614

ITALY.

in which we have gazed on your heights and your depths. What changes, too, havepassed, to convert the Alps of the earliest glacial period into those which we nowcontemplate! With a voice the most eloquent and impressive, do ye speak of Time andof Power ; and as we listen we feel that we stand in the inmost shrine of their temples.Our conceptions of the grand, the beautiful, the terrific, the. enduring, have all beenexpanded since we first gazed upon ye. Far more wisdom might be gained by himwho has been presented at your courts, and trod your spacious hulls, and held communionwith your mystic spirits, than by the visitant of earth’s most gorgeous palaces. Whilepuny man is struggling all around—setting up and pulling down—with a fickleness ofwhich your own mists are a symbol, ye stand forth in all your glory unchanged.Unchanged ! did we say ? We recall the word. On the works of Nature herself,throughout the habitable globe, is written ^Mutability. Like the entire aspect of theearth, whether waste or cultivated, peopled or solitary, yc are perpetually undergoingtransformation. And as “ no man ever bathed twice in the same river,” so, though theprocess is slow’er, no tw r o generations of inhabitants or visitants ever- behold yc in thesame character, colour, and shape; and the day will doubtless come when ye, themountains of Switzerland and Italy , shall be only things of the past!—Farew r ell !