landscapes in Europe; the country is broken, but cultivated like a garden, and so well wooded as to resemble a vast park. Every town in Switzerland possesses some feature of originality, and none are destitute of lovely and refreshing walks; but there is none richer in umbrageous roads, or where they are kept in better repair, than Bern. Graceful foot-paths wind among the fields, which are little encumbered with fences or hedges, and roads as good as those which are seen in pleasure-grounds. The fine wood of Bremgarten, with its magnificent avenues of trees, extends almost to the very gates of the town, and is reached by a boulevard lined on each side with limes, which in their season perfume the air. A more beautiful or highly-cultivated region is scarcely to be found than the banks of the Aar in its vicinity. The environs abound in views over hill and dale, over wood and river; and the most unobservant cannot fail to remark how superior in brilliancy of color and elegance of form even the wayside flowers appear; the very weediest of weeds seem attractive and ornamental. In the rare pure air of this mountainous section the whole plant population becomes, as it were, refined and aristocratic. Then Bern looks from her peninsula on the beauties and snows of her Oberland, a continuous chain the most regular in all Switzerland, and the most imposing and pompous panorama that can be found in the whole realm of mountains. In the grand barrier which separates Bern from the Valais there are six celebrated peaks, commencing on the east with the Wetterhorn,[112] then the Schreckhorn, the Finsteraarhorn, the Eiger, the Mönch, and the Jungfrau, ranging in height from twelve thousand to fourteen thousand and twenty-six feet. They all pierce the empyrean, but the Finsteraarhorn overtops all the others. They look so sharp and wildly precipitous that the bare thought of standing on any one of them would make you shudder. The horizontal extent of this range is vast, the grouping magnificent, the scene unparagoned. They present bold outlines cut sharply against the sky, summits veiled with clouds, crests alternately gently rounded or rugged and broken, noble slopes, steep precipices, outlines of mingled grace and boldness.[113] In the course of a clear day there is a beautiful variety of aspect, bright, pure, rich, harmonious,--from the dark shadows cast by the rising sun, the brilliancy of mid-day, the violet hues at sunset, and the ashy and almost ghostly paleness of evening. Imagine frozen snow piled in the heavens and stretching miles across the boundary of an otherwise beautiful view, having its sides shaded by innumerable valleys, with here and there a patch of hoary, naked rock, and the upper line all tossed into peaks and swelling ridges, like the waves of a colossal ocean. The grandest scene of all, and seen in greater perfection at Bern than any other point in Switzerland, is that brief period when the majestic architecture of the Alps, with its