exceeded.

It is like the image of the same great Poet, of Old Time sternly driving his ploughshare o'er Creation. The Poem of the Night Thoughts is full of great and rich materials for the mind and heart; it is one of the best demonstrations in our language of the absurdity of that strange idea of Dr. Johnson, that devotion is not a fit subject for poetry! Let the Christian stand at midnight beneath the stars, with mountains round about him, and if the influences of the scene are rightly appreciated, though he may be no Poet, he will feel that Prayer, Praise, and the highest Poetry are one.

"In every storm that either frowns or falls
What an asylum has the soul in prayer!
And what a Fane is this, in which to pray!
And what a God must dwell in such a Fane !"
NIGHT THOUGHTS, IX.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

BATHS OF LEUK.

THE village or hamlet of the baths is a place of about three hundred inhabitants, whose clusters of wooden nests hang to the mountains at an elevation of more than 4500 feet above the

level of the sea. The bathing houses and inns are spacious, crowded for some six weeks in July and August, deserted almost all the rest of the year, and shut up and abandoned from October to May. Three times since their establishment in the sixteenth century they have been overwhelmed by avalanches, though to the eye of a stranger in the summer, their position does not seem to be of imminent peril. But the scenery is of an extreme grandeur, a glorious region, where the sublimities of nature combine to elevate the mind, at the same time that the body comes to be healed of its infirmities. These healing springs, wherever they occur, are proofs of the Divine benevolence; may they not be regarded as peculiarly so, when placed in the midst of scenes so adapted to raise the thoughts to heaven?

But what invalid here ever thinks of the scenery who has to

spend eight hours a day immersed and steaming in hot water? The grand spring bursts forth like a little river close to the bath-house, of as great heat as 124 Fahrenheit, and supplies the great baths, which are divided into wooden tanks, about twenty feet square, four in each building, where men, women, and children bathe indiscriminately, clad in long woollen gowns. There they sit for hours in the water, some two or three weeks together, four hours at breakfast and four hours after dinner. It is very droll and very disgusting to look at them, floating about, such a motley crew, in such a vulgar mixture, some fifteen or twenty in each tank. It is surprising that persons of either sex, with any refinement of feeling, can submit to such a process, so coarse, so public, so indelicate; but they say that this social system is resorted to, because of the tedium of being obliged to spend six or eight hours a day in the water; so they make a regular soirée of it, a sort of Fourier affair, having all things common, and entertaining each other as much as possible.

The traveller stands on a wooden bridge, and gazes at the watery community in amazement, looking narrowly for fins; but he sees nothing but groups of human heads, emerging and bobbing about like the large corks to a fishing net, among which are floating a score of little wooden tables with books, newspapers, and so forth, for the occupation of said heads, or tea and coffee with toast, or a breakfast á la fourchette, for the supply of the bodies belonging to them. Some are reading, others amphibiously lounging, others coquetting at leisure with a capricious appetite, others playing chess, all up to the chin in hot water. Inveterate chess-players would make excellent patients in these baths. Without some occupation of that nature, one would think there must be no little danger of falling asleep and getting drowned. One of the bathing-houses is for poor, who are admitted free of expence; and here it is not so surprising to see them all parboiling together; but that the better rank should suffer such a system of vulgarity and publicity seems incredible.

the

It is principally from France and Switzerland that the visitors come, and they have to be steeped three weeks in the water for cure. Eight hours daily in the baths and two in bed, to

gether with the eight or ten spent in sleep, nearly finish the twenty-four of our diurnal existence. There are no provisions for private baths, so that the necessity of making a tête-à-tête of some fifteen or twenty together is inexorable. And, after all, there may be no more want for refinement in a social Neptunian pic-nic of this sort than there is in tripping over the white sands at Brighton, or floating in the surf on the beach at Newport, Naiad-like in companies.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

PASS OF THE GEMMI.-TRIALS OF FAITH.

