Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/35

Rh for her sex into an impertinent Frenchman by boxing his ears. The inconvenience incidental to tourists of the empty purse she parried in a measure by subsisting upon chocolate, but happily, just at the moment when this régime was beginning to be deleterious, she was delivered by a lucky encounter with English friends, the family of one of her old schoolfellows, who not only put financial matters to rights, but "saw me to the station and took my ticket to Zurich, for they declared I could not be trusted out of their sight until settled in the train, otherwise I might perhaps turn up at the Caucasus. For I had great hankerings after that region, having heard from a traveller I met at Grindelwald that its mountain scenery far surpassed anything in the Alps." The Alpine scenery nevertheless delighted her intensely and its beauties are eloquently celebrated: —

"For once I felt truly free. My body, pliant to my soul, moved rhythmically to the sound of the rushing stream. The sky, of a deep sapphire, was alive with clouds, high white clouds changing chameleon-like as the sun and wind touched their ethereal substance. Sometimes they stood on tiptoe on the top of a mountain peak like columbines balancing themselves on the shoulders of a giant. Innumerable waterfalls came rushing from invisible glaciers—sometimes in a broad torrent that dashed foaming down to the stream; sometimes in a soft froth like the millv with which the Alps, those Mothers of Europe, were feeding the land.

"A very few things in this life have exceeded my expectations. The Alps, aglow like mountains of roses round a heavenly Jerusalem, receding range beyond range into airier infinitudes of light, a vision like the last part of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony turned into visible form and beckoning something deep down usually