“Yet there are parts of it which at sunrise or sunset either, the poet might have written from the very windows of his bedroom, if he had been there in the dawn and evenings of days of such extraordinary brilliancy and glory, as marked and filled the atmosphere, during our sojourn in that blessed region. A glorious region it is, much nearer heaven than our common world, and carrying a sensitive, rightly constituted mind far up in spirit toward the gates of heaven, toward God, whose glory is the light of heaven, and of whose power and majesty the mountains, ice-fields and glaciers, whether beneath the sun, moon, or stars, are a dim, though grand and glittering, symbol. ‘Fire and hail, snow and vapor, stormy wind, fulfilling His word, mountains and all hills, fruitful trees and all cedars, praise the Lord. He looketh on the earth and it trembleth; He toucheth the hills, and they smoke.’ “The following is the original German hymn, in what the translator denominates a very bald English translation, to be compared as a curiosity with its glorification in Coleridge. It occupies but five stanzas of four lines, and is entitled, ‘Chamouny at Sunrise. To Klopstock.’ I have here put it into the metrical form of the original. “Out of the deep shade of the silent fir-grove, Trembling I survey thee, mountain-head of eternity, Dazzling (blinding) summit, from whose vast hight My dimly perceiving spirit floats into the Everlasting. “Who sank the pillar deep in the lap of earth Which, for past centuries, fast props thy mass up? Who uptowered, high in the vault of ether, Mighty and bold, thy beaming countenance? “Who poured you from on high, out of eternal Winter’s realm, O jagged streams, downward with thunder-noise? And who bade aloud, with the Almighty Voice, ‘Here shall rest the stiffening billows?’ “Who marks out there the path for the Morning Star? Who wreathes with blossoms the skirt of eternal Frost? To whom, wild Arveiron, in terrible harmonies, Rolls up the sound of thy tumult of billows? “Jehovah! Jehovah! crashes in the bursting ice! Avalanche-thunders roll it in the cleft downward: Jehovah! it rustles in the bright tree-tops; It whispers murmuring in the purling silver-brooks.