MONT BLANC FROM THE COL DE

BALME.

FROM THE WANDERINGS OF A PILGRIM.

THE Col de Balme is about seven thousand feet high, and lying as it does across the vale of Chamouny at the end toward Martigny and the valley of the Rhone, through which runs the grand route of the Simplon from Switzerland to Italy, you have from it one of the most perfect of all views both of Mont Blanc and the vale of Chamouny, with all the other mountain ridges on every side. You have, as it were, an observatory erected for you, seven thousand feet high, to look at a mountain of sixteen thousand....

Till we arrived within a quarter of an hour of the summit, the atmosphere was clear, and Mont Blanc rose to the view with a sublimity which it seemed at every step could scarcely be rivalled, and which yet at every step was increasing. The path is a winding ascent, practicable only for mules or on foot. A north-east wind, in this last quarter of an hour, was driving the immensity of mist from the other side of the mountain over the summit, enveloping all creation in a thick frosty fog, so that when we got to the solitary house, we were surrounded by an ocean of cold gray cloud, that left neither mountain nor the sun itself distinguishable. And such, thought we, is the end of all our morning's starvation, perils, and labours; not to see an inch before us; all this mighty prospect, for which alone one might worthily cross the Atlantic, hidden from us, and quite shut out! We could have wept, perhaps, if we had not been too cold and too hungry. Our host burned up the remainder of his year's supply of wood to get us a fire, and then most hospitably provided us with a breakfast of roast potatoes, whereby all immediate danger of famishing was deferred to a considerable distance. But our bitter disappointment in the fog was hard to be borne, and we sat brooding and mourning over the gloomy prospect for the day, and wondering what we had best do with ourselves, when suddenly, on turning toward the window, Mont Blanc was flashing in the sunshine.

Such an instantaneous and extraordinary revelation of splendour we never dreamed of. The clouds had vanished, we could not tell where, and the whole illimitable vast of glory in this, the heart of Switzerland's Alpine grandeurs, was disclosed; the snowy Monarch of Mountains, the huge glaciers, the jagged granite peaks, needles, and rough enormous crags and ridges congregated and shooting up in every direction, with the long beautiful vale of Chamouny visible from end to end, far beneath, as still and shining as a picture! Just over the longitudinal ridge of mountains on one side was the moon in an infinite depth of ether; it seemed as if we could touch it; and on the other the sun was exulting as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber. The clouds still sweeping past us, now concealing, now partially veiling, and now revealing the view, added to its power by such sudden alternations.

Far down the vale floated in mid air beneath us

a few fleeces of cloud, below and beyond which lay the valley with its villages, meadows, and winding paths, and the river running through it like a silver thread. Shortly the mists congregated away beyond this scene, rolling masses upon masses, penetrated and turned into fleecy silver by the sunlight, the whole body of them gradually retreating over the south-western end and barrier of the valley. In our position we now saw the different gorges in the chain of Mont Blanc lengthwise, Charmontiere, Du Bois, and the Glacier du Bosson protruding its whole enorme from the valley. The grand Mulet, with the vast snow-depths and crevasses of Mont Blanc were revealed to us. That sublime summit was now for the first time seen in its solitary superiority, at first appearing round and smooth, white and glittering with perpetual snow, but as the sun in his higher path cast shadows from summit to summit, and revealed ledges and chasms, we could see the smoothness broken. Mont Blanc is on the right of the valley, looking up from the Col de Balme; the left range being much lower, though the summit of the Buet is near ten thousand feet in height. Now on the Col de Balme we are midway in these sublime views, on an elevation of seven thousand feet, without an intervening barrier of any kind to interrupt our sight.

On the Col itself we are between two loftier heights, both of which I ascended, one of them being a ridge so sharp and steep, that though I got up without much danger, yet on turning to look about me and come down, it was absolutely frightful. A step either side would have sent me shcer down a thousand feet; and the crags by which I had mounted appeared so loosely perched, as if I could shake and tumble them from their places by my hand. The view in every direction seemed infinitely extended, chain behind chain, ridge after ridge, in almost endless succession.

But the hour of most intense splendour in this day of glory was the rising of the clouds in Chamouny, as we could discern them like stripes of amber floating in an azure sca. They rested upon, and floated over the successive glacier gorges of the mountain range on either hand, like so many islands of the blest, anchored in mid-heaven below us; or like so many radiant files of the white-robed heavenly host floating transversely across the valley. This extended through its whole length, and it was a most singular phenomenon; for through these ridges of cloud we could look as through a telescope down into the vale and along to its farther end; but the intensity of the light flashing from the snows of the mountains and reflected in these fleecy radiances, almost as so many secondary suns, hung in the clear atmosphere, was well-nigh blinding.

