to school in the morning from eight to twelve, then home to dinner, then in the afternoon from one to three; but in the summer only from eight to eleven in the morning at school, and then the rest of the day to work. He told us also how the school had two masters and one mistress, besides the clergyman of the parish, who takes the children for religious instruction two hours a-day.

Upon my word (the traveller may say to himself) here is a good, wise, time-honored provision. These primitive people are old-fashioned and Biblical enough, to think that religious instruction ought to be as much an element of education, and as constant and unintermitted, as secular. They are right, they are laying foundations for stability, prosperity, and happiness in their little community. The world is wrong side up in this matter of education, when it administers its own medicines only, its own beggarly elements, its own food, and nothing higher, its own smatterings of knowledges, without the celestial life of knowledge. Power it gives, without guidance, without principles. It is just as if the art of ship-building should be conducted without helms, and all ships should be set afloat to be guided by the winds only. For such are the immortal ships on the sea of human life without the Bible; its knowledge, its principles, ought from the first to be as much a part of the educated intelligent constitution, as the keel or rudder is part and parcel of a well built ship.

Religious instruction, therefore, and the breath of the sacred Scriptures, ought to be breathed into the child's daily life of knowledge, not put off to the Sabbath, when grown children only are addressed from the pulpit, or left to parents at home, who perhaps themselves, in too many cases, never open the Bible. If in their daily schools children were educated for Eternity as well as Time, there would be more good citizens, a deeper piety in life, a more sacred order and heaven-like beauty in the Republic, a better understanding of law, a more patient obedience to it, nay, a prediction of it, and a conformable organization to it, and an assimilation with its spirit, beforehand.

It is by celestial observations alone, said Coleridge (and it was a great and profound remark), that terrestrial charts can be constructed. If our education would be one that States can live by and flourish, it must be ordered in the Scriptures. What suicidal,

heterogeneous, Roman madness, in the attempt to exclude the Bible from our public schools! May its authors bite themselves! Our guide told us moreover a very curious regulation of the internal police of the school at Muhlinen, intended to keep the children from playing truant, which they accomplish effectually by working not upon the child's fear of the rod, or love of his studies, but upon the parent's love of his money. That is to say,

if the children are absent, and as often as they are absent, a cross is put against the parent's name, and he is made accountable, and is fined, if he does not give satisfactory reason for the child's absence. Of course all the whippings for playing truant are administered by the parent, and therefore it being very sure, if there is a fine for the parent to pay, that the amount of it will be fully endorsed upon the child with a birch rod, the pupils take good care to keep punctual at school. No delinquent can escape, for no false excuse can be manufactured. It is a system which might perhaps be very useful in other arts besides that of school-keeping.

Coming up the valley to Lauterbrunnen, you cannot cease admiring the splendid verdure that clothes the mountains on each side, as well as the romantic depth and wildness of the gorge, above which your road passes. Just before you enter the village or hamlet, the cascade of the Staubach, at some distance beyond it, comes suddenly into view, poured from the very summit of the mountain, as if out of heaven, and streaming, or rather waving, in a long line of foam, like Una's hair as described by Spenser, or like the comet Ophiuncus in Milton; sweeping down the perpendicular face of the mountain with indescribable grace and beauty.

The rising of the moon upon this scene was beyond expression lovely. The clouds had gone, and the snowy summit of the Jungfrau seemed hanging over into the valley, and the moon rose with a single star by her side, lending to the glaciers a rich but transitory brilliancy, and shining with her solemn light, so still, so solemn, down into the depths of the broad ravine, upon meadow, rock, and torrent. From the window of my room in our hotel I could see in one view this moon, the glittering Jungfrau, and the foaming Staubach on the other side. The night was

very beautiful, but soon the mists rose, filling the valley, and taking away from a tired traveller all apology for not going immediately to bed. We had had a charming day, and were once more out of the world of artificial and dawdling idlers, and in the deep heart of nature's most solitary and sublime recesses. How great, how pure, how exquisite, is the enjoyment of the traveller in these mountain solitudes! He scarcely feels fatigue, but only excitement; it is a species of mental intoxication, a joyous, elevated, elastic state, which is as natural an atmosphere for the mind, in these circumstances, as the pure bracing mountain air is for the body.

CHAPTER XV.

Staubach Cascade and Vale of Lauterbrunnen.

THE first sound I heard on waking in the morning, indeed the sound that waked me, was the echoing Alpine Horn, breaking the stillness of the Valley with its long drawn far off melody. I threw open my window towards the East; the sun was already on the snowy summit of the Jungfrau, the air sparkling and frosty, giving a sharp, decisive promise of a clear day; and the Staubach, which was such a dim and misty line of waving silver in the moonlight of the evening, was clearly revealed, almost like a bird of paradise, throwing itself into the air from the brow of the mountain.

It is the most exquisitely beautiful of waterfalls, though there are miniatures of it in the Valley of the Arve almost as beautiful. You have no conception of the volume of water, nor of the grandeur of the fall, until you come near it, almost beneath it; but its extreme beauty is better seen and felt at a little distance; indeed we thought it looked more beautiful than ever when we saw it, about ten o'clock, from the mountain ridge on the opposite side of the Valley. It is between eight and nine hundred feet in height, over the perpendicular precipice, so that the eye traces its course so long, and its movement is so checked by the resistance of the air and the roughnesses of the mountain, that it seems rather to float than to fall, and before it reaches the bottom, dances down in ten thousand little jets of white foam, which all alight together, as softly as a white-winged albatross on the bosom of the ocean. It is as if a million of rockets were shot off in one shaft into the air, and then descended together, some of them breaking at every point in the descent, and all streaming down in a combination of meteors. So the streams in this fall, where it springs into the air, separate and hold their own as long as possi

ble, and then burst into rockets of foam, dropping down at first heavily, as if determined to reach the ground unbroken, and then dissolving into showers of mist, so gracefully, so beautifully, like snow-dust on the bosom of the air, that it seems like a spiritual creation, rather than a thing inert, material.

"Time cannot thin thy flowing hair,

Nor take one ray of light from thee,
For in our Fancy thou dost share
The gift of Immortality."

Its literal name is Dust-fall, and to use a very homely illustration, but one which may give a man, who has never seen any. thing like it, some quaint idea of its appearance in part, it is as if Dame Nature had poured over the precipice from her horn of plenty a great torrent of dry white meal! One should be more mealy-mouthed in his figures, but if you are not satisfied with this extraordinary comparison, take the more common one of a long lace veil waving down the mountain; or better still, the uncommon one of the Tail of the Pale Horse streaming in the wind, as painted so beautifully in Lord Byron's Manfred.

"It is not noon,-the sun-bow's rays still arch
The torrent with the many hues of heaven,
And roll the sheeted silver's waving column
O'er the crag's headlong perpendicular,
And fling its lines of foaming light along,

And to and fro, like the pale courser's tail,
The giant steed to be bestrode by Death,
As told in the Apocalypse."

It makes you think of many things, this beautiful fall, springing so fearlessly into the gulf. It is like the faith of a Christian, it is like a poet's fancies, it is like a philosopher's conjectures, plunging at first into uncertainty, but afterwards flowing on in a stream of knowledge through the world. For so does this fall, when it reaches the earth in a mere shower of mist, gather itself up again in a refreshing, gurgling stream, for the meadows and the plains to drink of. It may make you think of Wordsworth's Helvetian Maid, the blithe Paragon of Alpine grace :—