“There was a time during the middle ages, when Chamouny was inhabited by monks. The reigning lord of the country made a present of the whole valley to a convent of Benedictine friars, in the eleventh century. Two English travelers, Messrs. Pococke and Windham, drew attention to its wonderful scenery in 1741, and now it is a grand highway of summer travel, visited annually by three or four thousand people. A visit to Mont Blanc has become a pilgrimage of fashion. Fashion does some good things in her day; and it is a great thing to have the steps of men directed into this grand temple of nature, who would otherwise be dawdling the summer perhaps at immoral watering-places. A man can hardly pass through the vale of Chamouny, before the awful face of Mont Blanc, and not feel that he is an immortal being. The great mountain looks with an eye, and speaks with a voice, that does something to wake the soul out of its slumbers. “The sublime hymn by Coleridge, in the vale before sunrise, is the concentrated expression of all the inspiring and heaven-directing influences of the scenery. The poem is as remarkably distinguished above the whole range of poetry in our language, for its sublimity, as the mountain itself among all the great ranges of the Alps. I am determined to quote it in full, for that and the tour of Mont Blanc ought to go together; and I will present along with it the German original of the poem in twenty lines, nearly as translated by Coleridge’s admiring and affectionate relative. I am not aware that Coleridge himself ever visited the vale of Chamouny; and if not, then that wonderful hymn to Mont Blanc was the work of imagination solely, building on the basis of the original lines in German. This was a grand and noble foundation, it is true; but the hymn by Coleridge was a perfect transfiguration of the piece, an inspiration of it with a higher soul, and an investiture of it with garments that shine like the sun. It was the greatest work of the poet’s great and powerful imagination, combined with the deep worshiping sense of spiritual things in his soul. “On visiting the scene, one is apt to feel as if he could not have written it in the vale itself: the details of the picture would have been somewhat different; and, confined by the reality, one may doubt if even Coleridge’s genius could have gained that lofty ideal point of observation and conception, from which he drew the vast and glorious imagery that rose before him. Not because the poem is more glorious than the reality, for that is impossible; but because, in painting _from_ the reality, the force and sublimity of his general conceptions would have been weakened by the attempt at faithfulness in the detail, and nothing like the impression of the aerial grandeur of the scene, its despotic unity in the imagination, notwithstanding its variety, would have been conveyed to the mind.