From the Grimsel to Handeck the scenery, though very grand, is somewhat monotonous in its utter sterility. All is bleak and desolate. Vegetation seems annihilated, except in the forms of rhododendrons, mosses, and lichens. Crags scarred with tempests, peaks riven as by thunderbolts, torrents raging over their rocky beds, glaciers creeping down the mountain sides, fill the scene. But from Handeck downwards, the Ober Hasli-thal is transcendently beautiful. The river, rushing along swiftly and rejoicingly, makes music to the ear. The pine forests yield their grateful shade. Through frequent glades and openings the grand mountain-forms of the Bernese Oberland may be descried. Alpine flowers bloom in richest profusion. The combination of soft tender beauty with stern savage grandeur is most pleasing. There are few more agreeable memories of a tour in Switzerland than that of a fine day between Meyringen and the Grimsel.

We are exposed, however, in its full extent, to those pests of the Oberlandbeggars, blowers of horns, firers of cannon, and sellers of fruit. At every turn the tourist is appealed to under one plea or another. Here a cretin mows and gibbers, holding out a dirty hand for an alms; there an old man shows a withered limb, or lifts his rags to disclose some frightful sore. Less disturbing to one's tranquillity, but still somewhat vexatious, are the constant invitations to hear some wonderful echo. At the most favourable points on the road men or boys station themselves, provided with huge Alpine cow-horns four or five feet in length, or with a dangerous-looking cannon, honeycombed, rusty, and, apparently, loaded to the very teeth.

"In the course of our walk," says the writer of the "Regular Swiss Round,"

"we passed several very irritable echoes. They were provoked by men with cowhorns six feet long. They waited, with their instruments, set in rough rests or

echoes are often singularly beautiful.

crutches, at convenient spots, and when travellers came in sight, began to blow, holding out their hats for a fee as we passed. The few notes of this simple instrument are taken up and repeated so many times, but at such a distance, that the report of a single blast seems quite to have died away, before you hear a chorus of cow-horns begin again a mile off. We treated ourselves to several pennyworths of cow-row. I should imagine that this unprofessional use of the horn, which is used to call the cattle home, must cause a great confusion in the minds of the cows. I fear they are often at a loss to distinguish the summons of their own master-the genuine voice of truth-from the selfish trumpetings of the gentlemen who, like many others elsewhere, and with more pretensions, get their living simply by making a noise in the world." It must be admitted, however, that these Two of Wordsworth's finest sonnets describe,

and moralise upon, the effect produced by the echoes on the Gemmi and at the Staubbach:

ON APPROACHING THE STAUBBACH.

TTERED by whom, or how inspired-designed

For what strange service, does this concert reach
Our ears, and near the dwellings of mankind!
Mid fields familiarized to human speech ?-

No mermaid's warble-to allay the wind,
Driving some vessel towards a dangerous beach--
More thrilling melodies; witch answering witch,

To chant a love-spell, never intertwined.

Notes shrill and wild with art more musical:

Alas! that from the lips of Abject Want,

Or Idleness in tatters mendicant,

The strain should flow-free Fancy to enthral,

And with regret and useless pity haunt

This bold, this bright, this sky-born WATERFALL!"

PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC SWITZERLAND.

119

ECHO UPON THE GEMMI.

"WHAT beast of chase hath broken from the cover?
Stern GEMMI listens to as full a cry,

As multitudinous a harmony

Of sound as rang the heights of Latmos over,
When, from the soft couch of her sleeping lover,
Up-starting, Cynthia skimmed the mountain-dew
In keen pursuit-and gave, where'er she flew,
Impetuous motion to the stars above her.
A solitary wolf-dog, ranging on

Through the bleak concave, wakes this wondrous chime
Of aëry voices locked in unison,-

Faint-far off-near-deep-solemn and sublime !—

So, from the body of one guilty deed,

A thousand ghostly fears, and haunting thoughts proceed!"

The Grimsel marks the division between the Catholic cantons of Southern Switzerland and the Protestant cantons of the north. Meyringen, therefore, our first halting-place, affords a favourable opportunity for glancing at the contrast in moral, social, and religious influence, of the two forms of faith upon the inhabitants of the same country. That the comparison is altogether favourable to Protestantism cannot for a moment be doubted. It is even admitted by the Romanists themselves. Leaving the Vallais with its squalor, its wretchedness, its utter misery, and crossing the pass into this bright cheerful valley, where everything seems thriving and prosperous, is like passing from the most poverty-stricken districts of Ireland into Devonshire or Surrey. The most unscrupulous partisan of Rome may endeavour to explain away the inference but he cannot deny

the fact.

