Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/54

 much than the London rough need be warned against an excessive devotion to the fine arts. Our danger is the reverse. Let us, in such brief moments as may be propitious, draw the curtains which may exclude the outside world, and abandon ourselves to the passing luxury of abstract meditation; or rather, for the word meditation suggests too near an approach to ordinary thought, of passive surrender to an emotional current.

The winter Alps provide some such curtain. The very daylight has an unreal glow. The noisy summer life is suspended. A scarce audible hush seems to be whispered throughout the region. The first glacier stream that you meet strikes the keynote of the prevailing melody. In summer the torrent comes down like a charge of cavalry — all rush and roar and foam" and fury — turbid with the dust ground from the mountain's flanks by the ice-share, and spluttering and writhing in its bed like a creature in the agonies of strangulation. In winter it is transformed into the likeness of one of the gentle brooks that creeps round the roots of Scawfell, or even one of those sparkling trout-streams that slide through a water meadow in the south, It is perfectly transparent. It babbles round rocks instead of clearing them at a bound. It can at most fret away the edges of the huge white pillows of snow that cap the boulders. High up it can only show itself at intervals between smothering snow-beds which form continuous bridges. Even the thundering fall of the Handeck becomes a gentle thread of pure water creeping behind a broad sheet of ice, more delicately carved and moulded than a lady's veil, and so diminished in volume that one wonders how it has managed to festoon the broad rock faces with so vast a mass of pendent icicles. The pulse of the mountains is beating low; the huge arteries through which the life-blood courses so furiously in summer have become a world too wide for this trickle of pellucid water. If one is still forced to attribute personality to the peaks, they are clearly in a state of suspended animation. They are spell-bound, dreaming of dim abysses of past time or of the summer that is to recall them to life. They are in a trance like that of the Ancient Mariner when he heard spirit voices conversing overhead in mysterious murmurs.

This dream-like impression is everywhere pervading and dominant. It is in proportion to the contrary impression of stupendous, if latent, energy which the Alps make upon one in summer. Then when an avalanche is discharged down the gorges of the Jungfrau, one fancies it the signal gun of a volley of artillery. It seems to betoken the presence of some huge animal, crouching in suspense but in perpetual vigilance, and ready at any moment to spring into portentous activity. In the winter the sound recalls the uneasy movement of the same monster, now lapped in sevenfold dreams. It is the rare interruption to a silence which may be felt — a single indication of the continued existence of forces which are for the time lulled into absolute repose. A quiet sea or a moonlit forest on the plains may give an impression of slumber in some sense even deeper. But the impression is not so vivid because less permanent and less forcibly contrasted. The lowland forest will soon return to such life as it possesses, which is after all little more than a kind of entomological buzzing. The ocean is the only rival of the mountains. But the six months' paralysis which locks up the energies of the Alps has a greater dignity than the uncertain repose of the sea. It is as proper to talk of a sea of mountains as of a mountain wave; but the comparison always seems to me derogatory to the scenery which has the greatest appearance of organic unity. The sea is all very well in its way; but it is a fidgety uncomfortable kind of element; you can see but a little bit of it at a time; and it is capable of being horribly monotonous. All poetry to the contrary notwithstanding, I hold that even the Atlantic is often little better than a bore. Its sleep chiefly suggests absence of the most undignified of all ailments; and it never approaches the grandeur of the strange mountain trance.

There are dreams and dreams. The special merit of the mountain structure is in the harmonious blending of certain strains of emotion not elsewhere to be enjoyed together. The winter Alps are melancholy, as everything sublime is more or less melancholy. The melancholy is the spontaneous recognition by human nature of its own pettiness when brought into immediate contact with what we please to regard as eternal and infinite. It is the starting into vivid consciousness of that sentiment which poets and preachers have tried, with varying success, to crystalize into definite figures and formulæ; which is necessarily more familiar to a man's mind, as he is more habitually conversant with the vastest objects of thought; and which is stimulated in the mountains in proportion as they are less dominated by 