people, may come to be as infrangible and undemolishable in time. The American, used to be blown up in steam-boats, found the mere scolding of his squaw to have no effect upon him, he said; and, after a few more Meudon martyrdoms, and such like, a jactation of a hundred fathoms, more or less, up in the air, or down the precipice, will be nothing to speak of-a mere Montagne Russe sort of matter, taken for amusement. One trial, and you wouldn't mind it-that's sure. Once begin, and you don't know what you may come to--especially when cooped up in a carriage.

The Oberinnthal, the upper valley of the Inn, has its point of geographic separation from the lower vale, the Unterinnthal, at the Martinswand, a prominent perpendicular crag you come to a few miles out of Innsbruck. It is one of the steps of the Solstein Alp, and beetles several hundred feet above the road. In the steep face of the cliff a hollow, in the hollow a chapel, in the chapel's front a crucifix, mark the spot where the emperor Maximilian was saved from one of these same somersets by a poor peasant, who was rewarded for his service as most are who disobey the old behest, not to put their trust in princes. The majestic rock is better famed as a post in the war of independence.

Beyond this, the vale becomes exceedingly beautiful. Tortuous, intertangled, interlocked, the solemn mountains wind, range on range, into each other, yielding, through their rifts and gaps, glimpses which might remind one who had seen them, of those got from the sea at sunrise, into the eastern Riviera of Genoa-the like mysterious world of rock and gorge, aërial cone and misty cave, in both. And as the mountains wind, so winds the traveller, at the base of the hills for the most part, among their convolutions, as the Nautilus navigates among the ocean waves.

About here, too, yoked to his galling wain, the large dove-coloured steer, with his broad branching horns and classic shape, his soft bright eye and docile ways, also reminds the traveller of his Italian neighbourhood.

Nor, with what else that is Italian, is the atmosphere without Italian purity too, Italian limpidity, light, and colour. The air is warm and bland, and, through the clear ether, cones immeasurably distant are, when seen, seen unobstructedly. Distant peaks, six or eight thousand feet above the sea-line, stand sharp against the blue sky, clothed in hues pure and delicate as an angel's wings, while, less distant, huge bare crags, recent snows strewing their unmolten glaciers, lie around, their hoar and furrowed faces upturned to the heavens, like early gods unmindful of the earth.

The Oberinnthal, less expansive than the valley below Innsbruck, varies in breadth perhaps from one to three miles between the bases of the hills. Farms, villages, manors, churches, castles on some of the heights and slopes; now and then a white-walled convent, with its belfry tower protruding from green trees; this, or such as this, with lean kine in the fat meadows, and broad fields of maize, of which they are said here to make their woman's wine-coffee, that is-(and if so, the Tyrolese might attest the genuineness of his drink as the Irishman did his, by swearing it was all grown on his own

estate)-form the foreground; while before, behind, rise around you on all sides, the majestic mountains, still higher as you advancehigher, wilder, rougher, vaster-gathering now together into dark groups, now breaking asunder again, receding on each hand into wider space, the glacier and the snow, bare granite pinnacles bending above forests, opening in the blue distance.

Mountaineers are said to be short of stature. Of the Tyrolese men the rule scarcely holds. Tall fellows many of them -fellows to dandle Milo's full-grown bull, nor ask Milo's apprenticeship; tall, stalwart, muscular men, who might take the brindled lion by the mane, and break his sinewy neck! With the women, perhaps the rule does hold. Methought they were bantam somewhat. There were pretty faces among them, and if not many, where is beauty not a rare thing? But stoutly, firmly built, and tolerably hale, such all the peasants seem; and they stride about their free vales as though they were their own, which they have earned the right to do.

The limbs of the women at work in the field yonder, for instance, they are sturdy enough. But did you ever see such strange hose! If the legs match, the stockings are odd, being a sort of nether mittens, stockings en demi solde, which reach no lower than the ankle, nor higher than the ham-you have no difficulty in observing their dimensions. It is very political economy to retrench thus both foot and garter; but surely, of all leg gear, this must be the least useful. Probably, however, the women spare in one garment to spend in another, save in hose to lay the saving out in petticoats, they having the strangest custom of burdening their already bulky bodies with about as many of these garments as Hamlet's gravedigger does—or did, as playgoers may remember-of his never-ceasing waistcoats. The younger girls have more mercy on themselves; but their burden increases with their age, and the older they grow the more of these coverings they carry. You may tell the years of an ox by the rings on his horns, the years of a stag by his tines, and the years of a Tyrolese peasant woman by the number of her petticoats; and the rotundity-ample as the courtly hoop, and much more solid — so augments at last, that she exhibits in her age as fine a specimen of Seppings's principle of the round stern as travellers will meet, among the strange things they see between London and Vienna.