The scene seemed to me a fit symbol of celestial glories; and I thought if a vision of such intense splendour could be arrayed by the divine power out of mere earth, air, and water, and made to assume such beauty indescribable at a breath of the wind, a movement of the sun, a slight change in the elements, what mind could even dimly and distantly form to itself a conception of the splendours of the world of heavenly glory.

MONT BLANC FROM THE VAL

D'AOSTE.

FROM THE SAME.

MONT BLANC from the Italian side, from the Val d'Aoste, is presented to the eye in a greater unity of sublimity, with a more undivided and overwhelming impression than from any other point. In the vale of Chamouny you are almost too near; you are under the mountain, and not before it; and from the heights around it there are other objects that command a portion of your admiration. But here Mont Blanc is the only object, as it were, between you and eternity. It is said that on this side the mountain rises in almost a sheer perpendicular precipice thirteen thousand feet high; an object that quite tyrannizes over the whole valley, so that you see nothing else; and in a day of such glowing brilliancy as I am writing of, you desire to see nothing else, for it seems as if heaven's splendours were coming down upon you!

It was between four and five in the afternoon that I came upon this view-and I gazed, and gazed, and gazed, almost wishing that I could spend as many days as there were minutes in the same position, and full of regret to leave a spot of such glorious beauty. The splendour was almost blinding. A brilliant sun, a few fleecy clouds around the mountain, a clear transparent atmosphere, the valley invested with the richest verdure, range after range of mountains retreating behind one another, tints softening from shade to shade, the light mingling with, and, as it were, entering into, the green herbage and forming with it a soft, luminous composition, dim ridges of hazy light, and at the close of this perspective of magnificence, Mont Blanc sheeted with snow, and flashing like a type of the Celestial City!

Coming suddenly upon such a scene, you think that no other point of view can possibly be equal to this, and you are tempted not to stir from the spot till sundown; but, looking narrowly, you see that the road scales the cliffs at some distance beyond, at an overhanging point where Mont Blanc will still be in full view; so you pass on, plunging for a few moments into a wood of chestnuts, and losing Mont Blanc entirely. Then you emerge, admiring the rich scene through which you have been advancing, until you gain the point which you observed from a distance, where the road circles the jagged, outjutting crags of the mountain at a great distance above the bottom of the valley, and then again the vision of glory bursts upon you. What combinations! Forests of the richest, deepest green, vast masses of foliage below you, as fresh and glittering in the sunlight as if just washed in a June shower, mountain crags towering above, the river Doire thundering far beneath you, down black, jagged, savage ravines; behind you, at one end of the valley, a range of snow-crowned mountains; before you, the same vast and magnificent perspective which arrested your admiration at first, with its infolding and retreating ranges of verdure and sunlight, and at the close, Mont Blanc flashing as lightning, as it were a mountain of pure alabaster.

The fleecy clouds that here and there circled and touched it, or like a cohort of angels brushed its summit with their wings, added greatly to the glory; for the sunlight reflected from the snow upon the clouds, and from the clouds upon the snow, made a more glowing and dazzling splendour. The outlines of the mountains being so sharply defined against the serene blue of the sky, you might deem the whole mass to have been cut out from the ether. You have this view for hours, as you pass up the valley, but at this particular point it is the most glorious.

It was of such amazing effulgence at this hour, that no language can give any just idea of it. Gazing steadfastly and long upon it, I began to comprehend what Coleridge meant when he said that he almost lost the sense of his own being in that of the mountain, so that it seemed to be a part of him and he of it. Gazing thus, your sense almost becomes dizzy in the tremulous effulgence. And then the sunset! The rich hues of sunset upon such a scene! The golden light upon the verdure, the warm crimson tints upon the snow, the crags glowing like jasper, the masses of shade cast from summit to summit, the shafts of light shooting past them into the sky, and all this flood of rich magnificence succeeded so rapidly by the cold gray of the snow, and gone entirely when the stars are visible above the moutains, and it is night!

THE MER DE GLACE.

FROM THE SAME.

