'Ranz des Vaches and other airs, by way of farewell. I have lately repeopled my mind with nature." "September 20. 313 the length of the lake in three hours. The lake small; but the banks fine. Rocks down to the water's edge. Landed at Newhause; passed Interlachen; entered upon a range of scenes beyond all description or previous conception. Passed a rock; inscription-two brothers-one murdered the other; just the place for it. After a variety of windings came to an enormous rock. Arrived at the foot of the mountain (the Jungfrau, that is, the Maiden); glaciers; torrents; one of these torrents nine Up at six; off at eight. The whole of this day's journey at an average of between from 2700 to 3000 feet above the level of the sea. This valley, the longest, narrowest, and considered the finest of the Alps, little traversed by travellers. Saw the bridge of La Roche. The bed of the river very low and deep, between immense rocks, and rapid as anger; a man and mule said to have tum-hundred feet in height of visible descent. bled over without damage. The people looked free, and happy, and rich (which last implies neither of the former); the cows superb; a bull nearly leapt into the chara-banc-agreeable companion in a postchaise; goats and sheep very thriving. A mountain with enormous glaciers to the right-the Klitzgerberg; further on, the Hockthorn-nice names- so soft! Stockhorn, I believe, very lofty and scraggy, patched with snow only; no glaciers on it, but some good epaulettes of clouds. "Passed the boundaries, out of Vaud and into Berne canton; French exchanged for bad German; the district famous for cheese, liberty, property, and no taxes. Hobhouse went to fish caught none. Strolled to the river; saw boy and kid; kid followed him like a dog; kid could not get over a fence, and bleated piteously; tried myself to help kid, but nearly overset both self and kid into the river. Arrived here about six in the evening. Nine o'clock going to bed; not tired to-day, but hope to sleep nevertheless." Lodged at the curate's. Set out to see the valley; heard an avalanche fall, like thunder; glaciers enormous; storm came on, thunder, lightning, hail; all in perfection, and beautiful. I was on horseback; guide wanted to carry my cane; I was going to give it him, when I recollected that it was a sword-stick, and I thought the lightning might be attracted towards him; kept it myself; a good deal encumbered with it, as it was too heavy for a whip, and the horse was stupid, and stood with every other peal. Got in, not very wet, the cloak being stanch. Hobhouse wet through; Hobhouse took refuge in cottage; sent man, umbrella, and cloak (from the curate's when I arrived) after him. Swiss curate's house very good indeed, — much better than most English vicarages. It is immediately opposite the torrent I spoke of. The torrent is in shape curving over the rock, like the tail of a white horse streaming in the wind, such as it might be conceived would be that of the 'pale horse' on which Death is mounted in the Apocalypse. It is neither mist nor water, but a something between both; its immense height (nine hundred feet) gives it a wave or curve, a spreading here or condensation there, wonderful and indescribable. I think, upon the whole, that this day has been better than any of this present excursion." is only in the sunshine. Ascended the Wengen mountain; at noon reached a valley on the summit; left the horses, took off my coat, and went to the summit, seven thousand feet (English feet) above the level of the sea, and about five thousand above the valley we left in the morning. On one side, our view comprised the Jungfrau, with all her glaciers; then the Dent d'Argent, shining like truth; then the Little Giant (the Kleine Eigher); and the Great Giant (the Grosse Eigher), and last, not least, the Wetterhorn. The height of Jungfrau is 13,000 feet above the sea, 11,000 above the valley; she is the highest of this range. Heard the avalanches falling every five minutes nearly. From whence we stood, on the Wengen Alp, we had all these in view on one side; on the other, the clouds rose from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices like the foam of the ocean of hell, during a spring tide-it was white, and sulphury, and immeasurably deep in appearance. 1 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 Grindlewald; dined; mounted again, and rode to the higher glacier like a frozen hurricane. Starlight, beautiful, but a devil of 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 3, their appearance reminded me of me and my family." 1" Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down In mountainous o'erwhelming, come and crush me ! Crash with a frequent conflict. *** The mists boil up around the glaciers; clouds "September 24. "Set off at seven; up at five. Passed the black glacier, the mountain Wetterhorn on the right; crossed the Scheideck mountain; came to the Rose glacier, said to be the largest and finest in Switzerland. I think the Bossons glacier at Chamouni as fine; Hobhouse does not. Came to the Reichenbach waterfall, two hundred feet high; halted to rest the horses. Arrived in the valley of Overland; rain came on; drenched a little; only four hour's rain, however, in eight days. Came to the lake of Brientz, then to the town of Brientz; changed. In the evening, four Swiss peasant girls of Oberhasli came and sang the airs of their country; two of the voices beautiful -the tunes also; so wild and original, and at the same time of great sweetness. The singing is over; but below stairs I hear the notes of a fiddle, which bode no good to my night's rest; I shall go down and see the dancing." September 25. "The whole town of Brientz were apparently gathered together in the rooms below; pretty music and excellent waltzing; none but peasants; the dancing much better than in England; the English can't waltz, never could, never will. One man with his pipe in his mouth, but danced as well as the others; some other dances in pairs and in fours, and very good. I went to bed, but the revelry continued below late and early. Brientz but a village. Rose early. Embarked on the lake of Brientz, rowed by the women in a long boat; presently we put to shore, and another woman jumped in. It seems it is the custom here for the boats to be manned by women: for of five men and three women in our bark, all the women took an oar, and but one man. "Got to Interlachen in three hours; pretty lake; not so large as that of Thoun. Dined at Interlachen. Girl gave me some flowers, and made me a speech in German, of which I know nothing; I do not know whether the speech was pretty, but as the woman was, I hope so. Re-embarked on the lake of Thoun; fell asleep part of the way: sent our horses round; found people on the shore, blowing up a rock with gunpowder; they blew it up near our boat, only Manfred. telling us a minute before ;- mere stupidity, but they might have broken our noddles. Got to Thoun in the evening; the weather has been tolerable the whole day. But as the wild part of our tour is finished, it don't matter to us; in all the desirable part, we have been most lucky in warmth and clearness of atmosphere." "September 26. "Being out of the mountains, my journal must be as flat as my journey. From Thoun to Berne, good road, hedges, villages, industry, property, and all sorts of tokens of insipid civilisation. From Berne to Fribourg; different canton; Catholics; passed a field of battle; Swiss beat the French in one of the late wars against the French republic. Bought a dog. The greater part of this tour has been on horseback, on foot, and on mule." "September 28. "Saw the tree planted in honour of the battle of Morat; three hundred and forty years old; a good deal decayed. Left Fribourg, but first saw the cathedral; high tower. Overtook the baggage of the nuns of La Trappe, who are removing to Normandy; afterwards a coach, with a quantity of nuns in it. Proceeded along the banks of the lake of Neuchâtel; very pleasing and soft, but not so mountainous- -at least, the Jura, not appearing so, after the Bernese Alps. Reached Yverdun in the dusk; a long line of large trees on the border of the lake; fine and sombre; the auberge nearly a German princess and suite; got full rooms. "September 29. 315 I have been very fortunate-fortunate in a companion (Mr. H.) - fortunate in our prospects, and exempt from even the little petty accidents and delays which often render journeys in a less wild country disappointing. I was disposed to be pleased. I am a lover of nature and an admirer of beauty. I can bear fatigue and welcome privation, and have seen some of the noblest views in the world. But in all this-the recollection of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory, around, above, and beneath me." SQUALL OFF MEILLERIE. —OUCHI. — COM- "Passed through a fine and flourishing country, but not mountainous. In the evening reached Aubonne (the entrance and bridge something like that of Durham), which AMONG the inmates of Sécheron, on his arcommands by far the fairest view of the rival at Geneva, Lord Byron had found Mr. Lake of Geneva; twilight; the moon on and Mrs. Shelley, and a female relative of the lake; a grove on the height, and of very the latter, who had about a fortnight before noble trees. Here Tavernier (the eastern taken up their residence at this hotel. It traveller) bought (or built) the château, was the first time that Lord Byron and Mr. because the site resembled and equalled that Shelley ever met; though, long before, when of Erivan, a frontier city of Persia; here he the latter was quite a youth, - being the finished his voyages, and I this little excur-younger of the two by four or five years, sion, for I am within a few hours of Diodati, and have little more to see, and no more to say." he had sent to the noble poet a copy of his Queen Mab, accompanied by a letter, in which, after detailing at full length all the accusations he had heard brought against With the following melancholy passage his character, he added, that, should these this Journal concludes: charges not have been true, it would make "In the weather for this tour (of 13 days), him happy to be honoured with his acquaint 1 [This is not correct. To retrieve his