f
something greater than themselves, than in those which exhaust the
treasures and powers of nature in an unconquerable and excellent
glory, leaving nothing more to be by fancy pictured or pursued. I do
not know that there is a district in the world more calculated to
illustrate this power of the expectant imagination than that which
surrounds the city of Fribourg in Switzerland, extending from it
towards Berne. It is of grey sandstone, considerably elevated, but
presenting no object of striking interest to the passing traveller; so
that as it is generally seen in the course of a hasty journey from the
Bernese Alps to those of Savoy, it is rarely regarded with any other
sensation than that of weariness, all the more painful because
accompanied with reaction from the high excitement caused by the
splendour of the Bernese Oberland. The traveller--foot-sore, feverish,
and satiated with glacier and precipice,--lies back in the corner of
the diligence, perceiving little more than that the road is winding
and hilly, and the country through which it passes, cultivated and
tame. Let him, however, only do this tame country the justice of
staying in it a few days, until his mind has recovered its tone, and
take one or two long walks through its fields, and he will have other
thoughts of it. It is, as I said, an undulating district of grey
sandstone, never attaining any considerable height, but having enough
of the mountain spirit to throw itself into continual succession of
bold slope and dale; elevated, also, just far enough above the sea to
render the pine a frequent forest tree along its irregular ridges.
Through this elevated tract the river cuts its way in a ravine some
five or six hundred feet in depth, which winds for leagues between the
gentle hills, unthought of until its edge is approached; and then,
suddenly, through the boughs of the firs, the eye perceives, beneath,
the green and gliding stream, and the broad walls of sandstone cliff
that form its banks; hollowed out where the river leans against them,
at its turns, into perilous over-hanging; and, on the other shore, at
the same spots, leaving little breadths of meadow between them and the
water, half overgrown with thicket, deserted in their sweetness,
inaccessible from above, and rarely visited by any curious wanderers
along the hardly traceable footpath which struggles for existence
beneath the rocks. And there the river ripples and eddies and murmurs
in an outer