Pennine are the loftiest, including Mont Blanc,-- “the monarch of mountains: They crown’d him long ago, On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, With a diadem of snow.” It is true that Mont Blanc is in Upper Savoy, just across the Swiss frontier, but it is a part of the same wonderful formation, and few people think of it without passing it incontinently to the credit of Switzerland. Then come the Finsteraarhorn and Monte Rosa, being, next after Mont Blanc, the two highest mountains in Europe. The most important ranges are the Alps, which run along the Italian frontier, the Bernese Oberland, and the Juras, which separate Switzerland on the west from France. Of the Bernese Alps the Finsteraarhorn, Jungfrau, Eiger, and Schreckhorn are the most conspicuous. As to height, the Alps are divided into the High Alps, rising from eight thousand to fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, and covered with perpetual snow and ice; the Middle Alps, beginning at about five thousand five hundred feet above the sea and rising to the point of perpetual congelation; and the Low Alps, commencing with an elevation of about two thousand feet. The actual height of the Swiss mountain fluctuates as much as twenty-five feet, owing to the varying thickness of the stratum of snow that covers the summit. Some present pure white peaks; some are black and riven under the frown of imperious cumuli; some have cornices, bosses, and amphitheatres; others have blue rifts, snow precipices, and glaciers issuing from their hollows,--“a chaos of metamorphic confusion, paradoxical conglomerates, strata twisted, pitched vertically or upside-down, levels changed by upheavals or depression.” “As Atlas fix’d, each hoary pile appears The gather’d winter of a thousand years.” A mountain guide will enumerate for you the names of the celebrated summits, as a cicerone points out the most illustrious figures in a museum of sculpture. Each of these mountains has its biography,--its history,--which the guide will be sure to relate. One takes life, it is a sanguinary homicidal Alp; another, on the contrary, is humane, hospitable, it offers safe sheltering-places to strayed travellers. The Matterhorn is a great storm-breeder.[93] The Schreckhorn is a peak of terror, the grimmest fiend of the Oberland; the Finsteraarhorn is a black peak of the Aar; Diablerets (Devil’s Strokes) is a name given to another in consequence of its terrible landslips, which have caused a popular superstition that, like Avernus, it is the portal of hell, and haunted by evil spirits. Differing in form, altitude, and color, each of them has its physiognomy and its character, and even “its soul,” as Michelet says. “Veil’d from eternity, the Jungfrau soars,”