glancing light. Even the peculiar beauties which the summits of the Alps borrow from the atmosphere, are sometimes displayed. The Swiss, gazing on the lofty and majestic form of a volcanic mountain, is astonished to behold, at the rising of the sun, the peaks inflamed with the same rose red glow which the snowy summits of Mont Rosa and Mont Blanc reflect at its selling, and the smoke wreaths, as they ascend from the crater into mid air, shining in golden hues like the clouds of heaven.[1]
But serene in their beauty and magnificence as these mountains generally appear, they hide in their bosoms elements of the highest terrestrial sublimity and awe, compared with whose appalling energy, not only the bursten lakes and the rushing avalanches of the Alps, but the most devastating explosions of Vesuvius or Etna, cease to terrify the imagination. When we look upon the ordinary aspects of these mountains, it is almost impossible to believe the geological story of their origin, and if our senses yield to science, they tacitly revenge themselves by placing in the remotest past, the era of such convulsions as it relates. But the nether powers though imprisoned are not subdued. The same telluric energy which piled the mountain from the ocean to the clouds, even while we gaze in silent worship on its glorious form is gathering in its dark womb, and time speeds on to the day, whose coming science can neither foretell nor prevent, when the mountain is rent; the solid foundations of the whole region are shaken; the earth is opened to vomit forth destroying fires upon the living beings who dwell upon its surface, or closed to engulph them; the forests are deluged by lava, or withered by sulphureous vapours; the sun sets at noonday behind the black smoke which thickens over the sky, and spreads far and wide, raining ashes throughout a circuit hundreds of miles in diameter; till it seems to the superstitious native that the fiery abodes of the volcanic dewas are disembowelling themselves, possessing the earth, and blotting out the heavens. The living remnants of the generation whose doom it was to inhabit Sumbawa in 1815, could tell us that this picture is but
- ↑ M. Zollinger in describing Mount Semirú in Java notices this singular resemblance to the mountains of his native country.
