Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/61

Rh condensed by the cold, they fall down in the shape of snow. It gives you an inexpressible feeling of loneliness to find yourself here at this height, as it were, in a sort of well, from which you scarcely can suppose that there is even a foot-path to get out by, except down the precipice before you. The clouds which gather here in this valley, at one time completely hiding the immense rocks, and absorbing them in a waste, impenetrable gloom, or at another letting a part of them be seen, like huge spectres, give to the people a cast of melancholy. In the midst of such natural phenomena, the people are full of presentiments and forebodings. Clouds, a phenomenon remarkable to every man from his youth up, are in the flat countries generally looked upon at most as something foreign, something super-terrestrial. People regard them as strangers, as birds of passage, which, hatched under a different climate, visit this or that country for a moment or two in passing; as splendid pieces of tapestry, wherewith the gods part off their pomp and splendour from human eyes. But here, where they are hatched, one is enveloped in them from the very first, and the eternal and intrinsic energy of his nature feels moved at every nerve to forebode, and to indulge in presentiments.

To the clouds, which with us even produce these effects, we pay little attention: moreover, as they are not pushed so thickly and directly before our eyes, their economy is the more difficult to observe. With regard to all such phenomena, one's only wish is to dwell on them for awhile, and to be able to tarry several days in the spots where they are observable. If one is fond of such observations, the desire becomes the more vivid, the more one reflects that every season of the year, every hour of the day, and every change of weather, produces new phenomena which we little looked for. And as no man, not even the most