"We have cantons whose frontiers interlock with one another as do my fingers," says M. Sismondi, to a friend of the writer's, clasping his hands and interlacing his fingers as he spoke, "and you need not to be told-a glance suffices to show you— whether you are in a Protestant or a Catholic canton." To the same gentleman a Catholic priest admitted the fact, but with great naïveté, explained it by saying, "The good God knows that you heretics have no hope for another world, so he gives you some compensation in this!" Even so zealous a Catholic and so accomplished a writer as M. Raoul Rochette says, "Generally, as in Glaris and Appenzel, the Catholics have continued to be shepherds whilst the Protestants have turned their attention to trade or manufactures. The poverty of the former contrasts with the affluence of the latter, so that, at first sight, it would seem to be better in this world to live with the Protestants than the Catholics; but there is another world in which this inferiority is probably compensated."

* M. N. Roussel, in a complete and exhaustive chapter of his great work, "Catholic and Protestant Nations Compared," shows, conclusively, that in education, morality, wealth, and all that constitutes national prosperity, Protestant Switzerland is incomparably in advance of Catholic.

The Reichenbach Falls form the chief attraction at Meyringen. I know no spot where the tourist can better study the arrowy character of a waterfall. The stream here is considerable, and it takes a fine buoyant header off a shelf of rock upon the hard stone floor of the chasm below. Of course it bursts and splashes off all round with much noise, and flings so much spray up the sides of the basin into which it leaps as to supply material for a number of baby falls, which run back like young ones to their parent. But its arrowy character is its most striking feature. It is like a sheaf of water-rockets rushing downwards. The moment the stream leaps clear off the rock it begins to form these barbed shoots.

The landlord of the hotel at the foot of the Falls treats his guests to a grand illumination of them on certain evenings in the week. The effect struck me as being unexpectedly fine. It cannot be better described than in the words of The Times correspondent: "The air was mild and still, and the darkness of the hour was hardly relieved in that hollow gorge by the few stars twinkling overhead. The hour was well chosen: heaven and earth were propitious, and when the signal-rocket flashed in the air, the soul of every bystander was thoroughly ripened for the coming wonder by those few minutes of trembling expectation. The rocket flashed up, the Bengal lights blazed out-red lights, green lights, violet lights. First the dark firs and the russet and gold beech-bushes were all on fire, then the waters gleamed out, rill after rill, blushing in the red, smiling in the green, fainting in the violet beams. A rich, warm life rushed from end to end all along that heaving stream-rich, warm life, where, one second before, there was only blank stillness and gloom. Rapid and fitful the ever-changing hues flitted up and down the successive leaps of the Fall; and calm, and pure, and solemn the silver tide poured down, unmoved in its perpetual flow, swelling its smooth arches, flashing on its hollow rock-beds, as unconcerned in all that glory of light as if it were only basking in its wonted sunbeams, or reflecting the pale glimmer of the genial moon. The effect was magical. The flood of those coloured lights did not merely flutter here and there on the surface of the waters; it went through their liquid mass from the rocky paths in their rear, shone through it as through the purest crystal, setting off each foaming billow, as one pressed upon the other in endless succession, imparting animation to the whole pillar of water, as if living things, tritons or water nymphs, had been floating up and down beneath that smooth compact surface-vague nondescript beings dancing and fluttering, like motes in a sunbeam. The effect was magical, not to be forgotten by any one who has seen it; worth seeing at the cost of much money, and ever so much trouble. All my theories on the true and false beautiful in art and nature were blown to the ground, and as the light faded away, and the waterfall was replunged into its nocturnal darkness, I had to avow that I had been delighted in spite of my preconceptions, charmed in defiance of my better reason."

The cheerful and thriving village of Meyringen is the centre upon which eight or nine mountain passes converge. It is therefore a favourite halting-place for tourists on Sunday, being readily accessible and possessing excellent accommodation. English service is conducted in the Lutheran church, which is granted for this