Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Volume 2

Though clouds rise oft between;
Faith views the radiant dome,
And a lustre flashes keen
From the New Jerusalem.

O, glory shining far
From the never-setting sun!
O, trembling morning star!
Our journey's almost done
To the New Jerusalem.

Our hearts are breaking now
Those mansions fair to see:
O Lord, thy heavens bow,
And raise us up with thee
To the New Jerusalem."

The echoes of our voices died along the mountain sides, as slowly we wended our downward way. The rosy flush began to fade. A rich creamy or orange hue seemed to imbue the scene, and finally, as the shadows from the Jura crept higher, and covered it with a pall, it assumed a startling, deathlike pallor of chalky white. Mont Blanc was dead. Mont Blanc was walking as a ghost upon the granite ranges. But as darkness came on, and as the sky over the Jura, where the sun had set, obtained a deep, rosy tinge, Mont Blanc revived a little, and a flush of delicate, transparent pink tinged his cone, and Mont Blanc was asleep. Good night to Mont Blanc.

Wednesday morning, June 29. The day is intensely hot; the weather is exceedingly fair, but Mont Blanc is not visible. Not a vestige—not a trace. All vanished. It does not seem possible. There do not seem to exist the conditions for such celestial pageant to have stood there. What! there—where my eyes now look steadily and piercingly into the blue, into the seemingly fathomless azure—there, will they tell me, I saw that enraptured vision, as it were, the city descending from God out of heaven, as a bride adorned for her husband? Incredible! It must be a dream, a vision of the night.

Evening. After the heat of the day our whole household, old and young, set forth for a boating excursion on the lake. Dividing our party in two boats, we pulled about a mile up the left shore. Lake Leman was before us in all its loveliness; and we were dipping our oar where Byron had floated past scenes which scarce need to become classic to possess a superior charm. The sun was just gone behind the Jura, leaving a glorious sky. Mont Blanc stood afar behind a hazy veil, like a spirit half revealed. We saw it pass before our eyes as we moved. "It stood still, but we could not discern the form thereof." As we glided on past boats uncounted, winged or many-footed, motionless or still, we softly sung,—

"Think of me oft at twilight hour,
And I will think of thee;
Remembering how we felt its power
When thou wast still with me.

Dear is that hour, for day then sleeps
Upon the gray cloud's breast;
And not a voice or sound e'er keeps
His wearied eyes from rest."

The surface of the lake was unruffled. The air was still. An occasional burst from the band in the garden of Rousseau came softened in the distance. Enveloped in her thick shawl H. reclined in the stern, and gave herself to the influences of the hour.

Darkness came down upon the deep. And in the gloom we turned our prows towards the many-twinkling quays, far in the distance. We bent to the oar in emulous contest, and our barks foamed and hissed through the water. In a few moments we were passing through the noisy crowd on the quay towards our quiet home.

LETTER XXXII

DEAR CHILDREN:—

I promised to write from Chamouni, so to commence at the commencement. Fancy me, on a broiling day in July, panting with the heat, gazing from my window in Geneva upon Lake Leman, which reflects the sun like a burning glass, and thinking whether in America, or any where else, it was ever so hot before. This was quite a new view of the subject to me, who had been warned in Paris only of the necessity of blanket shawls, and had come to Switzerland with my head full of glaciers, and my trunk full of furs.

While arranging my travelling preparations, Madame F. enters.

"Have you considered how cold it is up there?" she inquires.

"I am glad if it is cold any where," said I.

"Ah, you will find it dreadful; you will need to be thoroughly guarded."

I suggested tippets, flannels, and furs, of which I already possessed a moderate supply. But no; these were altogether insufficient. It was necessary that I should buy two immense fur coats; one for C., and one for myself.

I assure you that such preparations, made with the thermometer between eighty and ninety, impress one with a kind of awe. "What regions must they be," thought I to myself, "thus sealed up in eternal snows, while the country at their feet lies scorching in the very fire!" A shadow of incredulity mingled itself with my reflections. On the whole, I bought but one fur coat.

At this moment C. came up to tell me that W., S., and G. had all come back from Italy, so that our party was once more together.

It was on the 5th of July that S. and I took our seats in the coupé of the diligence. Now, this coupé is low and narrow enough, so that our condition reminded me slightly of the luckless fowls which I have sometimes seen riding to the Cincinnati market in coupés of about equal convenience. Nevertheless, it might be considered a peaceable and satisfactory style of accommodation in an ordinary country. But to ride among the wonders of the Alps in such a vehicle is something like contemplating infinity through the nose of a bottle. It was really very tantalizing and provoking to me till C. was so obliging as to resign his seat on top in my favor, and descend into Sheol, as he said. Then I began to live; for I could see to the summit of the immense walls of rock under which we were passing. By and by we were reminded, by the examination of our passports, that we had entered Sardinia; and the officers, being duly satisfied that we were not going to Chamouni to levy an army among the glaciers, or raise a sedition among the avalanches, let us pass free. The discretion and wisdom of this passport system can never be sufficiently admired. It must be entirely owing to this, that the Alps do not break out on Europe generally, and tear it in pieces.

But the mountains—how shall I give you the least idea of them? Old, sombre, haggard genii, half veiled in clouds, belted with pines, worn and furrowed with storms and avalanches, but not as yet crowned with snow. For many miles after leaving Geneva, the Mole is the principal object; its blue-black outline veering and shifting, taking on a thousand strange varieties of form as you approach it, others again as you recede.

