The logical facts of the hills, in his description of their external features, and material construction and purposes, he crowns with their complemental analogic relations, in his revelation of their fine intents to the mind, a testimony to their interior spiritual truths. With good understanding and exact description of their physical uses as condensers of moisture, purifiers of air, distributors of water, and fertilizers of ground, he joins insight and an interpretation of their "pure use to the intellect, that patient and most precious service they hold to imagination and religious sentiment. The dip of their strata, the make of their crystalline and slaty rocks, their various growth of tree, flower, and moss, the muddy flow or clear run of glacier-streams, the course of slides and fall of débris, are all noted. He is not regardless, either, of the healthful bodily excitement of tramping and climbing in the bracing air of their great exercise-ground, or of the refreshment to tired minds and the supply to vacant wits in a sojourn among scenes so full of charm and interest as theirs. But the good account of these things is made up with constant feeling for, and recurring expression of, a comprehension of their higher regards to what is deeper in us than eyesight and understanding. The humble services of the hills may engage his downward look to search ridges, ravines, water-courses, valleyward slopes, and, with narrow range, intently to examine details of structure and form. But he holds himself ever ready to lift up his eyes to them for that help, which the royal poet of Israel, perhaps wiser in his song than he knew, sings in the old Psalm, and to answer that most helpful invitation of theirs and beneficent persuasion to the mind's eye, to look upward still, beyond the climbing, darkling purple of their sides, and the airy, golden splendors of their peaks, to a glory visitant only to spiritual insight, and of which the noontide, burning through all their vallies and blazing from all their tops, is but the shadow.

So to him the great mountains well may stand, more than to serve man's use, to speak God's righteousness, and appear not only "schools of the human race, full of treasures of illuminated manuscripts for the scholar, and kindly in simple lessons to the worker," but also "the great cathedrals of the earth, their gates of rock, pavements of cloud,

choirs of stream and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of purple traversed by the continual stars, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in holiness for the worshipper."

We welcome this book on the White Hills, which we have in hand now particularly to notice, as belonging altogether in its spirit if not entirely in its form, to this high, transcendental sort of mountain literature. Transcendental, not in the common and commonplace acceptation of the word and implication of vagueness or incomprehensible unreality, but in its proper meaning and suggestion of the imaginative power, which seizes and presents the ideal truth dominant over the physical truth, the actuality and fact of nature, and constituting the supreme, immortal significance of the manifold forms of art.

For the sake of contrast we have joined with Mr. King's book, at the head of our article, two English books of mountain travel. The list might have been much longer. For our ignorance has been greatly surprised to find how considerable a place mountains occupy in our literature. The Alps are surrendering region after region of their mystery to lovers of adventure and science, and consent to give up place by place of their still seclusion to be themes of many books, from the little narrative of a two days' exploration of a new path to the top of Mont Blanc to the big volumes which chronicle the patient toil of Forbes or De Saussure in their scientific search. The lofty and terrific passes of the Himalayas have begun to feel the steps of others beside their mountaineers and sparse Tartar traders, and their "White" mountain, the Dhawala-Giri, has given its likeness to a traveller for his book, who, if he could have breathed at the height of 27,000 feet, would doubtless have set in the picture the effigy of himself, unfurling the English flag, or drinking a bottle of brown stout on the snowy top. A half-century ago Humboldt was travelling in South America, collecting and observing through many years, for his magnificent work upon the Cordilleras, and just now we have had the good fortune to see how rich and beautiful a record of mountain travel art can add to the witness of literature, in Mr. Church's "Heart of the Andes."

One notices also, with surprise, the recentness of moun

tain literature. Acquaintance with these grand sculptures of the earth, a very distant acquaintance, too, satisfied men till within a few generations. Friendship and intimate knowledge have only lately sprung up. The superstitions, terrors, and mysteries of their wildness and silence were a bar to their approach more effectual than the difficulty and perils of their rocky gateways. It needed the will of some imperial general and the stress of military exigencies to compel unwilling men to force their passage. It was not till 1743 that Pococke and Windham led off, by an exploration of the Valley of Chamouni, the long line of travellers, who, since then, have been making so familiar the wonderful beauty of the great range of aiguilles, domes and glaciers which stretches from the Col de Balme to the Col de Bonhomme. And not till within a very few years has it been thought worth while to explore the exhaustless Alpine grandeur and loveliness outlying and remote from the beaten track, and conventional tourism of that charming region. Our Monts Blancs of New Hampshire, save for a few visits by straggling and terror-stricken settlers and Indians, were not known by any exploration till hard upon the present century. But now, just as the torrents are dwindling, and the rivulets drying up, the great stream of travel sets toward the hills, and flows through the Col of the Notch, or of Peabody river, bringing peculiar refreshment and rich deposit to the hotels and their keepers. And all this increasing travel among mountains all over the world, with its corresponding literature, what is it but a sign of the times, another added to the many tokens of the impulse this age is giving to its sons to subdue the earth, as if the old command had been too long put off from its fulfilment?

