The Rhode-Island Republican. [volume] (Newport, R.I.) 1809-1841, 1835-12-23

SPLENDID DEsCRIPTIoN OF THE ALPS. Much
we talk of nature, there places where we feel
that our previous conceptions have been dim and
narrow lie who crosses the alps, will experience,
this sensation, mingled with certainty, that thou
sands Of painters and poets, and millions of others,
live and die without even suspecting the power of
scenery over the mind. Our journey across the
Splogen was 10 a day memorable forever. Our
recolIections are of grandeur--gloomy vastness-
awful solitude-cternal sublimity. There were
moments during the ascent, Of kind strange and
new to me- Whoever seeks L" something new un-
der the SUM-" if he has dwcI in a plain, let him
ascend veritable mountain, and he will find it.
Awe, amazement, gloom wonder and rapture, dur
ing which you cannot smle combine to elevate you.
The road winds up-and up-and up--a mad
stream, white with foam, laundering all day by its
side--amid slopes and cliffs, forests and vales-
then plain and a poor hut, a ragged town and
some beggars. You pause and rest; and them again,
up and up winding and ,urnins-somctimes through
tremendous rnvines-sometimcs by magnificent
ter falls--sometimes along gddy and yawnins gulfs
--yet still always up and up.
Then the face Of the earth changes, aud the
grass fades nearly away, and the naked, everlasting
rocks lift their gary backs through the soil. The
tempests Of six thousand years have beaten agains,
them. Now the road steals thro' desert Of endless
: stones, broken and scattered aboul-now, through
long. dark gallery, wet and dripping-now, ut the
brink OF tremendous preciplce, which your imag-
ination would receive as the summit of any mou n
tain, but anon, the toiing, sweating horses drag you
around another angle of rock, and 10 above you
over hang other cliffs and other mountains in the
sky; piles, swcls, and ice; and so near their awfu
heights to startle you, the white line runs ye
higher and higher, and you believe not that it i.
your path still so far above you-and yet it is.
The earth is now totally changed and the tenn.
peraturc and atmosphere and heavens are changed
You wrap your heavy cloak about you in the biting
cold. Dark clouds are rolling heavily over you
the winter winds shake violently the closed gasse
of your carriage; and as the road still mountin!
aiid bending up, turns your face now to the right
now TO the cft--you catch, far below, such awfu
g!eamings of sublime sccnery-such dim, vii,
depths of azure--such forms Of cold blue lifted
built up around you i'll the eternal silence, an,
sh.ouded in the mist and storm, that your very sou
is hushed and chilled, and you feel as if DEATH tn
king of terrors, had here fixed his home and wer
aspectre to stand in your pah to lean and bee
kon 10 you from his car of rolling MIST you woul,
bcheld him without starting, for your imaginao,
scarcely be more excited. A cataract, which
on the plain, would draw all Europe to it as fash
ionable resort is here curiosity. Its lonely thun
der swels and dies away in its nerminabe solitude
Twenty times we thought ourselves at the height q
this stupendous road, and yet its zg-zag ap
pcared ever mounting before us, and up, and up ii
tho cold grew extreme and the darkness of nigl
overlook us; and we were completely lost, an
envcloped in heavy, wet clouds rolling around lik
Q mighty ocean.-Fay's Skefthss.