I have alluded to the sunset seen in this valley. All travellers love to talk a little of their own experience, their good or their ill fortune. The first evening I entered Chamouni, the clouds had gathered on the summits of the mountains, and a view of Mont Blanc was thought hopeless. Nevertheless I sallied forth, and planted myself in the valley, with a singular confidence in the goodness of nature towards one who was the humblest but one of the sincerest of her votaries. My confidence was rewarded. The clouds dispersed, and the roseate sunset on the mountain was seen to perfection. I had not yet learned to distinguish that summit which, in an especial manner, bears the name of Mont Blanc. There is a modesty in its greatness. It makes no ostentatious claim to be the highest in the range, and is content if for a time you give the glory of pre-eminence to others. But it reserves a convincing proof of its own superiority. I had been looking elsewhere, and in a wrong direction, for Mont Blanc, when I found that all the summits had sunk, like the clouds when day deserts them, into a cold dead white--all but one point, that still glowed with the radiance of the sun when all beside had lost it. There was the royal mountain. What a cold, corpse-like hue it is which the snow-mountain assumes just after the sun has quitted it. There is a short interval then, when it seems the very image of death. But the moon rises, or the stars take up their place, and the mountain resumes its beauty and its life. Beauty is always life. Under the star-light how ethereal does it look! * * * * * In the landscapes of other countries, the house--the habitation of man--be it farm-house or cottage--gathers, so to speak, some of the country about itself--makes itself the centre of some circle, however small. Not so in Switzerland. The hooded chalet, which even in summer speaks so plainly of winter, and stands ever prepared with its low drooping roof to shelter its eyes and ears from the snow and the wind--these dot the landscape most charmingly, but yet are lost in it; they form no group, no central point in the scene. I am thinking more particularly of the chalets in the Oberland. There is no path apparently between one and the other; the beautiful green verdure lies untrodden around them. One would say, the inhabitants found their way to them like birds to their nests. And like enough to nests they are, both in the elevation at which they are sometimes perched, and in the manner of their distribution over the scene.