has peopled them; alternately
glittering in sunshine, and enveloped in clouds, and from the well-known
effects of haze and distance, appearing suspended in the air in their
full dimensions and relative proportions. The imagination dwells upon
the appalling hazards peculiar to their few accessible parts, and on the
almost total extinction of life and animal powers, which is the penalty
of a few hours sojourn there. And here again, too, the mind is forcibly
impressed with the utter helplessness of the speck of dust which it
inhabits, and that momentary dependence on Providence, which must be so
convincingly felt in traversing such regions. Ascending in the scale of
comparison, it may reflect, that these gigantic forms, which fill the
eye at a distance at which cities and pyramids would fade into
imperceptible specks, are but excrescences on the face of that earth,
which itself is but an atom in the map of the universe. But I am
wandering from my subject, and from the route, which, in this quarter,
is somewhat precipitous. I shall, therefore, only remark what has
frequently struck me as not an improbable conjecture, that Milton might
have formed his splendid conception of the icy region of Pandaemonium
from some of these colossal ranges of Alps with which his eye must have
been familiar, seen through the vistas of a stormy sky. In the
well-known passage which I shall take the liberty of quoting, one seems
to recognise the deep drifts of snow, and the blue crevasses which
abound in such a spot as the Mer de Glace, as well as the castellated
peaks and glaciers which border on it, and the biting atmosphere which
prevails among their summits.

[Footnote 2: The Welsh proverb, that a man who sleeps on the top of
Snowdon, must awake either a fool or a poet, refers as probably to the
effect produced on the mind by the prodigious mountain panorama
discernible from thence, as to any fancied influence of the genius
loci.]

"Beyond this flood a frozen continent
Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms
Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land
Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems
Of ancient pile; or else deep snow and ice,
A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog
'Twixt Damiata and Mount Casius old,
Where armies whole have sunk: the parching air
Burns frore, and cold performs th' effect of fire."

CHAP. II.

ROCHEPOT TO LYONS.

"MON Dieu, ma fille," says Madame de Sevi