This Is Alpine Solitude.

All around me were these deep, green dells, from which comes up the tinkle of bells, like the dropping of rain every where It seems to me the air is more elastic and musical here than below, and gives grace to the commonest sound.

Now I look back along the way we have been travelling. I look at the strange old cloudy mountains, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn, the Schreckhorn. A kind of hazy ether floats around them - an indescribable aerial halo - which no painter ever represents. Who can paint the air - that vivid blue in which these sharp peaks cut their glittering images? Of all peaks, the Eiger is the most impressive to me.

[Illustration: _of the sharp pointed Eiger, with mountain goats on a pinnacle in the foreground._]

It is a gigantic ploughshare of rock, set up against the sky, its thin, keen, purple blade edged with glittering frost; for so sharp is its point, that only a dazzling line marks the eternal snow on its head.

I walked out as far as I could on a narrow summit, and took a last look. Glaciers! snows! mountains! sunny dells and flowers! all good by. I am a pilgrim and a stranger.

Already, looking down to the shanty, I see the guide like a hen that has lost a chicken, shaking her wings, and clucking, and making a great ado. I could stay here all day. I would like to stay two or three - to see how it would look at sunrise, at sunset - to lie down in one of these sunny hollows, and look up into the sky - to shut my eyes lazily, and open them again, and so let the whole impression _soak in_, as Mrs. H. used to say.

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