Littell's Living Age/Volume 133/Issue 1712/The Alps in Winter
THE ALPS IN WINTER.
Men of science have recently called our attention to the phenomena of dual consciousness. To the unscientific mind it often seems that consciousness in its normal state must be rather multiple than dual. We lead, habitually, many lives at once, which are blended and intercalated in strangely complex fashion. Particular moods join most naturally, not with those which are contiguous in time, but with those which owe a spontaneous affinity to their identity of composition. When in my study, for example, it often seems as if that part alone of the past possessed reality which had elapsed within the same walls. All else — the noisy life outside, nay, even the life, sometimes rather noisy too, in the next room, becomes dreamlike. I can fancy that my most intimate self has never existed elsewhere, and that all other experiences recorded by memory have occurred to other selves in parallel but not continuous currents of life. And so, after a holiday, the day on which we resume harness joins on to the day on which we dropped it, and the interval fades into a mere hallucination.
There are times when this power (or weakness) has a singular charm. We can take up dropped threads of life, and cancel the weary monotony of daily drudgery; though we cannot go back to the well-beloved past, we can place ourselves in immediate relations with it, and break the barriers which close in so remorsely to hide it from longing eyes. To some of us the charm is worked instantaneously by the sight of an Alpine peak. The dome of Mont Blanc or the crags of the Wetterhorn are spells that disperse the gathering mists of time. We can gaze upon them till we "beget the golden time again." And there is this peculiar fascination about the eternal mountains. They never recall the trifling or the vulgarizing associations of old days. There are times when the bare sight of a letter, a ring, or an old house, overpowers some people with the rush of early memories. I am not so happily constituted. Relics of the conventional kind have a perverse trick of reviving those petty incidents which one would rather forget. They recall the old follies that still make one blush, or the hasty word which one would buy back with a year of the life that is left. Our English fields and rivers have the same malignant freakishness. Nature in our little island is too much dominated by the petty needs of humanity to have an affinity for the simpler and deeper emotions. With the Alps it is otherwise. There, as after a hot summer day the rocks radiate back their stores of heat, every peak and forest seems to be still redolent with the most fragrant perfume of memory. The trifling and vexatious incidents cannot adhere to such mighty monuments of bygone ages. They retain whatever of high and tender and pure emotion may have once been associated with them. If I were to invent a new idolatry (rather a needless task) I should prostrate myself, not before beast, or ocean, or sun, but before one of those gigantic masses to which, in spite of all reason, it is impossible not to attribute some shadowy personality. Their voice is mystic and has found discordant interpreters; but to me at least it speaks in tones at once more tender and more awe-inspiring than that of any mortal teacher. The loftiest and the sweetest strains of Milton or Wordsworth may be more articulate, but do not lay so forcible a grasp upon my imagination.
In the summer there are distractions. The business of eating, drinking, and moving is carried on by too cumbrous and clanking a machinery. But I had often fancied that in the winter, when the whole region becomes part of dreamland, the voice would be more audible and more continuous. Access might be attained to those lofty reveries in which the true mystic imagines time to be annihilated, and rises into beatific visions untroubled by the accidental and the temporary. Pure undefined emotion, indifferent to any logical embodiment, undisturbed by external perception, seems to belong to the sphere of the transcendental. Few people have the power to rise often to such regions or remain in them long. The indulgence, when habitual, is perilously enervating. But most people are amply secured from the danger by incapacity for the enjoyment. The temptation assails very exceptional natures. We — the positive and matter-of-fact part of the world — need be no more afraid of dreaming too much than the London rough need be warned against an excessive devotion to the fine arts. Our danger is the reverse. Let us, in such brief moments as may be propitious, draw the curtains which may exclude the outside world, and abandon ourselves to the passing luxury of abstract meditation; or rather, for the word meditation suggests too near an approach to ordinary thought, of passive surrender to an emotional current.
