To-day, riding broilingly
through hay-fields - to-morrow, stuck in snow drifts!
LETTER XXXV.
Dear Henry: -
You cannot think how beautiful are these Alpine valleys. Our course,
all the first morning after we left Chamouni, lay beside a broad,
hearty, joyous mountain torrent, called, perhaps from the darkness of
its waters, Eau Noire. Charming meadows skirted its banks. All the way
along I could think of nothing but Bunyan's meadows beside the river
of life, "curiously adorned with lilies." _These_ were curiously
adorned, broidered, and inwrought with flowers, many and brilliant as
those in a western prairie. Were I to undertake to describe them, I
might make an inventory as long as Homer's list of the ships. There
was the Canterbury bell of our garden; the white meadow sweet; the
blue and white campanula; the tall, slender harebell, and a little,
short-tufted variety of the same, which our guide tells me is called
"Les Clochettes," or the "little bells" - fairies might ring them, I
thought. Then there are whole beds of the little blue forget-me-not,
and a white flower which much resembles it in form. I also noticed,
hanging in the clefts of the rocks around Tete Noir, the long golden
tresses of the laburnum. It has seemed to me, when I have been
travelling here, as if every flower I ever saw in a garden met me some
where in rocks or meadows.
There is a strange, unsatisfying pleasure about flowers, which, like
all earthly pleasure, is akin to pain. What can you do with them? - you
want to do something, but what? Take them all up, and carry them with
you? You cannot do that. Get down and look at them? What, keep a whole
caravan waiting for your observations! That will never do. Well, then,
pick and carry them along with you. That is what, in despair of any
better resource, I did. My good old guide was infinite in patience,
stopping at every new exclamation point of mine, plunging down rocks
into the meadow land, climbing to the points of great rocks, and
returning with his hands filled with flowers. It seemed almost
sacrilegious to tear away such fanciful creations, that looked as if
they were votive offerings on an altar, or, more likely, living
existences, whose only conscious life was a continued exhalation of
joy and praise.
These flowers seemed to me to be earth's raptures and aspirations
- her better moments - her lucid intervals. Like every thing else in
our existence, they are mysterious.
In what mood of mind were they conceived by the great Artist? Of what
feelings of his are they the expression - springing up out of the
dust, in these gigantic, waste, and desolate regions, where one would
think the sense of his almightiness might overpower the soul? Born in
the track of the glacier and the avalanche, they seem to say to us
that this Almighty Being is very pitiful, and of tender compassion;
that, in his infinite soul, there is an exquisite gentleness and love
of the beautiful, and that, if we would be blessed, his will to bless
is infinite.
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