This Was Said
To Be A Spectacle Which The Tourist Ought By No Means
To Miss.
I was strongly tempted, but I could not go
there with propriety, because one goes in a boat.
The task which I had set myself was to walk over Europe
on foot, not skim over it in a boat.
I had made a tacit
contract with myself; it was my duty to abide by it.
I was willing to make boat trips for pleasure, but I could
not conscientiously make them in the way of business.
It cost me something of a pang to lose that fine sight,
but I lived down the desire, and gained in my self-respect
through the triumph. I had a finer and a grander sight,
however, where I was. This was the mighty dome of the Jungfrau
softly outlined against the sky and faintly silvered by
the starlight. There was something subduing in the influence
of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed
to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal,
face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature
of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast.
One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation
of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice - a spirit
which had looked down, through the slow drift of the ages,
upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them;
and would judge a million more - and still be there,
watching, unchanged and unchangeable, after all life
should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation.
While I was feeling these things, I was groping,
without knowing it, toward an understanding of what the
spell is which people find in the Alps, and in no other
mountains - that strange, deep, nameless influence, which,
once felt, cannot be forgotten - once felt, leaves always
behind it a restless longing to feel it again - a longing
which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning
which will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will.
I met dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative,
cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far countries
and roamed through the Swiss Alps year after year - they
could not explain why. They had come first, they said,
out of idle curiosity, because everybody talked about it;
they had come since because they could not help it, and they
should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same reason;
they had tried to break their chains and stay away,
but it was futile; now, they had no desire to break them.
Others came nearer formulating what they felt; they said they
could find perfect rest and peace nowhere else when they
were troubled: all frets and worries and chafings sank to
sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps;
the Great Spirit of the Mountain breathed his own peace
upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them;
they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid
things here, before the visible throne of God.
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