J.R.

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THE SELECTOR; AND LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS.

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MOUNT ST. MICHAEL.

No. 65 of Constable’s Miscellany, just published, consists of A Journal of a Residence in Normandy, by J.A.  St. John, Esq.  This volume falls in opportunely enough for the further description of Mount St. Michael, engraved in No. 477 of The Mirror.

Breakfasting in haste, I procured a horse and a guide, and set out for the mount, no less celebrated for its historical importance, than for the peculiarity of its position.  As soon as I had emerged from the streets of Avranches, I saw before me a vast bay, now entirely deserted by the tide, and consisting partly of sand, partly of slime, intersected by the waters of several rivers, and covered, during spring tides, at high water.—­Two promontories, the one bluff and rocky, the other sandy and low, project, one on either hand, into the sea; and in the open space between these two points are two small islands, from around which the sea ebbs at low water:  one of them is a desert rock, called the Tombelaine, and the other the Mont St. Michel.[3] The space thus covered and deserted alternately by the sea is about eight square leagues, and is here called the Greve.

The Mont St. Michel, which is about the same height as the Great Pyramid of Egypt, and now stood, as that does, upon a vast plain of sand, which is here, however, skirted in its whole length by the sea, has a very striking and extraordinary aspect.  It appeared, as the water was so close behind it, to rise out of the sea, upon the intense and dazzling blue of which its grey rocks and towers were relieved in a sharp and startling manner; and, as I descended lower and lower on the hill-side, and drew near the beach, its pinnacles seemed to increase in height, and the picturesque effect was improved.

At length I emerged from the shady road upon the naked beach, and saw the ferry-boat and the Charon that were to convey me and my charger over the first river.  My Avranches guide here quitted me; but I had been told that the ferryman himself usually supplied his place in piloting strangers across the quicksands, which, owing to the shifting of the course of the rivers, are in constant change, and of the most dangerous character.  Horses and their riders, venturing to select their own path over the sands, have been swallowed up together, and vessels, stranded here in a tempest, have in a short time sunk and disappeared entirely.  The depth of what may perhaps be termed the unsolid soil, is hitherto unknown, though various attempts have been made to ascertain it.  In one instance, a small mast, forty feet high, was fixed up in the sands, with a piece of granite of considerable weight upon the top of it; but mast, granite, and all, rapidly disappeared, leaving no trace behind.  It is across several leagues of a beach of this nature that one has to approach the Mont St. Michel.