d be conducted down it: and the prospect which burst upon
us in front, had apparently no limit but the power of human vision.
Beyond the foreground, which was formed by a series of rocky glens
diverging from below the point on which we stood, the immense vale of
the Saone extended like a bird's-eye view of the ocean, its relative
distances marked by towns and villages glittering like white sails.
Above the flat line of haze, which, at the first glance, appears to
terminate the prospect at the distance of sixty miles, or more, we
distinguished a faint blue outline of lofty mountains, which must have
been the barrier separating France from Switzerland; and, as occasional
gleams of sunshine broke out, the glittering and jagged lines of a
barrier still more distant, and apparently hanging in mid air, became
distinctly visible. Among these I recognised, at last, the features of
Mont Blanc, in whose peculiar outline I could not be mistaken, and
which, according to the map, cannot be less than 110 or 120 miles
distant, in a direct line from the Montagne de Rochepot. It is, perhaps,
not necessary to be a mountaineer, like Jean Jacques, by birth and
education, in order to feel the peculiar expansion of mind, which he
describes as caused by breathing mountain-air, and contemplating
prospects like this of which I speak.[2] A boundless plain, and enormous
mountains, such as the Alps, whether viewed individually, or contrasted
with each other, are objects not physically grand alone, but affording
also food for deep and enlarged reflection. The mind, while expatiating
over the mass of feelings and projects, of hopes and fears, which are
passing within the limits of the wide map below, feels the nothingness
of the atom which it animates, and the comparative insignificance of its
own joys and griefs in the scale of creation, and retires at last into
itself, sobered into that calm state which is so favourable to the
formation of any momentous decision, or the prosecution of a train of
deep thought. A moment's glance changes the scene from culture and
population to the silence and solitude of a dead icy desert; from the
redundancy of animal and vegetable life to its "solemn syncope and
pause." The ideas of obscurity, danger, and infinity, all powerful and
acknowledged sources of the sublime, are excited at the view of a range
of frozen summits, cold, fixed, and everlasting as the imaginary nature
of those destinies, with whom a noble bard