The winter Alps provide some such curtain. The very daylight has an unreal glow. The noisy summer life is suspended. A scarce audible hush seems to be whispered throughout the region. The first glacier stream that you meet strikes the keynote of the prevailing melody. In summer the torrent comes down like a charge of cavalry — all rush and roar and foam" and fury — turbid with the dust ground from the mountain's flanks by the ice-share, and spluttering and writhing in its bed like a creature in the agonies of strangulation. In winter it is transformed into the likeness of one of the gentle brooks that creeps round the roots of Scawfell, or even one of those sparkling trout-streams that slide through a water meadow in the south, It is perfectly transparent. It babbles round rocks instead of clearing them at a bound. It can at most fret away the edges of the huge white pillows of snow that cap the boulders. High up it can only show itself at intervals between smothering snow-beds which form continuous bridges. Even the thundering fall of the Handeck becomes a gentle thread of pure water creeping behind a broad sheet of ice, more delicately carved and moulded than a lady's veil, and so diminished in volume that one wonders how it has managed to festoon the broad rock faces with so vast a mass of pendent icicles. The pulse of the mountains is beating low; the huge arteries through which the life-blood courses so furiously in summer have become a world too wide for this trickle of pellucid water. If one is still forced to attribute personality to the peaks, they are clearly in a state of suspended animation. They are spell-bound, dreaming of dim abysses of past time or of the summer that is to recall them to life. They are in a trance like that of the Ancient Mariner when he heard spirit voices conversing overhead in mysterious murmurs.
This dream-like impression is everywhere pervading and dominant. It is in proportion to the contrary impression of stupendous, if latent, energy which the Alps make upon one in summer. Then when an avalanche is discharged down the gorges of the Jungfrau, one fancies it the signal gun of a volley of artillery. It seems to betoken the presence of some huge animal, crouching in suspense but in perpetual vigilance, and ready at any moment to spring into portentous activity. In the winter the sound recalls the uneasy movement of the same monster, now lapped in sevenfold dreams. It is the rare interruption to a silence which may be felt — a single indication of the continued existence of forces which are for the time lulled into absolute repose. A quiet sea or a moonlit forest on the plains may give an impression of slumber in some sense even deeper. But the impression is not so vivid because less permanent and less forcibly contrasted. The lowland forest will soon return to such life as it possesses, which is after all little more than a kind of entomological buzzing. The ocean is the only rival of the mountains. But the six months' paralysis which locks up the energies of the Alps has a greater dignity than the uncertain repose of the sea. It is as proper to talk of a sea of mountains as of a mountain wave; but the comparison always seems to me derogatory to the scenery which has the greatest appearance of organic unity. The sea is all very well in its way; but it is a fidgety uncomfortable kind of element; you can see but a little bit of it at a time; and it is capable of being horribly monotonous. All poetry to the contrary notwithstanding, I hold that even the Atlantic is often little better than a bore. Its sleep chiefly suggests absence of the most undignified of all ailments; and it never approaches the grandeur of the strange mountain trance.
There are dreams and dreams. The special merit of the mountain structure is in the harmonious blending of certain strains of emotion not elsewhere to be enjoyed together. The winter Alps are melancholy, as everything sublime is more or less melancholy. The melancholy is the spontaneous recognition by human nature of its own pettiness when brought into immediate contact with what we please to regard as eternal and infinite. It is the starting into vivid consciousness of that sentiment which poets and preachers have tried, with varying success, to crystalize into definite figures and formulæ; which is necessarily more familiar to a man's mind, as he is more habitually conversant with the vastest objects of thought; and which is stimulated in the mountains in proportion as they are less dominated by the petty and temporary activities of daily life. In death, it is often said, the family likeness comes out which is obscured by individual peculiarities during active life. So in this living death or cataleptic trance of the mountains, they carry the imagination more easily to their permanent relations with epochs indefinitely remote.
