I would rather tell of the
angel's face I saw in Kalmannstunga.
It was a girl, ten or twelve
years of age, beautiful and lovely beyond description, so that I
wished I had been a painter. How gladly would I have taken home
with me to my own land, if only on canvass, the delicate face, with
its roguish dimples and speaking eyes! But perhaps it is better as
it is; the picture might by some unlucky chance have fallen into the
hands of some too-susceptible youth, who, like Don Sylvio de
Rosalva, in Wieland's Comical Romance, would immediately have
proceeded to travel through half the world to find the original of
this enchanting portrait. His spirit of inquiry would scarcely have
carried him to Iceland, as such an apparition would never be
suspected to exist in such a country, and thus the unhappy youth
would be doomed to endless wandering.
June 20th.
The distance from Kalmannstunga to Thingvalla is fifty-two miles,
and the journey is certainly one of the most dreary and fatiguing of
all that can be made in Iceland. The traveller passes from one
desert valley into another; he is always surrounded by high
mountains and still higher glaciers, and wherever he turns his eyes,
nature seems torpid and dead. A feeling of anxious discomfort
seizes upon the wanderer, he hastens with redoubled speed through
the far-stretched deserts, and eagerly ascends the mountains piled
up before him, in the hope that better things lie beyond.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 142 of 329
Words from 37876 to 38133
of 87606
