Reader, stand with me for a moment upon the banks of this Swiss river, and we shall find it worthy of the world of savage grandeur through which it passes. The river is quite narrow. Its rocky bed is full three hundred feet below the banks on which we stand. The water dashes by us with such force and velocity that, as it strikes the rocks and bowlders in the stream, the spray rises up for a hundred feet or more. The light of the sun shining through the rising mist flings a radiant rainbow on the opposite wall of rock. Mountains rise up abruptly on either side of the river. On the opposite side of the stream from where we stand, a mountain rises up steeply for six, eight, nine, thousand feet. Away up there 9,000 feet above the world, on the broad top of the mountain, there is an everlasting lake filled from Heaven’s founts, baring its blue bosom to the blue sky. Around this “lake of the gods,” and also from its centre, Alpine peaks lift their grey and ghastly heads up against the sky, as if to support the blue dome of Heaven, lest the moon and the stars extinguish themselves in the crystal sea. And that is not all. The water, as if tired of its home in the skies, breaks over its rocky prison walls; and, in a perpetual stream eighteen inches deep and thirty feet wide, it comes, churned into madness and foam—comes madly dashing and splashing down the mountain side for 9,000 feet at an angle of seventy-five degrees. Finally with the swiftness of an arrow the maddened stream leaps into the river, and we stand on the banks and look down on the “hoarse torrent’s foaming breath below.” “We gaze and turn away and know not where, Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart Reels with its fullness, there—forever there— Chain’d to the chariot of Nature’s triumphal Art We stand as captives, and would not depart.” Baedeker truly says: “The glacier—the most striking feature of the Alpine world—is a stupendous mass of purest azure ice.” No scene in Switzerland is so strikingly and so strangely beautiful as when, in some fertile and wooded valley, the glittering pinnacles of a glacier are suddenly presented to our gaze, in the immediate proximity of wheat fields, fruit trees, smiling meadows and human habitations. These extensive glaciers are long arms of solid ice, resembling a thousand frozen cataracts, occupying entire valleys, and attaining a thickness estimated at 1,500 feet. The surface of these glaciers is by no means smooth and regular. Here one frowning terrace rises above another; there the glacier swells and rises into huge pinnacles and towering pyramids of purest ice. Again the surface is torn into every conceivable shape by great crevasses which sometimes sink to an enormous depth. In crossing these glaciers, guides, spiked shoes, Alpenstocks, strong ropes, and ice axes are indispensable. [Illustration: A GLACIER IN SWITZERLAND.]