Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/56

 loftier peaks. It is moulded into the same magic combination of softness and delicacy by shadows so pure in color, that they seem to be woven out of the bluest sky itself. Lake and forest and mountain are lighted by the low sun, casting strange misty shadows to portentous heights, to fade in the vast depths of the sky, or to lose themselves imperceptibly on the mountain flanks. As the steamboat runs into the shadow of the hills, a group of pine-trees on the sky-line comes near the sun, and is suddenly transformed into molten silver; or some snow-ridge, pale as death on the nearest side, is lighted up along its summit with a series of points glowing with intense brilliancy, as though the peaks were being kindled by a stupendous burning-glass. The great snow mountains behind stand glaring in spectral calm, the cliffs hoary with frost, but scarcely changed in outline or detail from their summer aspect. When the sun sinks, and the broad glow of gorgeous coloring fades into darkness, or is absorbed by a wide expanse of phosphoric moonlight, one feels fairly in the outer court of dreamland.

Scenery, even the wildest which is really enjoyable, derives half its charm from the occult sense of the human life and social forms moulded upon it. A bare fragment of rock is ugly till enamelled by lichens, and the Alps would be unbearably stern but for the picturesque society preserved among their folds. In summer the true life of the people is obscured by the rank overgrowth of parasitic population. In winter the stream of existence shows itself in more of its primitive form, like the rivulets which represent the glacier torrents. As one penetrates further into the valleys, and the bagman element — the only representative of the superincumbent summer population — disappears, one finds the genuine peasant, neither the parasite which sucks the blood of summer tourists nor the melodramatic humbug of operas and picture-books. He is the rough athletic laborer, wrestling with nature for his immediate wants, reducing industrial life to its simplest forms, and with a certain capacity — not to be quite overlooked — for the absorption of schnaps. Even Sir Wilfred Lawson would admit the force of the temptation after watching a day's labor in the snow-smothered forests. The village is empty of its male inhabitants in the day, and towards evening one hears distant shouts and the train of sleighs emerges from the skirts of the forest, laden with masses of winter fodder, or with the mangled trunks of "patrician trees," which strain to the utmost the muscles of their drawers. As the edge of an open slope is reached, a tumultuous glissade takes place to the more level regions. Each sleigh puts out a couple of legs in advance, like an insect's feelers, which agitate themselves in strange contortions, resulting by some unintelligible process in steering the freight past apparently insuperable obstacles. One may take a seat upon one of these descending thunderbolts as one may shoot the rapids of the St. Lawrence; but the process is slightly alarming to untrained nerves.

As the sun sinks the lights begin to twinkle out across the snow from the scattered cottages, more picturesque than ever under their winter covering. There is something pathetic, I hardly know why, in this humble illumination which lights up the snowy waste and suggests a number of little isolated foci of domestic life. One imagines the family gathered in the low, close room, its old stained timbers barely visible by the glimmer of the primitive lamp, and the huge beams in the ceiling enclosing mysterious islands of gloom, and remembers 'Macaulay's lonely cottage where

The goodman is probably carving lopsided chamois instead of "trimming his helmet's plume;" but it may be said with literal truth that

and the spinning-wheel has not yet become a thing of the past. Though more primitive in its arrangements, the village is in some ways more civilized than its British rival. A member of a school board might rejoice to see the energy with which the children are making up arrears of education interrupted by the summer labors. Olive branches are plentiful in these parts, and they seem to thrive amazingly in the winter. The game of sliding in miniature sleighs seems to be inexpressibly attractive for children of all ages, and may possibly produce occasional truancy. But the sleighs also carry the children to school from the higher clusters of houses, and they are to be seen making daily pilgrimages long enough to imply a considerable tax upon their pedestrian powers. A little picture comes back to me as I write of a string of red-nosed urchins plodding vigorously up the deep tracks which lead 