eficence among these clouds of Heaven?
Or is it the descendant of a long race of mountains, existing under
appointed laws of birth and endurance, death and decrepitude? There
can be no doubt as to the answer. The rock itself answers audibly by
the murmur of some falling stone or rending pinnacle. It is _not_ as
it was once. Those waste leagues around its feet are loaded with the
wrecks of what it was. On these perhaps, of all mountains, the
characters of decay are written most clearly; around these are spread
most gloomily the memorials of their pride, and the signs of their
humiliation.

[25] Of course I had seen every other tried before giving this
favourable judgment.

What then were they once? The only answer is yet again--"Behold the
cloud!"

36. There are many spots among the inferior ridges of the Alps, such
as the Col de Ferret, the Col d'Anterne, and the associated ranges of
the Buet, which, though commanding prospects of great nobleness, are
themselves very nearly types of all that is most painful to the human
mind. Vast wastes of mountain ground,[26] covered here and there with
dull grey grass or moss, but breaking continually into black banks of
shattered slate, all glistening and sodden with slow tricklings of
clogged, incapable streams; the snow-water oozing through them in a
cold sweat, and spreading itself in creeping stains among their dust;
ever and anon a shaking here and there, and a handful or two of their
particles or flakes trembling down, one sees not why, into more total
dissolution, leaving a few jagged teeth, like the edges of knives
eaten away by vinegar, projecting, through the half-dislodged mass,
from the inner rock; keen enough to cut the hand or foot that rests on
them, yet crumbling as they wound, and soon sinking again into the
smooth, slippery, glutinous heap; looking like a beach of black scales
of dead fish cast ashore from a poisonous sea, and sloping away into
foul ravines, branched down immeasurable slopes of barrenness, where
the winds howl and wander continually, and the snow lies in wasted and
sorrowful fields covered with sooty dust, that collects in streaks and
stains at the bottom of all its thawing ripples.

[26] This is a fourth volume passage,--and I will venture to say of it,
as Albert Duerer, when he was pleased with his work--that for what it has
to do, it cannot be much better done. It is a study on the Col de Bon
Homme.

I know of no other scenes so appalli