Frondes Agrestes Part 2

And in this tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the shadows of the firmament, G.o.d would seem to set forth the stooping of His own Majesty to men, upon the throne of the firmament. As the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of eternity, we cannot behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and the Preserver of men, those heavens are indeed His dwelling-place: "Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is G.o.d's throne; nor by the earth, for it is His footstool!" And all those pa.s.sings to and fro of fruitful showers and grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built about the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening thunders, and glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, are but to deepen in our hearts the acceptance, and distinctness, and dearness of the simple words, "Our Father, which art in heaven."

SECTION IV.

ILl.u.s.tRATIVE: STREAMS AND SEA.

27. Of all inorganic substances, acting in their own proper nature, and without a.s.sistance and combination, water is the most wonderful.

If we think of it as the source of all the changefulness and beauty which we have seen in clouds,--then, as the instrument by which the earth we have contemplated was modelled into symmetry, and its crags chiselled into grace;--then, as in the form of snow, it robes the mountains it has made with that transcendent light which we could not have conceived if we had not seen;--then, as it exists in the foam of the torrent, in the iris which spans it, in the morning mist which rises from it, in the deep crystalline pools which mirror its hanging sh.o.r.e, in the broad lake and glancing river;--finally, in that which is to all human minds the best emblem of unwearied, unconquerable power the wild, various, fantastic, tameless unity of the sea;--what shall we compare to this mighty, this universal element, for glory and beauty? or how shall we follow its eternal changefulness of feeling?

It is like trying to paint a soul!

28. The great angel of the sea--rain; the angel, observe,--the messenger sent to a special place on a special errand. Not the diffused, perpetual presence of the burden of mist, but the going and returning of the intermittent cloud. All turns upon that intermittence. Soft moss on stone and rock; cave fern of tangled glen; wayside well--perennial, patient, silent, clear, stealing through its square font of rough-hewn stone; ever thus deep, no more;--which the winter wreck sullies not, the summer thirst wastes not, incapable of stain as of decline;--where the fallen leaf floats undecayed, and the insect darts undefiling: cressed brook and ever-eddying river, lifted even in flood scarcely over its stepping stones,--but through all sweet summer keeping tremulous music with harp-strings of dark water among the silver fingering of the pebbles. Far away in the south the strong river G.o.ds have all hasted, and gone down to the sea. Wasted and burning, white furnaces of blasting sand, their broad beds lie ghastly and bare; but here in the moss lands, the soft wings of the sea angel droop still with dew, and the shadows of their plumes falter on the hills; strange laughings and glitterings of silver streamlets, born suddenly, and twined about the mossy heights in trickling tinsel, answering to them as they wave.

29. Stand for half an hour beside the fall of Schaffhausen, on the north side, where the rapids are long, and watch how the vault of water first bends unbroken, in pure polished velocity, over the arching rocks at the brow of the cataract, covering them with a dome of crystal twenty feet thick, so swift that its motion is unseen except when a foam globe from above darts over it like a falling star; and how the trees are lighted above it under all their leaves,[19] at the instant that it breaks into foam; and how all the hollows of that foam burn with green fire like so much shattering chrysoprase; and how, ever and anon startling you with its white flash, a jet of spray leaps hissing out of the fall, like a rocket, bursting in the wind and driven away in dust, filling the air with light; and how through the curdling wreaths of the restless crashing abyss below, the blue of the water, paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the sky through white rain-cloud, while the shuddering iris stoops in tremulous stillness over all, fading and flushing alternately through the choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself at last among the thick golden leaves which toss to and fro in sympathy with the wild water,--their dripping ma.s.ses lifted at intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies away,--the dew gushing from their thick branches through drooping cl.u.s.ters of emerald herbage, and sparkling in white threads along the dark rocks of the sh.o.r.e, feeding the lichens, which chase and chequer them with purple and silver.

[19] Well noticed. The drawing of the fall of Schaffhausen, which I made at the time of writing this study, was one of the very few, either by other draughtsmen or myself, which I have seen Turner pause at with serious attention.

