at Ecluse, where Jura challenges Alp, the line of the lower Alps may itself be slowly traced, as we slowly turn our faces, past the Grand and Petit Salève, which tower so immediately above Geneva itself, and so grandly, with their long, parallel belts of gleaming white limestone precipice, as we approach it from the lake; past the broad, rich valley of the lower Avre, which at this point opens deeply into the mountain bosom of Savoy; to the spot where the richly wooded Voirons sinks gently to the azure waters of the Lake. This, if the day be dull, or the distance indistinct, is roughly the view that the eye commands from the Cathedral tower across the old brown roofs, immediately below us, of the upper city of Geneva, and across the battalion of bright, white villas that gleam from suburban woods. Contrariwise, if the day be clear--and the number of such days in this sunny climate is astonishingly great--the whole landscape, at any time so beautiful, is embellished and transfigured by the presence of one grand object, that hangs so high in heaven, though forty miles distant in a bee-line, and that gleams so white and ætherial, that one almost hesitates for a moment whether to address it as cloud or mountain. For there, almost due south-east from Calvin's city, though one doubts whether Calvin's inward-brooding eye ever brightened at its prospect, or ever heeded it more than carelessly; there, in distant magnificence more supreme, and in majesty of height more completely realized than is experienced to my knowledge in the case of any other great hill in Europe (save only by Monte Rosa possibly, as seen between Milan and Pavia); there, with its glorious central dome enshrouded in deep masses of overwhelming snow, and even from this distance those snows are palpably deep and overwhelming, and not to be confounded for a moment with mere thin and transient sprinkling; there, towering above its immediate satellites with a complete and unquestioned supremacy that is never felt when we see it fore-shortened, as most people come to see it, in the naked valley of Chamonix; there, giving unity and perspective to the whole vast and varied panorama, is the dominating presence of Mont Blanc himself, even at this great distance still patently a king. There is a passage in _Præterita_, recalling one in Wordsworth, in which Ruskin describes his pure delight as a boy in the presence of the hills, without seeking further to read their lesson, as Wordsworth learnt to read it, and afterwards Ruskin himself, in the light of "the still sad music of humanity." "St. Bernard of La Fontaine," he tells us in the chapter headed "Schaffhausen and Milan," "looking out to Mont Blanc with his child's eyes, sees above Mont Blanc the Madonna; St. Bernard of Talloires, not the Lake of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny and Aosta. But for me the Alps and their people were alike beautiful in their snow and their humanity; and I wanted, neither for them nor