There is something which fascinates more in the free life, the young energy, the sparkling transparency, and merry music of the smaller streams. The upper Swiss valleys are sweet with perpetual streamlets, that seem always to have “chosen the steepest places to come down for the sake of the leaps, scattering their handfuls of crystals this way and that, as the wind takes them, with all the grace, but with none of the formalism of fountains, until at last they find their way down to the turf, and lose themselves in that, silently; with quiet depth of clear water furrowing among the grass-blades and looking only like their shadows, but presently emerging again in little startled gushes and laughing hurries, as if they had remembered suddenly that the day was too short for them to get down the hill.” On summer days even the glaciers are furrowed with thousands of threads of water; innumerable little rills, which run and sparkle over its sides like streams of quicksilver, and which disappear suddenly in the moulins, at the bottom of which invisible canals join the extremity of the glacier. At night all these brooklets are silent, and stopped; the cold congeals and imprisons them in a thin coating of ice, which evaporates again the next day. Of these mountain streams our own poet Bryant writes,-- “Thy springs are in the cloud; thy stream Begins to move and murmur first Where ice-peaks feed the noonday beam, Or rain-storms on the glacier burst.” It is easy to have cascades in Switzerland, with its vast bodies of snow at an elevation which does not preclude melting in summer, and from which the water has to find its way down rocky precipices, sometimes thousands of feet. The most noted of these cascades are the _Giessbach_ and the _Staubbach_. The first consists of a succession of seven cascades, embowered in foliage, leaping from a height of eleven hundred feet, and finally losing themselves in the waters of the Lake of Brienz; the soft winds swing the spray as light as a mist of the sunrise or the gentle sway of a bridal veil, while the rainbow hues rest like kisses on its silver threads. The Falls of Staubbach, or _Fall of Dust_, is well named; it is so ethereal, or dust-like, that it appears at times about to sail away like a cloud on the wings of the wind; it apparently creeps down from its lofty rock, a thousand feet on high, and seems to throw itself timidly into the abyss, and to win slowly against the mass of air. This retarded appearance in the fall is caused by its being broken into mist soon after it leaves the shelf over which it is precipitated. In its centre the fall is purely vapor; but the rock advancing somewhat towards the base, it collects again into water as it strikes it and forms a stream at the bottom. It has been compared by poets to “the tail of the white horse on which death was mounted,” and called a “sky-born waterfall,” and Goethe describes it,--