The melancholy, however, which is shared with all that is sublime or lovely has here its peculiar stamp. It is at once exquisitely tender and yet wholesome and stimulating. The Atlantic in a December gale produces a melancholy tempered by the invigorating influence of the human life that struggles against its fury; but there is no touch of tenderness in its behavior; it is a monster which would take a cruel pleasure in mangling and disfiguring its victim. A boundless plain is often at once melancholy and tender, especially when shrouded in snow; but it is depressing as the vapors which hang like palls over a dreary morass. The Alps alone possess the merit of at once soothing and stimulating. The tender half-tones, due to the vaporous air, the marvellous delicacy of light and shade on the snow-piled ranges, and the subtlety of line, which suggests that some sensitive agent has been moulding the snow covering to every gentle contour of the surface, act like the media which allow the light-giving rays to pass, whilst quenching the rays of heat; they transmit the soothing and resist the depressing influences of nature. The snow on a half-buried chalet suggests a kind hand laid softly on a sick man's brows. And yet the nerves are not relaxed. The air is bright and bracing as the purest breeze on the seashore, without the slightest trace of languor. It has the inspiring quality of the notorious "wild north-easter," without its preposterous bluster. Even in summer the same delicious atmosphere may be breathed amongst the higher snow-fields in fine weather. In winter it descends to the valleys, and the nerves are strung as firmly as those of a race-horse in training, without being over-excited. The effect is heightened by the intensity of character which redeems every detail of a mountain region from the commonplace. The first sight of a pine-tree, bearing so gallantly — with something, one may almost say, of military jauntiness — its load of snow crystals destroyed to me forever the charm of one of Heine's most frequently quoted poems. It became once for all impossible to conceive of that least morbid of trees indulging in melancholy longing for a southern palm. It may show something of the sadness of a hard struggle for life; but never in the wildest of storms could it condescend to sentimentalism.
But it is time to descend to detail. The Alps in winter belong, I have said, to dreamland. From the moment when the traveller catches sight, from the terraces of the Jura, of the long encampment of peaks, from Mont Blanc to the Wetterhorn, to the time when he has penetrated to the innermost recesses of the chain, he is passing through a series of dreams within dreams. Each vision is a portal to one beyond and within, still more unsubstantial and solemn. One passes, by slow gradations, to the more and more shadowy regions, where the stream of life runs lower and the enchantment binds the senses with a more powerful opiate. Starting, for example, from the loveliest of all conceivable lakes, where the Blümlis Alp, the Jungfrau, and Schreckhorn form a marvellous background to the old towers of Thun, one comes under the dominion of the charm. The lake-waters, no longer clouded by turbid torrents, are mere liquid turquoise. They are of the color of which Shelley was thinking when he described the blue Mediterranean awakened from his summer dreams "beside a pumice isle in Baiae's Bay." Between the lake and the snow-clad hills lie the withered forests, the delicate reds and browns of the deciduous foliage giving just the touch of warmth required to contrast the coolness of the surrounding scenery. And higher up, the pine forests still display their broad zones of purple, not quite in that uncompromising spirit which reduces them in the intensity of summer shadow to mere patches of pitchy blackness, but mellowed by the misty air, and with their foliage judiciously softened with snow-dust like the powdered hair of a last-century beauty. There is no longer the fierce glare which gives a look of parched monotony to the stretches of lofty pasture under an August sun. The perpetual greens, denounced by painters, have disappeared, and in their place are ranges of novel hue and texture which painters may possibly dislike — for I am not familiar with their secrets — but which they may certainly despair of adequately rendering. The ranges are apparently formed of a delicate material of creamy whiteness, unlike the dazzling splendors of the eternal snows, at once so pure and so mellow that it suggests rather frozen milk than ordinary snow. If not so ethereal, it is softer and more tender than its rival on the loftier peaks. It is moulded into the same magic combination of softness and delicacy by shadows so pure in color, that they seem to be woven out of the bluest sky itself. Lake and forest and mountain are lighted by the low sun, casting strange misty shadows to portentous heights, to fade in the vast depths of the sky, or to lose themselves imperceptibly on the mountain flanks. As the steamboat runs into the shadow of the hills, a group of pine-trees on the sky-line comes near the sun, and is suddenly transformed into molten silver; or some snow-ridge, pale as death on the nearest side, is lighted up along its summit with a series of points glowing with intense brilliancy, as though the peaks were being kindled by a stupendous burning-glass. The great snow mountains behind stand glaring in spectral calm, the cliffs hoary with frost, but scarcely changed in outline or detail from their summer aspect. When the sun sinks, and the broad glow of gorgeous coloring fades into darkness, or is absorbed by a wide expanse of phosphoric moonlight, one feels fairly in the outer court of dreamland.
