on every countenance when the countryside hears of it; and all will feel that. a true, tender, loving nature, kind to the poor, and faithful to her God and neighbor, has gone from them.

The planter and his family in the old chariot, with white handkerchiefs to their eyes, will not be the only mourners who follow to the tomb, in the old churchyard she passed through to church so regularly, the mortal remains of the pure-hearted lady. The distance, rather, shall alone blot out and swallow up the long line of carriages dragged slowly on by horses with drooping heads and gentlemen who rein in their animals to the dead-march gait-and plainly-clad pedestrians, male and female, who whisper to each other, with moist eyes and subdued voices, all the virtues of the good lady who has passed from them. She lived long, and was surrounded at her death with all that makes old age comfortable, "as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends;" but it is hard to lose her, even to see he

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