The subjugation of the earth intended by the books on our list, of Mr. Hinchcliff and the Alpine Club, seems to be mainly a seizure of the more external features and regards of mountain nature to the more external uses of the mind, or to the wholly outward uses of bodily exercise and recuperation.

Mr. Hinchcliff's book is a very pleasant one, and we could wish, since, in Mr. Ruskin's phrase, the mountains must always be to some only "places of gymnastic exercise," that the feats done in the great gymnasium might be

always recorded in so simple, fresh, and delightful a way. Not that it is wholly taken up with the account of overcoming difficulties, discovering new places, striking out fresh paths, and of various amusement and incident with guides, mountaineers, and simple village-folk. For the author's eye is ever open to the Alpine beauty and grandeur, and dwells upon its obvious aspects with a hearty and healthy love. But it is still a vagrant gaze, and apt to wander off. There is little of the quicker sight which notes the more delicate and subtile elements of the lovely and sublime in nature, and none at all of the penetrative vision which catches, in outward forms and tints, subtle analogies or rich suggestions for the use and pleasure of æsthetic and religious sentiment.

"Peaks, Passes and Glaciers," is a book of like quality, but not quite so entertaining, being not one continuous narrative, but made up of many papers, a good proportion of which are records of scientific observation, attractive, therefore, only to those concerned with the details of the botany, geology, and meteorology of the Alps. They are the contributions of the Alpine Club, a society of gentlemen interested in the various aims and results of mountain travel and exploration. But their motto, "Per Nives sempiternas et Rupes tremendas " suggests daring adventure and the overcoming of difficulties as their main object. And, save for the scientific information and a hint, here and there, of some appreciation of the varied and striking beauty of mountain landscape, this suggestion is borne out by vivid descriptions of exploits which make a nervous and giddyheaded man quake while he reads by the safe fire-side. We quite sympathize with "the American gentleman whom one of these lusty climbers found crawling "like a worm " down some via mala of that upper region of eternal snows and fearful crags so delightful to the members of the Alpine Club. If 1815 somewhat took the conceit out of the old song of "Britannia rules the waves," the old lady of the red-cross shield is, at any rate, in a fair way of asserting her sovereignty over the mountains by the pluck of her muscular sons.

We are glad to notice many parsons among the daring members of the Alpine Club. The bodies of saints are nowadays objects of much concern, and the bearing of mus

cular and nervous conditions upon saintship much discussed. And, certainly, if the violent are to storm the kingdom of heaven by dint of sturdy physique, the leaders of the host ought to be in best condition, and living witnesses to the power of the new gospel according to robustness. One may well rejoice, therefore, to meet these clerical names in the record of gymnastic feats among the high Alps, and to come across, as often happens now, the clerical creature himself in the wildest places of our New Hamp shire hills. It is pleasant to see the pale cast of thought or dyspepsia turning to ruddiness, and to believe that the great draughts of nature he draws in may infuse some healthful color and bloom of life into his pale theologies. Only we beg the good man not to throw a slur, as we ourselves once felt painfully on the top of Mount Washington, upon the red-shirts and wide-awakes of the region, by the black and white correctness of his costume and the prig nicety of varnished leather shoes.

The form of these English books is worthy of note. The paper and print of the costly publications of Longman and Co. need no commendation. They are a delight to the eye and the touch. We cannot see how the maps could be better, and our American publishers may well take pattern by them. On the very small scale which fits these octavos, they are printed with perfect clearness, so that main routes and mere paths, villages, remote châlets and mountain huts are all exactly traced and pointed out. The whole lay of the land, in the bass-relief of the glaciers and passes and the high relief of the great ranges and peaks, is all plainly indicated by careful engraving and nice variety of tint. We cannot commend so highly the illustrations. Perhaps their unpicturesqueness is designed to fit the general topographical character of the books. Yet we can not believe that the crude, disagreeable color in them is at all true even to the common scale of tint among the Alps in their most prosaic times and aspects. It is a plain libel. Chromoliths ought to be very good to be preferred before such wood engraving as can be produced in England, and these are far short of the best manner of color-lithography.

But as our eye falls on the wonderful Matterhorn, figured in Mr. Hinchcliff's book, we are reminded that the