Scenery, even the wildest which is really enjoyable, derives half its charm from the occult sense of the human life and social forms moulded upon it. A bare fragment of rock is ugly till enamelled by lichens, and the Alps would be unbearably stern but for the picturesque society preserved among their folds. In summer the true life of the people is obscured by the rank overgrowth of parasitic population. In winter the stream of existence shows itself in more of its primitive form, like the rivulets which represent the glacier torrents. As one penetrates further into the valleys, and the bagman element — the only representative of the superincumbent summer population — disappears, one finds the genuine peasant, neither the parasite which sucks the blood of summer tourists nor the melodramatic humbug of operas and picture-books. He is the rough athletic laborer, wrestling with nature for his immediate wants, reducing industrial life to its simplest forms, and with a certain capacity — not to be quite overlooked — for the absorption of schnaps. Even Sir Wilfred Lawson would admit the force of the temptation after watching a day's labor in the snow-smothered forests. The village is empty of its male inhabitants in the day, and towards evening one hears distant shouts and the train of sleighs emerges from the skirts of the forest, laden with masses of winter fodder, or with the mangled trunks of "patrician trees," which strain to the utmost the muscles of their drawers. As the edge of an open slope is reached, a tumultuous glissade takes place to the more level regions. Each sleigh puts out a couple of legs in advance, like an insect's feelers, which agitate themselves in strange contortions, resulting by some unintelligible process in steering the freight past apparently insuperable obstacles. One may take a seat upon one of these descending thunderbolts as one may shoot the rapids of the St. Lawrence; but the process is slightly alarming to untrained nerves.
As the sun sinks the lights begin to twinkle out across the snow from the scattered cottages, more picturesque than ever under their winter covering. There is something pathetic, I hardly know why, in this humble illumination which lights up the snowy waste and suggests a number of little isolated foci of domestic life. One imagines the family gathered in the low, close room, its old stained timbers barely visible by the glimmer of the primitive lamp, and the huge beams in the ceiling enclosing mysterious islands of gloom, and remembers 'Macaulay's lonely cottage where
The oldest cask is opened,
And the largest lamp is lit.
The goodman is probably carving lopsided chamois instead of "trimming his helmet's plume;" but it may be said with literal truth that
The goodwife's shuttle merrily
Goes flashing through the loom,
and the spinning-wheel has not yet become a thing of the past. Though more primitive in its arrangements, the village is in some ways more civilized than its British rival. A member of a school board might rejoice to see the energy with which the children are making up arrears of education interrupted by the summer labors. Olive branches are plentiful in these parts, and they seem to thrive amazingly in the winter. The game of sliding in miniature sleighs seems to be inexpressibly attractive for children of all ages, and may possibly produce occasional truancy. But the sleighs also carry the children to school from the higher clusters of houses, and they are to be seen making daily pilgrimages long enough to imply a considerable tax upon their pedestrian powers. A little picture comes back to me as I write of a string of red-nosed urchins plodding vigorously up the deep tracks which lead from the lower valley to a remote hamlet in a subsidiary glen. The day was gloomy, the light was fading, and the grey hill-ranges melted indistinguishably into the grey sky. The form of the narrow glen, of the level bottom in which a few cottages clustered near the smothered stream, of the sweeps of pine forests rising steeply to the steeper slopes of alp, and of the ranges of precipitous rock above was just indicated by a few broad sweeps of dim shadow distinct enough to suggest, whilst scarcely defining, the main features of the valley and its walls. Lights and shadows intermingled so faint and delicate that each seemed other; the ground was a form of twilight; and certainly it looked as though the children had no very cheerful prospect before them. But, luckily, the mental coloring bestowed by the childish mind upon familiar objects does not come from without nor depend upon the associations which are indissoluble for the older observer.