AT Montanvert you find yourself on the extremity of a plateau, so situated, that on one side you may look down into the dread frozen sea, and on the other, by a few steps, into the lovely, green vale of Chamouny. What astonishing variety and contrast in the spectacle! Far beneath, a smiling and verdant valley, watered by the Arve, with hamlets, fields and gardens, the abode of life, sweet children and flowers:-far above, savage and inaccessible crags of ice and granite, and a cataract of stiffened billows, stretching away beyond sight-the throne of Death and Winter.

From the bosom of the tumbling sea of ice, enormous granite needles shoot into the sky, objects of singular sublimity, one of them rising to the great height of thirteen thousand feet, seven thousand above the point where you are standing. This is more than double the height of Mount Washington in our country, and this amazing pinnacle of rock looks like the spire of an interminable colossal cathedral, with other pinnacles around it. No snow can cling to the summits of these jagged spires; the lightning does not splinter them; the tempests rave round them; and at their base, those eternal drifting ranges of snow are formed, that sweep down into the frozen sea, and feed the perpetual, immeasurable masses of the glacier. Meanwhile, the laughing verdure, sprinkled with flowers, plays upon the edges of the enormous masses of ice-so near, that you may almost

The impetuous arrested cataract seems as if it were ploughing the rocky gorge with its turbulent surges. Indeed the ridges of rocky fragments along the edges of the glacier, called moraines, do look precisely as if a colossal iron plough had torn them from the mountain, and laid them along in one continuous furrow on the frozen verge. It is a scene of stupendous sublimity. These mighty granite peaks, hewn and pinnacled into Gothic towers, and these rugged mountain walls and buttresses,-what a cathedral! with this cloudless sky, by starlight, for its fretted roof-the chanting wail of the tempest, and the rushing of the avalanche for its organ. How grand the thundering sound of the vast masses of ice tumbling from the roof the Arve-cavern at the foot of the glacier! Does it not seem, as it sullenly and heavily echoes, and rolls up from so immense a distance below, even more sublime than the thunder of the avalanche above us?

AVALANCHES OF THE JUNGFRAU.

FROM THE SAME.

ORDINARILY, in a sunny day at noon, the avalanches are falling on the Jungfrau about every ten minutes, with the roar of thunder, but they are much more seldom visible, and sometimes the traveller crosses the Wengern Alp without witnessing them at all. But we were so very highly favoured as to see two of the grandest avalanches possible in the course of about an hour, between twelve o'clock and two. One cannot command any language to convey an adequate idea of their magnificence. You are standing far below, gazing up to where the great disc of the glittering Alp cuts the heavens, and drinking in the influence of the silent scene around. Suddenly an enormous mass of snow and ice, in itself a mountain, seems to move; it breaks from the toppling outmost mountain ridge of snow, where it is hundreds of feet in depth, and in its first fall of perhaps two thousand feet, is broken into millions of fragments. As you first see the flash of distant artillery by night, then hear the roar, so here you may see the white flashing mass majestically bowing, then hear the astounding din. A cloud of dusty, misty, dry snow rises into the air from the concussion, forming a white volume of fleecy smoke, or misty light, from the bosom of which thunders forth the icy torrent in its second prodigious fall over the rocky battlements. The eye follows it delighted as it ploughs through the path which preceding avalanches have worn, till it comes to the brink of a vast ridge of bare

pendicular. Then pours the whole cataract over the gulf with a still louder roar of echoing thunder, to which nothing but the noise of Niagara in its sublimity is comparable. Nevertheless, you may think of the tramp of an army of elephants, of the roar of multitudinous cavalry marching to battle, of the whirlwind tread of ten thousand bisons sweeping across the prairie, of the tempest surf of ocean beating and shaking the continent, of the sound of torrent floods or of a numerous host, or of the voice of the Trumpet on Sinai, exceeding loud, and waxing louder and louder, so that all the people in the camp trembled, or of the rolling orbs of that fierce chariot described by Milton,

