e was brought near us, and on it lay the album in which we
were expected to enter our names. Many notable autographs we found
here, and despite the gladness we felt in adding ours to the number,
there was still a sad, desolate thought: those most distinguished had
all passed away. The mountains remained, their glory undiminished; but
the human beings climbing their heights, and exulting in the grandeur
of heaven and earth, had vanished like the mist wreath. Years would
pass and other feet would cross the slippery fields, other eyes look
out upon the work of God's hands, other names be traced, and we, like
the throng before us, be gone--no longer to look upon the created, but
the Creator.

As soon as we were sufficiently rested, Franz summoned us to the Sea
of Ice, and we began to descend the steep and rugged face of the
mountain. As we approached the surface of the glacier, these
inequalities rose into considerable elevations, intermingled with
half-formed pyramids, bending walls and shapeless masses of ice; with
blocks of granite and frightful chasms at once savage and fantastic.
It puzzled me to know why it should have been called a sea, a rough
and stony one at that; but to me it looked like a river, walled in by
two enormous mountains, rising to the height of ten thousand feet, and
forming a ravine a mile and a half wide, that pursues a straight
course for several miles and divides at the upper end into two glens,
like deep gashes, that run up to the highest elevation of the Alps,
terminating at the lower extremity in an icy precipice of two thousand
feet, whose base is in a still deeper valley. It was as if there had
been innumerable torrents dashing down the precipice into the
valley--arrested by a mighty hurricane as they hurried along, and
wrought into the wildest forms by the fury of the tempest, and then
suddenly congealed, leaving a sea or river of ice, framed in with
lofty peaks and snowy summits, cataracts and avalanches, clouds and
storms, a wonderful combination of the grand, the terrible, and the
sublime.

Franz understood his business of guide too well to let me loiter as I
wished. "These fissures are the chief danger," he said; and, holding
out his small hand, he grasped mine with the tenacity of one not
accustomed to let anything slip through his fingers. A girdle of
imperfectly frozen snow borders this sea; and Franz never planted his
feet till he had first ascertained the nature of the surface wit