There is no want, indeed, of natural symbols of melancholy feeling, of impressive bits of embodied sadness, recalling in sentiment some of Bewick's little vignettes of storm-beaten crag and desolute churchyard. Any place out of season has a certain charm for my mind in its suggestions of dreamful indolence. But the Alpine melody deepens at times to pathos and even to passionate regret. The deserted aspect of these familiar regions is often delicious in its way, especially to jaded faculties. But it is needless to explain at length why some familiar spots should now be haunted, why silence should sometimes echo with a bitter pang the voices of the past, or the snow seem to be resting on the grave of dead happiness. The less said on such things the better; though the sentiment makes itself felt too emphatically to be quite ignored. The sadder strains blend more audibly with the music of the scenery as one passes upwards through grim gorges towards the central chain and the last throbs of animation begin to die away. In the calmest summer day the higher Aar valley is stern and savage enough. Of all congenial scenes for the brutalities of a battle-field, none could be more appropriate than the dark basin of the Grimsel, with nothing above but the bleakest of rock, and the most desolate of snow-fields, and the sullen lake below, equally ready to receive French or Austrian corpses. The winter aspect of the valley seems to vary between two poles. It can look ghastly as death when the middle air is thick with falling snow, just revealing at intervals the black bosses of smoothed cliff that glare fantastically downwards from apparently impassable heights, whilst below the great gash of the torrent-bed looks all the more savage from the cakes of thick ice on the boulders at the bottom. It presents an aspect which by comparison may be called gentle when the winter moonlight shows every swell in the continuous snowfields that have gagged the torrent and smoothed the ruggedness of the rocks. But the gorge is scarcely cheerful at the best of times, nor can one say that the hospice to which it leads is a lively place of residence for the winter. Buried almost to the eaves in snow, it looks like an eccentric grey rock with green shutters. A couple of servants spend their time in the kitchen with a dog or two for company, and have the consolations of literature in the shape of a well-thumbed almanac. Doubtless its assurance that time does not actually stand still must often be welcome. The little dribble of commerce, which never quite ceases, is represented by a few peasants, who may occasionally be weatherbound long enough to make serious inroads on the dry bread and frozen ham. Pigs, for some unknown reason, seem to be the chief article of exchange, and they squeal emphatic disapproval of their enforced journey. At such a point one is hanging on to the extremest verge of civilization. It is the last outpost held by man in the dreary regions of frost. One must generally reach it by floundering knee-deep, with an occasional plunge into deeper drifts through hours of severe labor. Here one has got almost to the last term. The dream is almost a nightmare. One's soul is sinking into that sleep
Where the dreamer seems to be
Weltering through eternity.
There is but a fragile link between ourself and the outer world. Taking a plunge into deep water, the diver has sometimes an uncomfortable feeling, as though an insuperable distance intervened between himself and the surface. Here one is engulphed in abysses of wintry silence. One is overwhelmed and drenched with the sense of mountain solitude. And yet it is desirable to pass yet further, and to feel that this flicker of life, feeble as it may be, may yet be a place of refuge as the one remaining bond between yourself and society. One is but playing at danger; but for the moment one can sympathize with the Arctic adventurer pushing towards the pole, and feeling that the ship which he has left behind is the sole basis of his operations. Above the Grimsel rises the Gallenstock, which, though not one of the mightiest giants, is a grand enough peak, and stands almost at the central nucleus of the Alps. The head waters of the Rhone and the Rhine flow from its base, and it looks defiantly across a waste of glaciers to its great brethren of the Oberland. It recalls Milton's magnificent phrase, "The great vision of the guarded mount," but looks over a nobler prospect than St, Michael's. Five hours' walk will reach it in summer, and it seemed that its winter panorama must be one of the most characteristic in the region. The accident which frustrated our attempt gave a taste of that savage nature which seems ready to leap to life in the winter mountains. The ferocious element of the scenery culminated for a few minutes, which might easily have been terrible.
