We are in the mountains, in the midst of a snow-storm, and, as we look around, we feel that Jehovah, as when Moses heard the noise of a mighty wind, is passing by. There is a vague emotion of mingled wonder, fear and awe, overshadowing our soul as we stand here alone in the tempest. See how the drift is spinning in the whirlwind; and now it streams out like a pennant on the night. Hark! to the deep organ peal of the hurricane as it thunders among the peaks high up above us—listen to the wild shrieks rising, we know not whither, as if the spirits of the mountain were writhing on beds of torture, as the olden legends say, all unpardoned by their Creator. And now—louder and wilder than the rest—sounding upwards from the gulf below, a voice of agony and might—sublime even in its tribulation, awful in its expression of gigantic suffering—like that of him whom the seer of the Apocalypse beheld bound hand and foot and cast into the bottomless pit, despite an unyielding conflict of twice ten thousand years. Ruin!—ruin!—all is ruin around us. We see not the burying of hamlets, we hear not the descent of avalanches, but the sky is lit up with a wan glare, the whole air is full of mysterious sounds, and we feel, with a strange all-pervading fear, that destruction will glut herself ere morning. God help the traveller who is abroad to-night! And now, with a sheer descent, full fifty fathoms down, let us plunge like the eagle when he shoots before the burning thunderbolt. We are on the wide ocean, and what a sight! Sea and air are commingled into one. You seem buried alive in a whirling tempest of snow-flakes, and though, as on the mountain, you hear on every side sounds of utter agony, yet, as there, the keenest eye cannot penetrate the wan, dim prospect around; but here, unlike on the hills, there is one voice superior to all the rest—the deep, awful bass of the rolling surges. And then the hurricane! How it whistles, roars and bellows through the rigging, now piping shrill and clear, and now groaning awfully as if in its last extremity. The snow is blocking up the decks, wet, spongy and bitterly cold. There! how she thumped against that wave, quivering under it in every timber, while the spray was dimly seen flying wild and high over the fore-top. “Shall we—oh! shall we live till morning?” asks a weeping girl. “We know not, sweet one, but we are in the Almighty’s hand, and his fatherly care will be over us as well here as on the land.” There; see—“hold on all,” thunders the Stentor voice of the skipper, sounding now however fainter than the feeblest infant’s cry; and as he speaks, the craft shivers with a convulsive throe, and a gigantic billow, seething, hissing, flashing, whirls in over the bow, deluges the deck, and roars away into the blackness of darkness astern. Was that a cry of a man overboard? God in his infinite mercy, pardon the poor wretch’s sins; for, alas! it were madness to attempt his rescue. Already he is far astern.