Trenton Falls and Niagara, he cannot restrain longing allusions to the thousand Alpine cascades of Switzerland that flicker through his memory, "slight avalanches of snow-dust shimmering into rainbow-dust"—and to the Alpine peaks themselves, those "ragged edges of creation, half blent with chaos," upon which, "inaccessible for ever, in the midst of the endless murmur of the world, antemundane silence lies stranded, like the corse of an antediluvian on a solitary rock-point in the sea"—those solemn heights, towards which painfully climbing, you may feel, "with the fascination[1] of wonder and awe, that you look, as the Chinese say, behind the beginning." Why does not Mr. Curtis give us his travels In Switzerland? All his Alpine references have an Alpine inspiration that makes us wish for more.[2] And albeit his temptation may be to indulge in a little rhapsody, and to dazzle with diamond-dust, yet has he too keen a sense of the ludicrous, and too confirmed a tendency to sarcasm, to lose himself in mystic rapture. Even at sunrise on the Righi, he has more than "half-an-eye" for the cloaked and blanketed cockneys beside him—"as if each had arisen, bed and all, and had so stepped out to enjoy the spectacle"—and finds the exceeding absurdity of the crowd interfere with the grandeur of the moment.
The chapters devoted to Saratoga and Newport, remind us in many a paragraph of both Hawthorne and Thackeray. The watering-places' talk is of blooming belles, who are grandmothers now, and of brilliant beaux, bald now and gouty: mournful midnight gossips! that will not let you leave those whose farewells yet thrill in your heart, in the eternal morning of youth, but compel you to forecast their doom, to draw sad and strange outlines upon the future—to paint pictures of age, wrinkles, ochre-veined hands, and mob-caps—until your Saratoga episode of pleasure has sombred into an Egyptian banquet, with your old, silently-smoking, and meditative habitiué for the death's-head. Savours this not of "Edward Fane's Rosebud" and of "Vanity Fair?"
A history of that community whereby hangs a tale of "Blithedale Romance," has been suggested to Mr. Curtis by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who says, "Even the brilliant Howadji might find as rich a theme in his youthful reminiscences of Brook Farm, and a more novel one,—close at hand as it lies,—than those which he has since made so distant a pilgrimage to seek, in Syria, and along the current of the Nile." Such a history, by such a historian, might be a curious parallel, or pendant, to the record of Miles Coverdale.
- ↑ Akin, perhaps, to that of Wordsworth's "Stepping Westwards."
- ↑ Elsewhere he sketches the view of the Righi—celestial snow-fields, smooth and glittering as the sky—rugged glaciers sloping into unknown abysses, Niagaran cataracts frozen into foam for ever—the range of the Jura, dusky and far, and the faint flash of the Aar in the morning mist—while over the hushed tumult of peaks thronging to the utmost east, came the sun, sowing those sublime snow-fields with glorious day. And again, of his impressions from the Faulhorn, the highest inhabited point in Europe, he says: "And as I looked across the valley of Grindelwald, and saw the snow-fields and ice-precipices of all the Horns,—never trodden and never to be trodden by man,—shining cold in the moonlight, my heart stood still as I felt that those awful peaks and I were alone in the solemn solitude. Then I felt the significance of Switzerland, and knew the sublimity of mountains." This "significance" is noted àpropos of the Catskill view, where he feels the want of that true mountain sublimity, the presence of lonely snow-peaks.