We had climbed high towards the giant backbone of the mountain, and a few minutes would have placed us on the top. We were in that dim upper stratum, pierced by the nobler peaks alone, and our next neighbor in one direction was the group of Monte Rosa, some sixty miles away, but softly and clearly defined in every detail as an Alpine distance alone can be. Suddenly, without a warning or an apparent cause, the weather changed. The thin white flakes which had been wandering high above our heads changed suddenly into a broad black veil of vapor, dimming square leagues of snow with its shadows. A few salmon-colored wreaths that had been lingering near the furthest ranges had vanished between two glances at the distance, and in their place long trailers of cloud spread themselves like a network of black cobwebs from the bayonet point of the Weisshorn to the great bastion of the Monte Rosa, and seemed to be shooting out mysterious fibres, as the spider projects its nets of gossamer. Though no formed mass of cloud had showed itself, the atmosphere bathing the Oberland peaks rapidly lost its transparency, and changed into a huge blur of indefinite gloom. A wind, cold and icy enough, had all day been sucked down the broad funnel of the Rhone glacier, from the limiting ridges; and the light powdery snow along the final parapet of the Gallensback had been blowing off in regular puffs, suggestive of the steady roll of rifle smoke from the file-firing of a battalion in line. Now the wind grew louder and shriller; miniature whirlwinds began to rollick down the steep gullies, and when one turned towards the wind, it seemed as if an ice-cold hand was administering a sharp blow to the cheek. In our solitude, beyond all possible communication with permanent habitation, distant by some hours of walk even from our base at the Grimsel, there was something almost terrible in this sudden and omnious awakening of the storm spirit. We had ventured into the monster's fastness and he was rousing himself. We depended upon the coming moon for our homeward route, and the moon would not have much power in the thick snowstorm that was apparently about to envelope us.
Retreat was evidently prudent, and when the dim light began to fade we were still climing that broad-backed miscellaneous ridge or congeries of ridges which divides the Grimsel from the Rhone glacier. In summer it is a wilderness of rocky hummocks and bowlders, affording shelter to the most ambitious stragglers of the Alpine rose, and visited by an occasional chamois — a kind of neutral ground between the kingdom of perpetual snow and the highest pastures — one of those chaotic misshapen regions which suggest the world has not been quite finished. In winter, a few black rocks alone peep through the snowy blanket; the hollows become covered pitfalls; and some care is required in steering through its intricacies, and crossing gullies steep enough to suggest a possibility of avalanches. Night and storm might make the work severe, though there was no danger for men of average capacity, and with first-rate guides. But, suddenly and perversely, the heaviest and strongest man of the party declared himself to be ill. His legs began to totter, and he expressed a decided approbation of sitting in the abstract. Then, I must confess, an uncomfortable vision flitted for a moment through my brain. I did not think of the spirited description of the shepherd, in Thomson, lost in the snowdrifts,
when, foul and fierce,
All winter drives along the darkened air.