Under whose burning wheels The steadfast empyrean shook throughout. It is with such a mighty shaking tramp that the avalanche down thunders. Another fall of still greater depth ensues, over a second similar castellated ridge or reef in the face of the mountain, with an awful majestic slowness, and a tremendous crash, in its concussion, awakening again the reverberating peals of thunder. Then the torrent roars on to another smaller fall, till at length it reaches a mighty groove of snow and ice, like the slide down the Pilatus, of which Playfair has given so powerfully graphic a description. Here its progress is slower, and last of all you listen to the roar of the falling fragments as they drop out of sight with a dead weight into the bottom of the gulf, to rest there for ever. Now figure to yourself a cataract like that of Niagara, (for I should judge the volume of one of these avalanches to be probably every way superior in bulk to the whole of the Horse-shoe fall,) poured in foaming grandeur, not merely over one great precipice of two hundred feet, but over the successive ridgy precipices of two or three thousand, in the face of a mountain eleven thousand feet high, and tumbling, crashing, thundering down, with a continuous din of far greater sublimity than the sound of the grandest cataract. Placed on the slope of the Wengern Alp, right opposite the whole visible side of the Jungfrau, we have enjoyed two of these mighty spectacles, at about half an hour's interval between them. The first was the most sublime, the second the most beautiful. The roar of the falling mass begins to be heard the moment it is loosened from the mountain; it pours on with the sound of a vast body of rushing water; then comes the first great concussion, a booming crash of thunders, breaking on the still air in mid heaven; your breath is suspended as you listen and look; the mighty glittering mass shoots headlong over the main precipice, and the fall is so great that it produces to the eye that impression of dread majestic slowness, of which I have spoken, though it is doubtless more rapid than Niagara. But if you should see the cataract of Niagara itself coming down five thousand feet above you in the air, there would be the same impression. The image remains in the mind, and can never fade from it; it is as if you had seen an alabaster cataract from heaven.

CHARLES FENNO HOFFMAN, son of Judge Josiah Ogden Hoffman, was born in the city of New York, in the year 1806. The name FENNO he derives from his maternal grandfather, a distinguished politician of the federal party in Philadelphia, during the administration of Washington. His father's family came me to New York from Holland, before the days of Peter Stuyvesant, and have ever held an honourable position in the state. His father, in his younger days, was often the successful competitor of Hamilton, Burr, Pinkney, and other professional giants, for the highest honours of the legal forum, and his brother, Mr. Ogden Hoffman, still maintains the family reputation at the bar.

When six years old, he was sent to a Latin grammar-school in New York, from which, at the age of nine, he was transferred to the Poughkeepsie Academy, a seminary upon the Hudson, about eighty miles from the city, which at that time enjoyed great reputation. The harsh treatment he received here induced him to run away, and his father, finding that he had not improved under a course of severity, did not insist upon his return, but placed him under the care of an accomplished Scottish gentleman in one of the rural villages of New Jersey. During a visit home from this place, when about twelve years of age, he met with an injury which involved the necessity of the immediate amputation of his right leg, above the knee. The painful circumstances are minutely detailed in The New York Evening Post, of the twenty-fifth of October, 1817, from which it appears, that while, with other lads, attempting the dangerous feat of leaping aboard a steamer as she passed a pier, under full way, he was caught between the vessel and the wharf. The steamer swept by, and left him clinging by his hands to the pier, crushed in a manner too frightful for description. This deprivation, instead of acting as a disqualification for the manly sports of youth, and thus turning the subject of it into a retired student, seems rather to have given young Hoffman an especial ambition to excel in field sports and

pastimes, to the still further neglect of perhaps more useful acquirements. At fifteen he entered Columbia College, and here, as at preparatory schools, was noted rather for success in gymnastic exercises than in those of a more intellectual character. His reputation, judging from his low position in his class, contrasted with the honours that were awarded him by the college societies at their anniversary exhibitions, was greater with the students than with the faculty, though the honorary degree of Master of Arts, conferred upon him under peculiarly gratifying circumstances, after leaving the institution in his third or junior year without having graduated, clearly implies that he was still a favourite with his alma mater.

Immediately after leaving college-being then eighteen years old-he commenced the study of the law with Mr. Harmanus Bleecker, of Albany. When twenty-one, he was admitted to the bar, and in the succeeding three years he practised in the courts of the city of New York. During this period he wrote anonymously for the New York American— having made his first essay as a writer for the gazettes while in Albany-and soon after, I believe, became associated with Mr. Charles King in the editorship of that paper. Certainly he gave up the legal profession, for the successful prosecution of which he appears to have been unfitted by his love of books, society, and the rod and gun, and since that time has devoted his attention almost constantly to literature.

In October, 1833, Mr. Hoffman left New York to travel in the western states and territories; and arriving at Detroit by way of Pennsylvania and Ohio, directed his course through the peninsula of Michigan and the northern parts of Indiana and Illinois to the Prairie du Chien, on the upper Mississippi, which was the northern and western limit of his journey. On his return he passed through Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, and reached home near the close of June, 1834. Of this tour he gave a very interesting account