Those forms of clouds called cumuli, (P.G.  Gewitter Wolken), presenting themselves the appearance of mountains covered with ice, often creep around these peaks at less than half their height!  At Zurich I first beheld the strange sight of mountains and clouds piled upon each other so that I could not well distinguish them.  It was on a sunny afternoon that I stood on the banks of the Zuricher See (Lake Zurich) and, looking over its calm waters, I beheld in the distant southeast a strange phenomenon.  There stood the high glittering banks of clouds, and over them I saw the black sides of a towering peak whose top was covered with ice and snow.  I then visited the Rigi and looked at Alpine Switzerland from its giddy heights.  This, since the railroad has been completed to its top, is one of the most famous mountains in Switzerland.  Though it stands beneath the line of perpectual snow, its top being covered with grass in summer, still it commands a panoramic view of indescribable grandeur.  Numerous hotels stand around the top where thousands of tourists find shelter during the summer nights, and among them is one of the finest hotels in the world.  When fall comes, all the landlords must take their families and move down from the mountain, as it would be impossible to keep the track of the railroad clear during the winter to bring up the necessary provisions for them.  The snow is often from 10 to 20 feet deep on these Alps.

All Swiss scenery, whether one is on the lakes, upon the mountains, or in the valleys and ravines, is singularly charming, and bears no resemblance to the scenery which one sees elsewhere; so that for this lack of having something with which to compare it, no one can do it justice in any description short of a volume.  The reader will therefore pardon our haste in this country.  One who sees the rest of Europe and not Switzerland, will not miss any particular links in the historic chain of social, religious and political development of the human race, but he will not have seen the sublime in nature.  The Alps are the poetry of inorganic creation, and a week or two spent on their lakes, in their valleys and gorges, amid the high waterfalls or upon their snowfields and glaciers, teaches one to associate new meanings to the words, grand, sublime, lofty, inspiring, overawing, romantic, wild, precipitous and bewildering, &c.  It took me two days to ascend as high as the Rhone glacier, during which time I walked over 30 miles up hill along old military roads which the Romans constructed through Switzerland.  I saw the snow and ice on the first day already, and it seemed as if I was but a little below it, but in place of reaching the snow line in the afternoon as I judged I might, I did not reach it until the next afternoon at 5:00 o’clock.  The valleys are narrow and the mountains rise in some places almost perpendicularly at the sides, so that the snow and ice which melts near the tops of the mountains, falls down thousands of feet into the streams below.  Water-falls that are from several hundred to a thousand feet in height are numerous among the Alps.