The Giessbach Falls which I ascended on the 6th of September, descends in a series of seven cascades 1,148 feet, and the Handeck Falls, which I passed on the 5th, precipitates in an unbroken sheet from the height of 250 feet!  Rainbows stand over all the falls of the Alps, whenever the sun shines.

On the second day (Sept. 4th) of my ascend of the Alps, I could look upwards and see the eternal snows, or look down into the valleys, and see the people in the meadows and fields making hay or cutting grain!  Haymakers may drink the water that was an hour before part of the mass of ice and snow which they see hanging near the top of the mountains several thousand feet above their heads!  Avalanches slide down into the valleys every month of the year, and I passed through tunnels and bridges that are purposely constructed that the snow may thus slide over the roads without doing harm to any one.  Where the mountains rise too precipitously, it is in some places impossible to construct a road along the edge; in these cases they pierce through the mountains for considerable distances.  The Axenstrasse, along Lake Luzerne, has many such tunnels, one of which is about one eighth of a mile in length.  In the Grimsel, the road avoids a water-fall by passing through a tunnel under it.

The Rhone Glacier, the only ice-field that I crossed, is upwards of nine miles in length and rises from 5,751 feet to 10,450 feet in height.  About the time of sunset on the 4th of September, I entered the cavern of ice from which issues the stream that constitutes the source of the Rhone River.  “This is the Rhodanus of the ancients, which was said to issue ‘from the gates of eternal night at the foot of the pillar of the sun.’”

I descended through the Grimsel pass (7,103 feet) and Haslithal along the upper waters of the Aare down to Meiringen, in one day.  Though there is only a bridle-path through the almost unparalled wildnesses of this valley, still there is a telegraphic wire running up to the hotel at the upper end, near the Rhone Glacier!  No language can describe the picturesqueness of the bare rocky sides of this valley.  I heard persons who thought they were alone, utter a dozen exclamations of surprise while making a single turn where a new view opened!  The solitary tourist will ejaculate his exclamations without number; and it is under such circumstances that the unpoetical soul seeks some personification to whom it may do homage.  It would not require a worshipper of images to kneel down, in the Grimsel or Ober Haslithal, before any emblem that embodied any adequate representation of the crushingly sublime scenery that one beholds there!

I met a lake whose depths seemed as boundless as the blue heavens above me.  The water of many of the Swiss lakes is as clear as crystal, so that white objects at their bottoms may be discerned at great depths.

While sailing along the Lake of Geneva one day, I could as little see substance in the water below me, when I looked upon it at a certain distance from the steamer, as in the clear sky; both seemed alike blue and boundless!