It must be entirely
owing to this, that the Alps do not break out on Europe generally, and
tear it in pieces.
But the mountains - how shall I give you the least idea of them? Old,
sombre, haggard genii, half veiled in clouds, belted with pines, worn
and furrowed with storms and avalanches, but not as yet crowned with
snow. For many miles after leaving Geneva, the Mole is the principal
object; its blue-black outline veering and shifting, taking on a
thousand strange varieties of form as you approach it, others again as
you recede.
It is a cloudy day; and heavy volumes of vapor are wreathing and
unwreathing themselves around the gaunt forms of the everlasting
rocks, like human reasonings, desires, and hopes around the ghastly
realities of life and death; graceful, undulating, and sometimes
gleaming out in silver or rosy wreaths. Still, they are nothing but
mist; the dread realities are just where they were before. It is odd,
though, to look at these cloud caperings; quite as interesting, in its
way, as to read new systems of transcendental philosophy, and perhaps
quite as profitable. Yonder is a great, whiteheaded cloud, slowly
unrolling himself in the bosom of a black pine forest. Across the
other side of the road a huge granite cliff has picked up a bit of
gauzy silver, which he is winding round his scraggy neck. And now,
here comes a cascade right over our heads; a cascade, not of water,
but of cloud; for the poor little brook that makes it faints away
before it gets down to us; it falls like a shimmer of moonlight, or a
shower of powdered silver, while a tremulous rainbow appears at
uncertain intervals, like a half-seen spirit.
[Illustration: _of waterfalls._]
The cascade here, as in mountains generally, is a never-failing source
of life and variety. Water, joyous, buoyant son of Nature, is calling
to you, leaping, sparkling, mocking at you between bushes, and singing
as he goes down the dells. A thousand little pictures he makes among
the rocks as he goes; like the little sketch which I send you.
Then, the _bizarre_ outline of the rocks; well does Goethe call
them "the giant-snouted crags;" and as the diligence winds slowly on,
they seem to lean, and turn, and bend. Now they close up like a wall
in front, now open in piny and cloudy vistas: now they embrace the
torrent in their great, black arms; and now, flashing laughter and
babbling defiance through rifted rocks and uprooted pines, the torrent
shoots past them, down into some fathomless abyss. These old Alp
mothers cannot hold their offspring back from abysses any better than
poor earth mothers.
There are phases in nature which correspond to every phase of human
thought and emotion; and this stern, cloudy scenery answers to the
melancholy fatalism of Greek tragedy, or the kindred mournfulness of
the Book of Job.
These dark channelled rocks, worn, as with eternal tears, - these
traces, so evident of ancient and vast desolations, - suggest the idea
of boundless power and inexorable will, before whose course the most
vehement of human feelings are as the fine spray of the cataract.
"For, surely, the mountain, falling, cometh to nought;
The rock is remored out of his place;
The waters wear the stones;
Thou washest away the things that grow out of the earth,
And thou destroyest the hopes of man;
Thou prevailest against him, and he passeth;
Thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away."
The sceptical inquirer into the mysteries of eternal things might
here, if ever, feel the solemn irony of Eliphaz the Temanite: -
"Should a wise man utter vain knowledge?
Should he reason with unprofitable talk?
Or with speeches that can do no good?
Art thou the first man that ever was born?
Or wast thou made before the hills?"
There are some of my fellow-travellers, by the by, who, if they
_had_ been made before the hills, would never have been much
wiser. All through these solemn passages and gorges, they are
discussing hotels, champagne, wine, and cigars. I presume they would
do the same thing at the gates of the Celestial City, if they should
accidentally find themselves there. It is one of the dark providences
that multitudes of this calibre of mind find leisure and means to come
among these scenes, while many to whom they would be an inspiration,
in whose souls they would unseal ceaseless fountains of beauty, are
forever excluded by poverty and care.
At noon we stopped at Sallenches, famous for two things; first, as the
spot where people get dinner, and second, where they take the
_char_, a carriage used when the road is too steep for the
diligence. Here S., who had been feeling ill all the morning, became
too unwell to proceed, so that we had to lie by an hour or two, and
did not go on with the caravan. I sat down at the room window to study
and sketch a mountain that rose exactly opposite. I thought to myself,
"Now, would it be possible to give to one that had not seen it an idea
of how this looks?" Let me try if words can paint it. Right above the
fiat roof of the houses on the opposite side of the street rose this
immense mountain wall. The lower tier seemed to be a turbulent swell
of pasture land, rolling into every imaginable shape; green billows
and dells, rising higher and higher in the air as you looked upward,
dyed here and there in bright yellow streaks, by the wild crocus, and
spotted over with cattle.