But I did recall a dozen uncomfortable legends — only too authentic — of travellers lost, far nearer to hospitable refuges, in Alpine storms; of that disgusting museum of corpses, which the monks are not ashamed to keep for the edification of travellers across the St. Bernard; of the English tourists frozen almost within reach of safety on the Col du Bonhomme; of that poor unknown wanderer, who was found a year or two ago in one of the highest chalets of the Val de Bagne, having just been able to struggle thither, in the winter, with strength enough to write a few words on a bit of paper, for the instruction of those who would find his body when the spring brought back the nomadic inhabitants. Some shadowy anticipation suggested itself of a possible newspaper paragraph, describing the zeal with which we had argued against our friend's drowsiness, of our brandy giving out, and pinches, blows, and kicks gradually succeeding to verbal remonstrance. Have not such sad little dramas been described in numberless books of travel? But the foreboding was thrown away. Our friend's distress yielded to the simplest of all conceivable remedies. A few hunches of bread and cheese restored him to a vigor quite excluding even the most remote consideration of the propriety of applying physical force. He was, I believe, the freshest of the party when we came once more, as the moonlight made its last rally against the gathering storm, in sight of the slumbering hospice. It certainly was as grim as ever — solitary and gloomy as the hut of an Esquimaux, representing an almost presumptuous attempt of man to struggle against the intentions of nature, which would have bound the whole region in the rigidity of tenfold torpor. To us, fresh from still sterner regions, where our dreams had begun to be haunted by fierce phantoms resentful of our intrusion, it seemed an embodiment of comfort. It is only fair to add that the temporary hermit of the place welcomed us as heartily as might be to his ascetic fare, and did not even regard us as appropriate victims of speculation.
After this vision of the savageness of winter, I would willingly venture one more description; but I have been already too daring, and beyond certain limits I admit the folly of describing the indescribable. There are sights and scenes, in presence of which the describer, who must feel himself to be, at best, a very poor creature, begins to be sensible that he is not only impertinent but profane. I could, of course, give a rough catalogue of the beauties of the Wengern Alp in winter; a statement of the number of hours' wading in snow across its slopes; a rhapsody about the loveliness of peaks seen between the loaded pine-branches, or the marvellous variety of sublimity and tender beauty enjoyed in perfect calm of bright weather on the dividing ridge. But I refrain. To me the Wengern Alp is a sacred place — the holy of holies in the mountain sanctuary, and the emotions produced when no desecrating influence is present and old memories rise up, softened by the sweet sadness of the scenery, belong to that innermost region of feeling which I would not, if I could, lay bare. Byron's exploitation of the scenery becomes a mere impertinence; Scott's simplicity would not have been exalted enough; Wordsworth would have seen this much of his own image; and Shelley, though he could have caught some of the finer sentiments, would have half spoilt it by some metaphysical rant. The best modern describers cannot shake off their moralizing or their scientific speculations or their desire to be humorous sufficiently to do justice to such beauties. A follower in their steps will do well to pass by with a simple confession of wonder and awe.
The last glorious vision showed itself as we descended from Lauterbrunnen; in the evening, regretting the neglect of nature to provide men with eyes in their backs. The moonlight reflected from the all-enveloping shroud of snow, slept on the lower ridges before us, and gave a mysterious beauty to the deep gorge of the white Lübschine; but behind us it turned the magnificent pyramid of the Jungfrau from base to summit into one glowing mass of magical light. It was not a single mass — a flat continuous surface, as it often appears in the more emphatic lights and shades of daytime; but a whole wilderness of peak, cliff, and glacier, rising in terrace above terrace and pyramid above pyramid, divided by mysterious valleys and shadowy recesses, the forms growing more delicate as they rose, till they culminated in the grand contrast of the balanced cone of the Silberhorn and the flowing sweep of the loftiest crest. A chaos of grand forms, it yet suggests some pervading design, too subtle to be understood by mortal vision, and scorning all comparison with earthly architecture. And the whole was formed, not of vulgar ice and earth, but of incarnate light. The darkest shadow was bright against the faint cliffs of the shadowy gorge, and the highest light faint enough to be woven out of reflected moonshine. So exquisitely modulated, and at once so audacious and so delicate in its sumptuous splendors of design, it belonged to the dream region, in which we appear to be inspired with supernatural influences.
But I am verging upon the poetical. Within a few hours, we were again struggling for coffee in the buffets of railway stations and forgetting all duties, pleasures, and human interests amongst the tumbling waves of the "silver streak." The winter Alps no longer exist. They are but a vision — a faint memory intruding itself at intervals, when the roar of commonplace has an interval of stillness. Only, if dreams were not at times the best and most solid of realities, the world would be intolerable.