It is a cloudy day; and heavy volumes of vapor are wreathing and unwreathing themselves around the gaunt forms of the everlasting rocks, like human reasonings, desires, and hopes around the ghastly realities of life and death; graceful, undulating, and sometimes gleaming out in silver or rosy wreaths. Still, they are nothing but mist; the dread realities are just where they were before. It is odd, though, to look at these cloud caperings; quite as interesting, in its way, as to read new systems of transcendental philosophy, and perhaps quite as profitable. Yonder is a great, whiteheaded cloud, slowly unrolling himself in the bosom of a black pine forest. Across the other side of the road a huge granite cliff has picked up a bit of gauzy silver, which he is winding round his scraggy neck. And now, here comes a cascade right over our heads; a cascade, not of water, but of cloud; for the poor little brook that makes it faints away before it gets down to us; it falls like a shimmer of moonlight, or a shower of powdered silver, while a tremulous rainbow appears at uncertain intervals, like a half-seen spirit.

The cascade here, as in mountains generally, is a never-failing source of life and variety. Water, joyous, buoyant son of Nature, is calling to you, leaping, sparkling, mocking at you between bushes, and singing as he goes down the dells. A thousand little pictures he makes among the rocks as he goes; like the little sketch which I send you.

Then, the bizarre outline of the rocks; well does Goethe call them "the giant-snouted crags;" and as the diligence winds slowly on, they seem to lean, and turn, and bend. Now they close up like a wall in front, now open in piny and cloudy vistas: now they embrace the torrent in their great, black arms; and now, flashing laughter and babbling defiance through rifted rocks and uprooted pines, the torrent shoots past them, down into some fathomless abyss. These old Alp mothers cannot hold their offspring back from abysses any better than poor earth mothers.

There are phases in nature which correspond to every phase of human thought and emotion; and this stern, cloudy scenery answers to the melancholy fatalism of Greek tragedy, or the kindred mournfulness of the Book of Job.

These dark channelled rocks, worn, as with eternal tears,—these traces, so evident of ancient and vast desolations,—suggest the idea of boundless power and inexorable will, before whose course the most vehement of human feelings are as the fine spray of the cataract.

"For, surely, the mountain, falling, cometh to nought;
The rock is remored out of his place;
The waters wear the stones;
Thou washest away the things that grow out of the earth,
And thou destroyest the hopes of man;
Thou prevailest against him, and he passeth;
Thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away."

The sceptical inquirer into the mysteries of eternal things might here, if ever, feel the solemn irony of Eliphaz the Temanite:—

"Should a wise man utter vain knowledge?
Should he reason with unprofitable talk?
Or with speeches that can do no good?
Art thou the first man that ever was born?
Or wast thou made before the hills?"

There are some of my fellow-travellers, by the by, who, if they had been made before the hills, would never have been much wiser. All through these solemn passages and gorges, they are discussing hotels, champagne, wine, and cigars. I presume they would do the same thing at the gates of the Celestial City, if they should accidentally find themselves there. It is one of the dark providences that multitudes of this calibre of mind find leisure and means to come among these scenes, while many to whom they would be an inspiration, in whose souls they would unseal ceaseless fountains of beauty, are forever excluded by poverty and care.

At noon we stopped at Sallenches, famous for two things; first, as the spot where people get dinner, and second, where they take the char, a carriage used when the road is too steep for the diligence. Here S., who had been feeling ill all the morning, became too unwell to proceed, so that we had to lie by an hour or two, and did not go on with the caravan. I sat down at the room window to study and sketch a mountain that rose exactly opposite. I thought to myself, "Now, would it be possible to give to one that had not seen it an idea of how this looks?" Let me try if words can paint it. Right above the fiat roof of the houses on the opposite side of the street rose this immense mountain wall. The lower tier seemed to be a turbulent swell of pasture land, rolling into every imaginable shape; green billows and dells, rising higher and higher in the air as you looked upward, dyed here and there in bright yellow streaks, by the wild crocus, and spotted over with cattle. Dark clumps and belts of pine now and then rise up among them; and scattered here and there in the heights, among green hollows, were cottages, that looked about as big as hickory nuts.

Above all this region was still another, of black pines and crags; the pines going up, and up, and up, till they looked no larger than pin feathers; and surmounting all, straight, castellated turrets of rock, looking out of swathing bands of cloud. A narrow, dazzling line of snow crowned the summit.

You see before you three distinct regions—of pasture, of pine, of bare, eternal sterility. On inquiring the name of the mountain, I was told that it was the "Aiguille" something, I forget what; but I discovered that almost all the peaks in this region of the Alps are called Aiguille, (needle,) I suppose from the straight, sharp points that rise at their summits.

There is a bridge here in Sallenches, from which, in clear weather, one of the best views of Mont Blanc can be obtained—so they tell us. To-day it is as much behind the veil, and as absolutely a matter of faith as heaven itself. Looking in that direction you could not believe that there ever had been, or could be, a mountain there. The concealing clouds look as gray, as cool, and as absolutely unconscious of any world of glory behind them as our dull, cold, every-day life does of a heaven, which is, perhaps, equally near us. As we were passing the bridge, however, a gust of icy wind swept down the course of the river, whose chilly breath spoke of glaciers and avalanches.

Our driver was one of those merry souls, to be found the world over, whose hearts yearn after talk; and when I volunteered to share the outside seat with him, that I might see better, he inquired anxiously if "mademoiselle understood French," that he might have the pleasure of enlightening her on the localities. Of course mademoiselle could do no less than be exceedingly grateful, since a peasant on his own ground is generally better informed than a philosopher from elsewhere.

Our path lay along the banks of the Arve, a raving, brawling, turbulent stream of muddy water. A wide belt of drifted, pebbly land, on either side of it, showed that at times the torrent had a much wider sweep than at present.