The first post ends at Zeil, a village below the castle of Fragenstein, and surrounded by the Solstein Alp, whose higher peak is nearly ten thousand feet above the sea.

The towering height and dream-like grandeur of the mountains, the fine combinations and pictorial effects are, in this quarter, very noble. Tyrol scenery, if generally less extensive than the Swiss, has, I think, the greater charm of greater completeness in itself. The higher Alps are ever in view in Switzerland, and, for that reason, are too present, too predominant. Drear, and bare, and cold, and gaunt, images of sterility and deprivation, our sense that they are such remains when the impression of their grandeur is impaired by familiaritynay, intrudes the more. The vales and plains their huge bulks make the horizon of, are sparely peopled in comparison with the inhabited valleys of Tyrol, which, green, fertile, pastoral, eminently populous,

are rich with culture, covered with habitations, alive with inhabitants, often to the very hill tops. The mountains that superadd grandeur to the scenery of Tyrol are such as rather to augment than impair the home impression, the characteristic of the country. They do not destroy, do not jar upon, but heighten, like a fine discord, the noble harmonies of the green field, the green hill side, the shining river, and the wooded height. In Switzerland, the discord drowns the harmony. In the vistas of the wooded defiles of Tyrol, in the transversal gaps which open towards Italy, the gigantic masses of the higher Alps come into view at intervals, but it is only at intervals. There is a charm in this mystic and fitful apparition of their colossal forms, dim, remote, aerial as they are. Closer and more constant, they would diminish, not increase, the beauty of the Innthall. Swiss scenery is often sublime. In scenery, from the sublime the step is to the repelling. Tyrol, if less sublime, is more beautiful, and is always beautiful.

After Telfs, (second relay,) the character of the country changes for a time; the woods close over the river, bald rocks jut above their tops into the air, the views are bounded. The road grows hilly toono pleasant event, since, whether up hill or down hill, continental postilions always crawl when they can. With the flaming sun cast, by a turn of the road, in our front, and the fierce wind, by the same chance, behind, we had dust to dust in mortal accumulation— with the heat and the dust together, were at once fried and basted. Whether it was to solace our sufferings as un fléau chasse l'autre, or because he had nothing better on his hands just then, I don't know, but our schwager thought the occasion good, as we were being done thus slowly, to give us a wind upon that horn of his. He lifted up his horn and blew it. "Blow the horn!" said we, for it wasn't the first offence. He paid no attention, but blew away. Gods, how he did blow! Didst ever hear a German schwager's horn? Such as this I hope you never may, be your sins what they will. Such squeaking and squalling, such spirting and fizzing, such snorting and gruntingnever was anything half so excruciating. The very echoes went into convulsions at it. Hudibras's nether trump, a chords of wildest donkeys, had brayed less dissonance. It fairly gored one's entrails, the horn did. The consequences of Sir Huon's horn, in Wieland's version of the matter, are the loss of the sultan's grinders, as Sotheby translates it, if we remember-silly incident enough-" Tally heigho the grinder" was the tune it played, belike. And belike our knight's horn was of the same family, however little magic was in it; it certainly set one's teeth horribly on edge. We bore it amazingly well for a long time; so long, indeed, that we could bear it no longer. Even the Duke of Wellington once observed that endurance has its limits. We stopped the chaise, therefore, since nothing less would do, and that stopped the trumpeter. Whereupon we tendered him our most emphatic thanks for his exertions, hoped he hadn't hurt himself, and just inquired whether the entertainment was to be included in the drinkgeld, or charged extra. He stared uncommonly. We thought he was offended. Not at all. He gave a smirk in due time, and then a grin-grinned and looked broad nonsense with a stare; and if he grinned horribly a ghastly

smile in the end, it was, no doubt, in triumph at the powers of the human mind, which had succeeded at last in the inarvellous process of comprehension. At length the process we suppose being fully completed, he nodded a nod of great intelligence, emitted a sound between a sniff and a snort, which perhaps was very good German to the initiated, shook his heel, smacked his whip, and away we went to our general consolation, for the road soon turned, the vale widened, (near Ober Meiningin,) and with the sun behind, the wind in front, all was well again. So goes the road through more than the Innthal. The old similitude of life with its vicissitudes to a traveller's journey is still true, whether we plod our way with scrip and staff, or make to serve us other legs than our own; whether with industry we go on foot, or with idleness on horseback.