finances, which had suffered through the misconduct of a nephew, Tavernier set out once more on his travels in 1689. He succeeded in reaching Moscow, but died there in the summer of that year. His "Travels through Turkey into Persia and the East Indies for the Space of Forty Years" were published in 1678. They will be found in Harris's Collection.] ance. The book alone, it appears, reached its destination, the letter having miscarried, and Lord Byron was known to have expressed warm admiration of the opening lines of the poem. There was, therefore, on their present meeting at Geneva, no want of disposition towards acquaintance on either side, and an intimacy almost immediately sprung up between them. Among the tastes common to both, that for boating was not the least strong; and in this beautiful region they had more than ordinary temptations to indulge in it. Every evening, during their residence under the same roof at Sécheron, they embarked, accompanied by the ladies and Polidori, on the Lake; and to the feelings and fancies inspired by these excursions, which were not unfrequently prolonged into the hours of moonlight, we are indebted for some of those enchanting stanzas', in which the poet has given way to his passionate love of Nature so fervidly. "There breathes a living fragrance from the shore of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear Drips the light drop of the suspended oar. the waters of the Lake are driven towards the town, and with the stream of the Rhone, which sets strongly in the same direction, combine to make a very rapid current towards the harbour. Carelessly, one evening; we had yielded to its course, till we found ourselves almost driven on the piles; and it required all our rowers' strength to master the tide. The waves were high and inspiriting- we were all animated by our contest with the elements. I will sing you an Albanian song,' cried Lord Byron; now, be sentimental and give me all your attention.' It was a strange, wild howl that he gave forth; but such as, he declared, was an exact imitation of the savage Albanian mode, laughing, the while, at our disappointment, who had expected a wild Eastern melody." Sometimes the party landed, for a walk upon the shore, and on such occasions, Lord Byron would loiter behind the rest, lazily trailing his sword-stick along, and moulding, as he went, his thronging thoughts into 1 Childe Harold, canto 3. shape. Often too, when in the boat, he would lean abstractedly over the side, and surrender himself up, in silence, to the same absorbing task. The conversation of Mr. Shelley, from the extent of his poetic reading, and the strange, mystic speculations into which his system of philosophy led him, was of a nature strongly to arrest and interest the attention of Lord Byron, and to turn him away from worldly associations and topics into more abstract and untrodden ways of thought. As far as contrast, indeed, is an enlivening ingredient of such intercourse, it would be difficult to find two persons more formed to whet each other's faculties by discussion, as on few points of common interest between them did their opinions agree; and that this difference had its root deep in the conformation of their respective minds needs but a glance through the rich, glittering labyrinth of Mr. Shelley's pages to assure us. In Lord Byron, the real was never forgotten in the fanciful. However Imagination had placed her whole realm at his disposal, he was no less a man of this world than a ruler of hers; and, accordingly, through the airiest and most subtile creations of his brain still the life-blood of truth and reality circulates. With Shelley it was far otherwise; his fancy (and he had sufficient for a whole generation of poets) was the me dium through which he saw all things, his the greater part of his poetry, but the polifacts as well as his theories; and not only tical and philosophical speculations in which he indulged, were all distilled through the same over-refining and unrealising alembic. Having started as a teacher and reformer of nothing of the world but from fancy, the the world, at an age when he could know persecution he met with on the threshold of this boyish enterprise but confirmed him in his first paradoxical views of human ills and their remedies; and, instead of waiting to take lessons of authority and experience, he, with a courage, admirable had it been but wisely directed, made war upon both. From impulse was at once given to his opinions this sort of self-willed start in the world, an and powers directly contrary, it would seem, to their natural bias, and from which his life was too short to allow him time to recover. With a mind, by nature, fervidly pious, he yet refused to acknowledge a Supreme Providence, and substituted some airy abstraction An arisof "Universal Love" in its place. tocrat by birth, and, as I understand, also in appearance and manners, he was yet a leveller in politics, and to such an Utopian extent as to be, seriously, the advocate of a com ET. 28. SHELLEY. POLIDORI. munity of property. With a delicacy and even romance of sentiment, which lends such grace