Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/55

 the petty and temporary activities of daily life. In death, it is often said, the family likeness comes out which is obscured by individual peculiarities during active life. So in this living death or cataleptic trance of the mountains, they carry the imagination more easily to their permanent relations with epochs indefinitely remote.

The melancholy, however, which is shared with all that is sublime or lovely has here its peculiar stamp. It is at once exquisitely tender and yet wholesome and stimulating. The Atlantic in a December gale produces a melancholy tempered by the invigorating influence of the human life that struggles against its fury; but there is no touch of tenderness in its behavior; it is a monster which would take a cruel pleasure in mangling and disfiguring its victim. A boundless plain is often at once melancholy and tender, especially when shrouded in snow; but it is depressing as the vapors which hang like palls over a dreary morass. The Alps alone possess the merit of at once soothing and stimulating. The tender half-tones, due to the vaporous air, the marvellous delicacy of light and shade on the snow-piled ranges, and the subtlety of line, which suggests that some sensitive agent has been moulding the snow covering to every gentle contour of the surface, act like the media which allow the light-giving rays to pass, whilst quenching the rays of heat; they transmit the soothing and resist the depressing influences of nature. The snow on a half-buried chalet suggests a kind hand laid softly on a sick man's brows. And yet the nerves are not relaxed. The air is bright and bracing as the purest breeze on the seashore, without the slightest trace of languor. It has the inspiring quality of the notorious "wild north-easter," without its preposterous bluster. Even in summer the same delicious atmosphere may be breathed amongst the higher snow-fields in fine weather. In winter it descends to the valleys, and the nerves are strung as firmly as those of a race-horse in training, without being over-excited. The effect is heightened by the intensity of character which redeems every detail of a mountain region from the commonplace. The first sight of a pine-tree, bearing so gallantly — with something, one may almost say, of military jauntiness — its load of snow crystals destroyed to me forever the charm of one of Heine's most frequently quoted poems. It became once for all impossible to conceive of that least morbid of trees indulging in melancholy longing for a southern palm. It may show something of the sadness of a hard struggle for life; but never in the wildest of storms could it condescend to sentimentalism.

But it is time to descend to detail. The Alps in winter belong, I have said, to dreamland. From the moment when the traveller catches sight, from the terraces of the Jura, of the long encampment of peaks, from Mont Blanc to the Wetterhorn, to the time when he has penetrated to the innermost recesses of the chain, he is passing through a series of dreams within dreams. Each vision is a portal to one beyond and within, still more unsubstantial and solemn. One passes, by slow gradations, to the more and more shadowy regions, where the stream of life runs lower and the enchantment binds the senses with a more powerful opiate. Starting, for example, from the loveliest of all conceivable lakes, where the Blümlis Alp, the Jungfrau, and Schreckhorn form a marvellous background to the old towers of Thun, one comes under the dominion of the charm. The lake-waters, no longer clouded by turbid torrents, are mere liquid turquoise. They are of the color of which Shelley was thinking when he described the blue Mediterranean awakened from his summer dreams "beside a pumice isle in Baiae's Bay." Between the lake and the snow-clad hills lie the withered forests, the delicate reds and browns of the deciduous foliage giving just the touch of warmth required to contrast the coolness of the surrounding scenery. And higher up, the pine forests still display their broad zones of purple, not quite in that uncompromising spirit which reduces them in the intensity of summer shadow to mere patches of pitchy blackness, but mellowed by the misty air, and with their foliage judiciously softened with snow-dust like the powdered hair of a last-century beauty. There is no longer the fierce glare which gives a look of parched monotony to the stretches of lofty pasture under an August sun. The perpetual greens, denounced by painters, have disappeared, and in their place are ranges of novel hue and texture which painters may possibly dislike — for I am not familiar with their secrets — but which they may certainly despair of adequately rendering. The ranges are apparently formed of a delicate material of creamy whiteness, unlike the dazzling splendors of the eternal snows, at once so pure and so mellow that it suggests rather frozen milk than ordinary snow. If not so ethereal, it is softer and more tender than its rival on the 