It Is The Curse Of The Alpine Valleys To Be Each One Village From
One End To The Other.
Go where you please, houses will still be in
sight, before and behind you, and to the right and left.
Climb as
high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations
nested in the wood. Nor is that all; for about the health resort
the walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids
about their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to
learn to jodel, and by German couples silently and, as you venture
to fancy, not quite happily, pursuing love's young dream. You may
perhaps be an invalid who likes to make bad verses as he walks
about. Alas! no muse will suffer this imminence of interruption -
and at the second stampede of jodellers you find your modest
inspiration fled. Or you may only have a taste for solitude; it
may try your nerves to have some one always in front whom you are
visibly overtaking, and some one always behind who is audibly
overtaking you, to say nothing of a score or so who brush past you
in an opposite direction. It may annoy you to take your walks and
seats in public view. Alas! there is no help for it among the
Alps. There are no recesses, as in Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill;
no sacred solitude of olive gardens on the Roccabruna-road; no nook
upon Saint Martin's Cape, haunted by the voice of breakers, and
fragrant with the threefold sweetness of the rosemary and the sea-
pines and the sea.
For this publicity there is no cure, and no alleviation; but the
storms of which you will complain so bitterly while they endure,
chequer and by their contrast brighten the sameness of the fair-
weather scenes. When sun and storm contend together - when the
thick clouds are broken up and pierced by arrows of golden
daylight - there will be startling rearrangements and
transfigurations of the mountain summits. A sun-dazzling spire of
alp hangs suspended in mid-sky among awful glooms and blackness; or
perhaps the edge of some great mountain shoulder will be designed
in living gold, and appear for the duration of a glance bright like
a constellation, and alone 'in the unapparent.' You may think you
know the figure of these hills; but when they are thus revealed,
they belong no longer to the things of earth - meteors we should
rather call them, appearances of sun and air that endure but for a
moment and return no more. Other variations are more lasting, as
when, for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some
windless hours, and the thin, spiry, mountain pine trees stand each
stock-still and loaded with a shining burthen. You may drive
through a forest so disguised, the tongue-tied torrent struggling
silently in the cleft of the ravine, and all still except the
jingle of the sleigh bells, and you shall fancy yourself in some
untrodden northern territory - Lapland, Labrador, or Alaska.
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