There was another Swiss household last year
similarly laid waste by the death of the faithful
and indefatigable Bennen, Professor Tyndal's
guide. But then the Professor, if too eager in
adventure (we recollect a terrible account of his
creeping round an ice-column, with his heels
higher than his head), has some reason for his
temerity, as one accumulating scientific facts
with regard to the singularities and the
exceptions of the rock and glacier land. Only it is
fearful that, with no very great result hitherto
promulgated to the world, an excellent, faithful,
and trustworthy being should have paid the
penalty.

There has been too much nonsense got up, on
the renown to be won by scrambling high, rather
high, higher, highest among Peaks and Passes—
which yield, in nine cases out of ten, no new
aspect of Nature—simply because nobody has
ever been up there before. But the nonsense
becomes ghastly when it implies contempt for and
waste of human life—a gift too holy to be played
with like a toy, under false pretences, by bragging
vanity. There has been too much
enthusiastic cant about " cutting out work:" of credit
claimed for him who, in spite of desperate
hazard, and by connivance of chances of weather
not to be guaranteed by the most experienced
in mountain climates, makes good his petty
victory of standing on some rock splinter, or
crossing some ice-crevice, where human foot
has never stood till then. The real quality of
enjoyment attendant on most of these ascents,
if sifted, resolves itself into something not
altogether unlike the gambler's triumph over the
wretched Field of Cloth of Green at Baden-
Baden. Why not go in for the prize?
Manasseh won his seventy thousand pounds there.
Sir Theodore broke the bank only last week.
Upon this hint, Brown and Jones and Robinson
play, and any one of the three is capable of
blowing his brains out should Black win twenty
times out of the one-and-twenty! Those poor
creatures, who brutalise themselves by accepting
wagers to perform preposterous gluttonies, have
a like argument—that of eating, drinking, and
digesting more than throat and stomach have
ever done before. After all, the most aspiring
member of the Alpine Club is beaten in
endurance, and thus according to the code of
honour, competition, and glory, by the hook-
swingers of the East and the Red Men of the
woods, from whom mortal tortures fail to extort
a cry.

No living creature could dream that any one
permitted to speak in these pages could use a
paragraph, a word, a syllable, a letter, in disparagement
of earnestness, bravery—free use of the
limbs, readiness in emergency to be enhanced by
training (though such has been proved to
present itself as an instinct to those who believe in
DUTY—under circumstances the most trying, not
merely of thew and sinew, but also of imagination
and nerve). We live, and move, and have
our being, in this England of ours, by aid of
that patient and indomitable sense of
responsibility which keeps every man who hopes up
to the working out of his hope (forlorn enough,
God help us! sometimes); which compels every
man who has passed his word, to fulfil the
same; which makes light of fatigue, danger,
risk of life, with every man who has taken
service. And the last attribute is proved so
often as some terrible catastrophe occurs.
We recollect the death-ride at Balaclava—
the soldiers who went down, standing under
arms, in the Birkenhead. We recollect the
sea-boy, told of in this paper not long ago,
who sat still to be swallowed up by the storm, in
his boat, because he would not quit his post.
Such stories crowd on us by the thousand.
When this great and noble devotion shall pass
away from us, or wane in obedience to anything
like secondary and selfish interests or
advantages, then, indeed, may we take leave of the
glory of England. Flecked and flawed as it is,
owing to want of clear sense on the part of our
rulers (who, by the way, are just now beginning
to speculate whether those entering the English
navy might not be as well taught to swim), the
ancient spirit is not dead among us. The more
need, then, is there to protect it in any direction
of mistake and vagary.

It is time—the apotheosis of foolhardihood
having been closed by a dead march, the echoes
of which will not cease during the lives of
those whom they concern—that its triumphs
should be displayed in their real colours, and not
those of the red fire, blue fire, and green fire,
which accompany, theatrically, every coronation
of theatrical success.

No wonder that the weary London lawyer—
weary of his desk, weary of his exhausted
atmosphere, weary of the terrible streets, the stones
of which burn under foot; no wonder that the
man of business whose lot is cast in some hideous,
prosy, provincial town; no wonder that the
professor, who has had enough of the lecture-room
and its apparatus; if he have a fibre of
manhood in him, rejoices in the change, rejoices
in the adventure, rejoices (this largely enters
into the Englishman's account) in his power of
proving to himself that he is neither effete nor
effeminate, nor has been rendered stupid by the
air, late hours, and tiresome headwork—but can
bear himself as a man among men of a class, and
of sympathies different to his own. No wonder
that the exquisitely bracing mountain air, the
superb sight of God's marvels in the worlds of
rock and ice and snow, are found by the thoughtful
and high-spirited intoxicating in their amount
of temptation. But there is a limit which sense
and sanity prescribe; and of late, among these
Peaks and Passes of the Alps, the necessity has
become that where Brown could not get, and
Jones should not arrive, Robinson must mount,
the last with a patent apparatus. The; " why"
remains an unexplained fact, save on the
hypothesis of bragging vanity; "the how," a story
which, as has been said, cleaveth a grief into
the hearts of many a home, where such grief
need not have been cleft. Surely, therefore,
this is not the wrong moment for the discriminating
of hardihood from foolhardihood.