to some of his lesser poems, he could notwithstanding contemplate a change in the relations of the sexes, which would have led to results fully as gross as his arguments for it were fastidious and refined; and though benevolent and generous to an extent that seemed to exclude all idea of selfishness, he yet scrupled not, in the pride of system, to disturb wantonly the faith of his fellow-men, and, without substituting any equivalent good in its place, to rob the wretched of a hope, which, even if false, would be worth all this world's best truths. - 317 lections, appears in the tinge, if not something deeper, of the manner and cast of thinking of Mr. Wordsworth, which is traceable through so many of his most beautiful stanzas. Being naturally, from his love of the abstract and imaginative, an admirer of the great poet of the Lakes, Mr. Shelley omitted no opportunity of bringing the beauties of his favourite writer under the notice of Lord Byron; and it is not surprising that, once persuaded into a fair perusal, the mind of the noble poet should -in spite of some personal and political prejudices which unluckily survived this short access of admiration, not only feel the influence, but, in some degree, even reflect the hues of one of the very few real and original poets that this age (fertile as it is in rhymers quales ego et Cluvienus) has had the glory of producing. Upon no point were the opposite tendencies of the two friends, — to long-established opinions and matter of fact on one side, and to all that was most innovating and visionary on the other, more observable than When Polidori was of their party, (which, in their notions on philosophical subjects; till he found attractions elsewhere, was geLord Byron being, with the great bulk of nerally the case,) their more elevated subjects mankind, a believer in the existence of of conversation were almost always put to Matter and Evil, while Shelley so far refined flight by the strange sallies of this eccentric upon the theory of Berkeley as not only to young man, whose vanity made him a conresolve the whole of Creation into spirit, but stant butt for Lord Byron's sarcasm and to add also to this immaterial system some merriment. The son of a highly respectable pervading principle, some abstract nonentity Italian gentleman, who was in early life, I of Love and Beauty, of which as a sub- understand, the secretary of Alfieri, Polidori stitute, at least, for Deity - the philosophic seems to have possessed both talents and bishop had never dreamed. On such sub- dispositions which, had he lived, might have jects, and on poetry, their conversation ge- rendered him a useful member of his pronerally turned; and, as might be expected, fession and of society. At the time, however, from Lord Byron's facility in receiving new of which we are speaking, his ambition of impressions, the opinions of his companion distinction far outwent both his powers and were not altogether without some influence opportunities of attaining it. His mind, acon his mind. Here and there, among those cordingly, between ardour and weakness, fine bursts of passion and description that was kept in a constant hectic of vanity, and abound in the third canto of Childe Harold, he seems to have alternately provoked and may be discovered traces of that mysticism amused his noble employer, leaving him selof meaning, that sublimity, losing itself in dom any escape from anger but in laughter. its own vagueness, which so much charac- Among other pretensions, he had set his terised the writings of his extraordinary heart upon shining as an author; and one friend; and in one of the notes we find evening at Mr. Shelley's, producing a tragedy Shelley's favourite Pantheism of Love thus of his own writing, insisted that they should glanced at:- "But this is not all: the undergo the operation of hearing it. To feeling with which all around Clarens and lighten the infliction, Lord Byron took upon the opposite rocks of Meillerie is invested, himself the task of reader; and the whole is of a still higher and more comprehensive scene, from the description I have heard of order than the mere sympathy with indi- it, must have been not a little trying to gravidual passion; it is a sense of the exist-vity. In spite of the jealous watch kept ence of love in its most extended and sublime capacity, and of our own participation of its good and of its glory: it is the great principle of the universe, which is there more condensed, but not less manifested; and of which, though knowing ourselves a part, we lose our individuality, and mingle in the beauty of the whole." Another proof of the ductility with which he fell into his new friend's tastes and predi upon every countenance by the author, it was impossible to withstand the smile lurking in the eye of the reader, whose only resource against the outbreak of his own laughter lay in lauding, from time to time, most vehemently, the sublimity of the verses ;-particularly some that began ""Tis thus the goiter'd idiot of the Alps," and then adding, at the close of every such eulogy, “I assure you, when I was in the Drury Lane Com |