xamine the ground; and was standing alone in the sun among a heap of
prostrate figures: with a Great Despair depicted in his face, which it
would be hard to surpass. It was like a picture--'After the
Battle'--Napoleon by the Brave: Bodies by the Paviours."

He came home by the Great St. Gothard, and was quite carried away by
what he saw of Switzerland. The country was so divine that he should
have wondered indeed if its sons and daughters had ever been other than
a patriotic people. Yet, infinitely above the country he had left as he
ranked it in its natural splendours, there was something more enchanting
than these that he lost in leaving Italy; and he expressed this
delightfully in the letter from Lucerne (14th of June) which closes the
narrative of his Italian life.

"We came over the St. Gothard, which has been open only eight days. The
road is cut through the snow, and the carriage winds along a narrow path
between two massive snow walls, twenty feet high or more. Vast plains of
snow range up the mountain-sides above the road, itself seven thousand
feet above the sea; and tremendous waterfalls, hewing out arches for
themselves in the vast drifts, go thundering down from precipices into
deep chasms, here and there and everywhere: the blue water tearing
through the white snow with an awful beauty that is most sublime. The
pass itself, the mere pass over the top, is not so fine, I think, as the
Simplon; and there is no plain upon the summit, for the moment it is
reached the descent begins. So that the loneliness and wildness of the
Simplon are not equalled _there_. But being much higher, the ascent and
the descent range over a much greater space of country; and on both
sides there are places of terrible grandeur, unsurpassable, I should
imagine, in the world. The Devil's Bridge, terrific! The whole descent
between Andermatt (where we slept on Friday night) and Altdorf, William
Tell's town, which we passed through yesterday afternoon, is the highest
sublimation of all you can imagine in the way of Swiss scenery. Oh God!
what a beautiful country it is! How poor and shrunken, beside it, is
Italy in its brightest aspect!

"I look upon the coming down from the Great St. Gothard with a carriage
and four horses and only one postilion, as the most dangerous thing that
a carriage and horses can do. We had two great wooden logs for drags,
and snapped them both like matches. The road is like a geometrical
staircase, with horri