Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/199

Rh . The hills either rest on each other, or have such narrow gorges between, that there is no room for cultivated valleys; and their faces are so steep, and so exposed to the action of the Indian rains, that all the soil is swept away from them; and so we have nothing to speak of but red slopes of rock and shingle, with only a few terraced patches of cultivation, and almost no trees at all, except in the immediate vicinity of the military stations. The worst parts of Syria would show to advantage compared with the long aproach to Simla. I understand, however, that the actual extent of cultivation is considerably greater than one would readily suppose, and occasionally the creeping vine and the cactus do their best to clothe the rocky surface. On ascending the Simla ridge itself, however, a change comes over the scene. Himáliyan cedars and oaks cover the heights and crowd the glades; rhododendrons, it be their season of bloom, give quite a glory of colour; and both white and red roses appear among the brambles and berberries of the thick underwood: a healthy resinous odour meets one from the forest of mighty pine-trees, mingled with more delicate perfumes; beds of fern with couches of moss lie along the roadside; masses of cloud come rolling down the valleys from the rounded, thickly wooded summit of Hatto; deep glens, also finely wooded, fall suddenly before our feet: on the one side, over a infusion of hills and the edifices of Subáthu and Dagshai, we have glimpses of the yellow burning Indian plain; on the other, through the oak-branches and the tower-like stems of deodar, there shines the long white line of eternal snow upon the giant mountains of Chamba, Kúlú, and Spiti. It was a matter of life or death for me to reach those snowy solitudes, and I found the words of Mignon's song in "Wilhelm Meister" flitting across my brain, and taking a new meaning: —

 

 From The Spectator.

have never felt any doubt at all that the process known in the terminology of Evangelical Churches as "conversion" is in very many cases indeed a real one, though it is a very mischievous sort of thing for revivalists or any one else to teach that there can be no true religion without some sudden spiritual crisis, such as John Wesley, for instance, dated in his own case as having happened precisely at a quarter before nine on the 24th May, 1738. No doubt there are many persons and some social classes for whom there is far more chance of "conversion," in Messrs. Moody's and Sankey's sense, than of any gradual change; and unquestionably this would be true of all persons like the famous Colonel Gardiner, for instance, (the officer whose life and marvellous conversion was recounted by his friend, Dr. Doddridge), persons, we mean, embarked in a life of conscious evil, — a life which, unless arrested in mid-career, is pretty sure to waste the available forces of character, and before long to leave too little strength of purpose of any kind for an effectual change. But the curious thing is that the high doctrine of "conversion," though it may have won its greatest number of apparent triumphs over persons, whether poor or rich, of Colonel