Near the village of Klam, a singular round old rotten tower (ruin of the castle of Klam) is seen emerging from a hollow filled with woods below the road, towards the river. The look back, with the wood and castle below you in the foreground, presented a striking spectacle. Tall mountains torn asunder to their foundations; gaunt rocks cast, in fierce confusion, hither and thither-huge, like Titans overthrown, still confronting Jove and his thunderbolts; queer twisted stones, looking like things arrested by the Gorgon's head in uncouthest antics; cliff on gnarled cliff, mysterious rift, "giantsnouted crag;" the whole tumultuous scene quivering and flashingthe countless peaks and points of the splintered granite, the glaciers above, and the tremulous river below quivering and flashing in the light of the declining sun, was an extraordinary spectacle. The dusk rocks near at hand, the black tower, and the darksome woods were, with the deep blue sky above, the only shadows: all the rest one blazing mass of many-formed shapes, of many-coloured light, of lustre almost intolerable. The striking effect was mainly produced, perhaps, by the grand opposition of the foreground; so much do such effects depend on the accidental distribution of minor objects and their contrasts. Probably the Bay of Naples appears the finest, as it does, from Keppel Craven's villa, or from the Palazzo Gallo, (the queen dowager's Palazzo Gallo,) on account of the architectural foregrounds; and the view from Sorrento the finest from the telegraph, owing to the square cairn-like stones, and the rude telegraph itself, close at hand.

By Niederkins, Nassereit, we arrived at night at Imst, which is an up-and-down sort of a town, through whose streets the traveller rolls like a cranky ship in a gale of wind. Much of the country was concealed by the dusk; and by the clouds which came with the evening, hanging down over the rocks in heavy folds, or sailing away sulkily from peak to peak, much more. But we should not think this the choicest quarter of the Innthal at any time.

The clouds are broken now, as we see them from the inn at Imst, the sky is strewn with their fragments, among which the young moon picks her way-the maiden moon-lifting, as she goes, her lithe and delicate horn above the mountains. Huge mountains are they, colossal shadows, that lie on the earth below her, dark and demon-like. She looks, as she moves above their backs, like Una with her lion at

her feet. Before her trips the evening star, bright-eyed handmaiden, lighting with her trembling lamp her lady to her couch,

But there in the last! Look! Over the snows, among the mists and clouds, there is a lunar rainbow. Many people live and die and never see a lunar rainbow. Here is one. Pretty apparition! Pale and faint and delicate, it spans the air from rock to rock, like the Bridge of Sighs over the Rialto, or Milton's bridge over chaos. Creature of the elements, shadow of a shade, ghost of an iris, how spectral and attenuate it is!

So slight is she, and transparent of hue,

That you might have seen the moon shine through;

Only the moon just now is not convaneant. The gintry on t'other side of her can see the moon through, belike. As it is, the stars twinkle through her instead. Between the mist without the arch and the mist within, there is the same difference as in the other, the sunbow, the lunar lady's solar sister, who is much more robust than she is, poor thing! But no wonder she is so fragile; the mother moon it is the child of, is not adolescent yet; only in her first teens. Very frail indeed she looks, frail as fair, too fair to be long lived. Born but to fade, a tender primrose-coloured, hectic flickers on her thin cheek. 'Tis a rainbow in a consumption, 'tis a gentle lady crossed in love and dying fast away; 'tis some soft spirit of the upper air, that hath partaken human passion: too beautiful for earth, of heaven forsaken, there she sitteth, alone, aloof, half way between both, self-consuming, meekly weeping, slowly dying. How fast her tears bedew the ground, poor lonely Niobe of the Night! 'Tis gone.

Listen! There is a dull low wail, like the sound of Eolian harps, that comes in the lull of the breeze from behind the hill; the funeral anthem of the mourning winds, no doubt, who make their moan thus, sobbing and sighing, as they bear off the dead Iris. Once upon a time they bore away Psyche, Love's Iris, these same winds did, in the same fashion, from the mountain tops.

Again the cloud comes, covering all things-true mountain weather this and again the gust. Whew! the winds, through gulf and gully, down they come with the howl of a thousand wolves, with the thunder of a thousand horsemen. Hail, too! More of it. All hail ! we'll to bed.

A word, however, while undressing about the hand-books. No impeachment of the compiler, but they should be nobody's Bible in the matter of inns. The hand-book is the innkeeper's book of fate. Saucy landlords, at its censure, mend their manners, and filthy ostels, at its bidding, cast their dirty skins, and come forth the next summer so sleek, that entering their precincts you think you have got next door. All which is well and good. But, on the other hand, no sooner doth the same hand-book commend one of these same inns, than it thinks, from the consequences that follow, its fortune already made; and there is no limit to the extortionate advantage it takes. The truth respecting them is often, therefore, just the reverse of what is set down, so that the hand-book, as far as they are concerned, should not unfrequently be interpreted as dreams are, by contraries. The remedy for travellers