rty; or they lead him away to shed his
blood and lay his bones in a foreign soil. Why is it that all the
functions of nature are beneficent? Even the storms that rage around
Mont Blanc, the ice of its eternal winter, yield only good. Here they
come, a river of crystal water, decking with living green this
far-spreading plain. But the institutions of man are not so. From their
frozen summits have too oft, alas! descended, not the peaceful river,
but the thundering avalanche, burying in irretrievable ruin, man, with
his labours and hopes. I suspect, however, that this is a narrow as well
as a sombre philosophy. Doubtless the great fact of the Fall is written
on the face of life. Nevertheless, we have a strong belief that the
mighty schemes of Providence, like the arrangements of external nature,
will all in the end become dispensers of good; that those evil systems
which have burdened the earth, like those mountains of ice and snow
which rise on its surface, have their uses, though as yet we stand too
near them, and too much within the sphere of their tempests and their
avalanches, fully to comprehend these uses. We must descend into the
low-lying plains of the future, and contemplate them afar off; and then
the glaciers and tempests of these moral Mont Blancs may dissolve into
tender showers and crystal rivers, which will fructify and gladden the
world.

In a few minutes I must leave the bridge of the Ticino. Could I, when
far away,--in the seclusion of my own library, for instance,--bid the
Alps rise before me, in stupendous magnificence, as now? I turned round,
and fixed my gaze on the tamer objects of the plain; then back again to
the mountains; but every time I did so, I felt the scene as new. Its
glory burst on me as if seen for the first time. Alas! thought I, if
this majestic image has so faded in the interval of a few moments, what
will it be years after? A scene like this, it is true, can never be
forgotten; but it is but a dwarfed picture that lives in the memory; and
it is well, perhaps, it should be so; for were one to see always the
Alps, with what eyes would one look upon the tamer though still romantic
hills of his own country! And we may extend the principle. There are
times when great truths--eternal verities--flash upon the soul in Alpine
magnitude. It is a new world that discloses itself, and we are thrilled
by its glory; but for the effective discharge of ordinary duties, it is
better, perhaps, that t