FROM the baths we set our faces, and my companion the face of his mule, to traverse the pass of the Gemmi, in many respects the grandest and most extraordinary pass in all Switzerland. If the builders of Babel had discovered this mountain, methinks they would have abandoned their work, and set themselves to blast a corkscrew gallery in the rock, by which to reach heaven. No language can describe the sublime impression of its frowning circular ridges, its rocky, diademic spheroids, if I may so speak, sweeping up, one after another, into the skies. The whole valley is surrounded by ranges of regal crags, but the mountain of the Gemmi, apparently, absolutely inaccessible, is the last point to which you would turn for an outlet. A side gorge that sweeps up to the glaciers and snowy pyramids flashing upon you in the opposite direction, is the route which you suppose your guide is going to take, and visions of pedestrians perillously scaling icy precipices, or struggling up to the middle through ridges of snow, begin to surround you, as the prospects of your own experience in this day's expedition. So convinced was I that the path must go out in that direction, that I took a short cut, which I conceived would bring me again into the mule-path at a point under the gla ciers, but after scaling precipices, and getting lost in a wood of firs in the valley, I was glad to rejoin my friend with the

The

guide, and to clamber on in pure ignorance and wonder. valley is what is called a perfect cul-de-sac, having no opening except where you entered from the Valley of the Rhone, and running up blunt, a little beyond the Baths of Leuk, against one of the loftiest perpendicular barriers of rock in all the Alpine recesses. It was therefore not possible to imagine where we should emerge, and not being able to understand clearly the dialect of our guide, we began to think that he did not him. self know the way.

Now what a striking symbol is this, of things that sometimes take place in our spiritual pilgrimage. We are often brought to a stand, hedged up and hemmed in by the providence of God, so that there seems no way out. A man is sometimes thrown into difficulties, in which he sits down beginning to despair, and says to himself, Well, this time it is all over with me; like Sterne's Starling, or worse, like Bunyan's Man in the Cage, he says, I can't get out. Then, when God has driven him from all self-confidence and self-resource, a door opens in the wall, and he rises up and walks at liberty, praising God.

Sometimes he says within himself, "This cannot be the path of duty; the mountain is too high, too inaccessible; there is no possibility of scaling it; the undertaking, Sir Conscience, that you point out to me by God's Word, is desperate. The path must go this other way; I am sure it must." Alas, Alas, poor pilgrim, try it, if you dare! Leave the Guide, whose dialect you think you can't understand, though Conscience all the while understands it, and too soon you will get lost amidst woods and precipices; and well for you it will be, if you do not fall over some fearful crag, or wander so far and so irretrievably, that no longer the voice of your Guide can be heard, and you stumble upon the dark mountains, till you are lost in the congregation of the dead. Remember By-Path Meadow, and Giant Despair's Castle, and come back, yea, haste back, if you are going where the Word of God does not go before you. Let your feet be towards the King's highway, and the mountain you will find is accessible, and the Lions are chained.

Shall I pursue the simile any farther? I will; for it makes me

think of the course of some men, who will not suffer themselves to be led across the great mysteries of God's Word, but endeavour to wind their way out of the gulf without scaling the mountain. They say it is utterly impossible, it is irrational, it cannot be, there must be some other mode of explaining these passages than that of admitting the stupendous, inexplicable mystery and miracle which they bear upon the face of them. So they would carry you round by side galleries, across drifts of snowy reasoning, as cold and as deceitful as the crusts of glittering ice, that among the Alps cover great fissures, where, if you step, you sink and are out of sight forever. Keep to the appointed path, over the mountain, for there alone are you safe. It is the path of Faith, faith in God's Word, faith in God's mysteries, faith in God's Spirit, faith in God's Son. Sometimes it is the path of Faith without reasoning, and you must take it, because God says so; indeed that great Word, GOD SAITH, is the highest of all reasoning, and if your reasoning goes against it, your reasoning is a lie.

Now have you tried your own way, and found it deceitful and ruinous? And are you ready to follow your Guide, as an ignorant little child, in all simplicity? This is well, and God sometimes suffers us to have our own way, to take it for a while, that we may find by sore experience that his way is the best. Your path seems to be shut up, but if he points it out, you may be sure that he will open it. As to the children of Israel, when brought to a stand at the verge of the Red Sea, so he says to you, Go forward!

The mysteries in God's Word, and the practical difficulties in our Pilgrimage, are like these mountain-passes. If you refuse to clamber, you must stay in the gulf, or go, by apostacy, backward, for there is no other way out. And if you will not accept the path, walking by Faith, not Sight, then you will never see the glory that is to be enjoyed on the summit. The great fundamental truths of God's Word, the Resurrection, the Atonement, the Triune Mysteries of the Godhead, the Eternity and Providence of God, the Deity and Grace of Christ, the Work of the Holy Spirit,-these are all mountain passes, to be crossed only by Faith; but when you so cross them, then