ps' tremendous steeps,
Skirting the pathless precipice, where throng
Wild forms of danger; as he onward creeps
If, chance, his anxious eye at distance sees
The mountain-shepherd's solitary home,
Peeping from forth the moon-illumin'd trees,
What sudden transports to his bosom come!
But, if between some hideous chasm yawn,
Where the cleft pine a doubtful bridge displays,
In dreadful silence, on the brink, forlorn
He stands, and views in the faint rays
Far, far below, the torrent's rising surge,
And listens to the wild impetuous roar;
Still eyes the depth, still shudders on the verge,
Fears to return, nor dares to venture o'er.
Desperate, at length the tottering plank he tries,
His weak steps slide, he shrieks, he sinks--he dies!

Emily, often as she travelled among the clouds, watched in silent awe
their billowy surges rolling below; sometimes, wholly closing upon the
scene, they appeared like a world of chaos, and, at others, spreading
thinly, they opened and admitted partial catches of the landscape--the
torrent, whose astounding roar had never failed, tumbling down the rocky
chasm, huge cliffs white with snow, or the dark summits of the pine
forests, that stretched mid-way down the mountains. But who may describe
her rapture, when, having passed through a sea of vapour, she caught
a first view of Italy; when, from the ridge of one of those tremendous
precipices that hang upon Mount Cenis and guard the entrance of that
enchanting country, she looked down through the lower clouds, and, as
they floated away, saw the grassy vales of Piedmont at her feet, and,
beyond, the plains of Lombardy extending to the farthest distance, at
which appeared, on the faint horizon, the doubtful towers of Turin?

The solitary grandeur of the objects that immediately surrounded her,
the mountain-region towering above, the deep precipices that fell
beneath, the waving blackness of the forests of pine and oak, which
skirted their feet, or hung within their recesses, the headlong torrents
that, dashing among their cliffs, sometimes appeared like a cloud of
mist, at others like a sheet of ice--these were features which received
a higher character of sublimity from the reposing beauty of the Italian
landscape below, stretching to the wide horizon, where the same melting
blue tint seemed to unite earth and sky.

Madame Montoni only shuddered as she looked down precipices near whose
edge the chairmen trotted lightly and swift