Avre, and look back at the bare, brown, limestone precipices of the colossal Tête-à-l'Ane, or forward to the more colossal snow-peaks that tower and still tower above you in ever-increasing splendour, till you climb at last to the bare strath of the cold, upland valley that was once the monastic _Campus Munitus_, and are shocked perhaps by the vulgarity and hopeless anti-climax of modern Chamonix itself. Chamonix, indeed, though emphatically no longer a mountain village, is picturesque enough inside in the picturesque French fashion, regarded, as it ought to be, as a mountain "ville-de-plaisir"--as Luchon, for instance, is picturesque in the Pyrenees, or as Mont Dore, among the highlands of Auvergne. Visit the place in spring, when winter-sports are over, and the tide of summer tourists has not yet commenced to flow, or visit it in autumn, when the tide has fairly ebbed, and you may still catch something of the solemn inspiration that filled the soul of Coleridge when he wrote his great "Hymn to Mont Blanc." At other times, I confess, the swarms of well-dressed idlers--they infest the paths to the Flegère, or Montanvert, like droves of human ants, and overflow in aimless wandering the unfenced, communal fields--are hardly less an annoyance than Wordsworth found the ragged children who tried to sell him pebbles when he landed on Iona. The Baths of St. Gervais, moreover, at the bottom of the hill--not the picturesque old village on the slopes above the Bon Nant--have been spoilt of recent years by one of those vast electric "usines" that form so vile a menace to the beauty of the Alps. The strath of this lower valley, from the gorge of Cluses, past Sallanches, to Chedde, can never have been distinguished for its charm. It is one of those lower Alpine valleys that are absolutely flat-bottomed--they look like dried-up marsh--and that are dusty and coarse in all their features, whether natural or due to man: dusty and coarse in their long, straight, unfenced roads; dusty and coarse in their wastes of tumbled boulders; dusty and coarse in their jungle of stunted scrub; in their straggling cottages, and untidy saw-mills; in the very flowers, parched and sun-dried, that survive by the side of their dull, dry roads. They are bordered, of course, by noble hills; but even these look monotonous and garish when seen across a foreground so ragged and entirely flat. Compared with the green valleys of the higher Alps, where the emerald pastures fall in soft curves to the exact level of the stream, and where every scrap of detail is fresh with moss or flower, these hot and arid vales are like the blazing hours of noon, with its pitiless lack of shade, in contrast with the long soft shadows of evening, or the dewy freshness of early morn.