white, and sulphury, and immeasurably deep in appearance. The side we ascended was (of course) not of so precipitous a nature; but on arriving at the summit, we looked down upon the other side upon a boiling sea of cloud, dashing against the crags on which we stood (these crags on one side quite perpendicular). Stayed a quarter of an hour; begun to descend; quite clear from cloud on that side of the mountain. In passing the masses of snow, I made a snowball and pelted Hobhouse with it.

"Got down to our horses again; ate something; remounted; heard the avalanches still; came to a morass; Hobhouse dismounted, to get over well; I tried to pass my horse over; the horse sunk up to the chin, and, of course, he and I were in the mud together, bemired, but not hurt; laughed, and rode on. Arrived at the Grindenwald; dined; mounted again, and rode to the higher glacierlike a frozen hurricane. Starlight, beautiful; but a devil a path! Never mind, got safe in. A little lightning; but the whole of the day as fine, in point of weather, as the day on which Paradise was made. Passed whole woods of withered pines, all withered; trunks stripped and barkless, branches lifeless; done by a single winter: their appearance reminded me of me and my family." Extract from Byron's Journal, 1816.

THESE notes were made on the day when Byron and his friend Mr. Hobhouse crossed the Wengern Alps, in their excursion in the Oberland Bernois; and

GRINDENWALD.

а

there are few routes in the Alps in which, within day's visit and observation, so much of the magnificence of Alpine nature can be seen. It is rare that travellers cross this pass without hearing, and generally seeing, the fall of avalanches; these are occasioned by the disruption of the glaciers-millions of tons – enormous masses which, by submelting, lose their support, and fall over into the ravines below. First, a sound like distant thunder is heard, and then the eye probably catches the cause-the broken ice forcing its way down the slopes, and falling over immense cliffs; with the appearance and sound of a stupendous cataract; it reaches its height of violence, and then subsides again, until other masses detach themselves, and reproduce these awful effects. So impalpably fine is the ice broken by the quantity commingling from such depths of fall, that clouds of ice-dust, as fine as steam, rise, and for a time float above the abyss-actually clouds of ice-that differ not in appearance from the vaporous clouds which are often seen at the same time above and around the observer.

There are two distinct glaciers which descend into the Grindenwald, from the ravines of the Finster-aarhorn, and other lofty masses of the Bernese Alps; the bases of these glaciers are of such easy access as to make those of Grindenwald better known than any other in the chain; and the upper glacier, that which

appears on the left of the view, is particularly beautiful. Little idea can be formed of its magnitude, until the visiter walks about amongst the masses of which it is composed, or enters the caverns of ice, where fractures or meltings allow of such examination; there he will receive such impressions of its character, its vastness, and its colour, as he can never lose: this latter quality is more beautiful than can be imagined, for on looking into a cavern, or down an abyss, the tint passes from the most delicate azure, upon the parts nearest to the light, to the most intense ultra-marine in the unilluminated depths of the crevices.