The Daily Cincinnati Republican, And Commercial Register

From Fay's Sketches in the New York Mirror.
A SPLENDID DESCRIPTION OF THE ALPS.

Much as we talk of nature, there are places where we feel that our previous conceptions have been dim and narrow. He who crosses the Alps will experience this sensation, mingled with a certainty that thousands of painters and poets, and millions of others, live and die without even suspecting the power of scenery over the mind. Our journey across the Splungen was, to us, a day memorable forever. Our recollections are of grandeur -gloomy vastness-awful solitude-eternal sublimity. There were moments during the ascent, of a kind strange and new to me. Whoever seeks "something new under the sun," if he has dwelt on a plain, let him ascend a veritable mountain, and he will find it. Awe, amazement, gloom, wonder, and rapture, during which you cannot smile, combine to elevate you. The road winds up, and up, and up-- a mad stream white with foam, thundering all day by its side, amid slopes and cliffs, forests and vales-- then a plain and a poor hut, or a rugged town and some beggars. You pause and rest; and then again, up and up, winding and turning—sometimes through tremendous ravines; sometimes by magnificent waterfalls-sometimes along giddy and awful gulfs: yet still always up and up. Then the face of the earth changes and the grass fades nearly away, and the naked and everlasting rocks lift their grey backs through the soil. The tempest of six thousand years have beaten against them. Now the road steals through the desert of endless stones, broken and scattered about-now through a long and dark gallery, wet and dripping--now at the brink of a tremendous precipice, which your imagination would receive as the summit of any mountain; but, anon, the toiling, panting, sweating horses, drag you around an angle of rocks; and lo! above you, overhang other cliffs and other mountains in the sky: piles, swells and pyramids of snow and ice, and so near their awful heights as to startle you, while the line runs yet higher and higher, and you believe not that it is your path still so far above you--and yet it is. The earth is now totally changed, and the temperate atmosphere and the heavens are changed. You wrap your heavy cloak around you in the biting cold. Dark clouds are rolling gloomily over your path, and the white snow shines beneath you, and the winter wind shakes violently against the closed glasses of your carriage: and as the road still mounting and bending up and up, turns your face now to the right, now to the left--you catch, far below, such awful gleamings of sublime scenery--such dim wild depths of azure - such forms of cold blue lifted and built up around you in the eternal silence, and shrouded in mist and storm that your very soul is hushed and chilled. and you feel as if death, the king of terrors, had here fixed his home; and were a spectre to stand in your path, or to lean and beckon to you from his car of rolling mist, you would behold him without starting, for your imagination can scarcely be more excited. A cataract which on the plain would draw all Europe to it as a fashionable resort, is here no curiosity. Its lonely thunder swells and dies away in the interminable solitude. Twenty times we thought ourselves at the height of this stupendous road, and yet its zig zag course appeared ever mounting high before us up and up, till the cold grew extreme and the darkness of night overlooked us--and we were completely lost and enveloped in heavy, wet clouds, rolling around like a mighty ocean.