30. Close beside the path by which travellers ascend the Montanvert from the valley of Chamouni, on the right hand, where it first begins to rise among the pines, there descends a small stream from the foot of the granite peak known to the guides as the Aiguille Charmoz. It is concealed from the traveller by a thicket of alder, and its murmur is hardly heard, for it is one of the weakest streams of the valley. But it is a constant stream, fed by a permanent, though small, glacier; and continuing to flow even to the close of summer, when more copious torrents, depending only on the melting of the lower snows, have left their beds,--"stony channels in the sun." The long drought which took place in the autumn of 1854, sealing every source of waters except these perpetual ones, left the torrent of which I am speaking, and such others, in a state peculiarly favourable to observance of their _least_ action on the mountains from which they descend. They were entirely limited to their own ice fountains, and the quant.i.ty of powdered rock which they brought down was, of course, at its minimum, being nearly unmingled with any earth derived from the dissolution of softer soil, or vegetable mould, by rains. At three in the afternoon, on a warm day in September, when the torrent had reached its average maximum strength for the day, I filled an ordinary Bordeaux wine flask with the water where it was least turbid. From this quart of water I obtained twenty-four grains of sand and sediment more or less fine. I cannot estimate the quant.i.ty of water in the stream; but the runlet of it at which I filled the flask was giving about two hundred bottles a minute, or rather more, carrying down, therefore, about three quarters of a pound of powdered granite every minute. This would be forty-five pounds an hour; but allowing for the inferior power of the stream in the cooler periods of the day, and taking into consideration, on the other side, its increased power in rain, we may, I think, estimate its average hour's work at twenty-eight or thirty pounds, or a hundredweight every four hours. By this insignificant runlet, therefore, rather more than two tons of the substance of the Mont Blanc are displaced and carried down a certain distance every week; and as it is only for three or four months that the flow of the stream is checked by frost, we may certainly allow eighty tons for the ma.s.s which it annually moves. It is not worth while to enter into any calculation of the relation borne by this runlet to the great torrents which descend from the chain of Mont Blanc into the valley of Chamouni.[20] I but take this quant.i.ty, eighty tons, as the result of the labour of a scarcely noticeable runlet at the side of one of them, utterly irrespective of all sudden falls of stones and of ma.s.ses of mountain (a single thunderbolt will sometimes leave a scar on the flank of a soft rock looking like a trench for a railroad), and we shall then begin to apprehend something of the operation of the great laws of change which are the conditions of all material existence, however apparently enduring. The hills, which, as compared with living beings, seem "everlasting," are in truth as perishing as they; its veins of flowing fountain weary the mountain heart, as the crimson pulse does ours; the natural force of the iron crag is abated in its appointed time, like the strength of the sinews in a human old age; and it is but the lapse of the longer years of decay which, in the sight of its Creator, distinguishes the mountain range from the moth and the worm.

[20] I have slightly modified and abridged what follows, being impatient of its prolixity, as well as ashamed of what is truly called the ludicrous under-estimate of the ma.s.s of the larger streams.

31. Few people, comparatively, have ever seen the effect on the sea of a powerful gale continued without intermission for three or four days and nights; and to those who have not, I believe it must be unimaginable, not from the mere force or size of surge, but from the complete annihilation of the limit between sea and air. The water, from its prolonged agitation, is beaten, not into mere creamy foam, but into ma.s.ses of acc.u.mulated yeast, which hang in ropes and wreaths from wave to wave; and where one curls over to break, form a festoon like a drapery from its edge; these are taken up by the wind, not in dissipating dust, but bodily, in writhing, hanging, coiling ma.s.ses, which make the air white, and thick as with snow, only the flakes are a foot or two long each; the surges themselves are full of foam in their very bodies, underneath, making them white all through, as the water is under a great cataract,--and their ma.s.ses, being thus half water and half air, are torn to pieces by the wind whenever they rise, and carried away in roaring smoke, which chokes and strangles like actual water. Add to this, that when the air has been exhausted of its moisture by long rain, the spray of the sea is caught by it as described above, and covers its surface not merely with the smoke of finely divided water, but with boiling mist: imagine also the low rain-clouds brought down to the very level of the sea, as I have often seen them, whirling and flying in rags and fragments from wave to wave; and finally conceive the surges themselves in their utmost pitch of power, velocity, vastness, and madness, lifting themselves in precipices and peaks furrowed with their whirl of ascent, through all this chaos; and you will understand that there is indeed no distinction left between the sea and air; that no object, nor horizon, nor any landmark, or natural evidence of position is left; that the heaven is all spray, and the ocean all cloud, and that you can see no farther in any direction than you could see through a cataract.[21]

[21] The whole of this was written merely to show the meaning of Turner's picture of the steamer in distress, throwing up signals. It is a good study of wild weather; but, separate from its aim, utterly feeble in comparison to the few words by which any of the great poets will describe sea, when they have got to do it. I am rather proud of the short sentence in the 'Harbours of England,' describing a great breaker against rock:--"One moment, a flint cave,--the next, a marble pillar,--the next, a fading cloud." But there is nothing in sea-description, detailed, like d.i.c.kens' storm at the death of Ham, in 'David Copperfield.'

SECTION V.

ILl.u.s.tRATIVE: MOUNTAINS.

32. The words which marked for us the purpose of the clouds are followed immediately by those notable ones,--"And G.o.d said, Let the waters which are under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." We do not, perhaps, often enough consider the deep signification of this sentence. We are too apt to receive it as the description of an event vaster only in its extent, not in its nature, than the compelling of the Red Sea to draw back that Israel might pa.s.s by. We imagine the Deity in like manner rolling the waves of the greater ocean together on an heap, and setting bars and doors to them eternally. But there is a far deeper meaning than this in the solemn words of Genesis, and in the correspondent verse of the Psalm, "His hands prepared the dry land." Up to that moment the earth had been _void_; for, it had been _without_ _form_. The command that the waters should be gathered, was the command that the earth should be _sculptured_. The sea was not driven to its place in suddenly restrained rebellion, but withdrawn to its place in perfect and patient obedience. The dry land appeared, not in level sands forsaken by the surges, which those surges might again claim for their own; but in range beyond range of swelling hill and iron rock, for ever to claim kindred with the firmament, and be companioned by the clouds of heaven.

What s.p.a.ce of time was in reality occupied by the "day" of Genesis, is not at present of any importance for us to consider. By what furnaces of fire the adamant was melted, and by what wheels of earthquake it was torn, and by what teeth of glacier and weight of sea-waves it was engraven and finished into its perfect form, we may, perhaps, hereafter endeavour to conjecture; but here, as in few words the work is summed by the historian, so in few broad thoughts it should be comprehended by us; and, as we read the mighty sentence, "Let the dry land appear," we should try to follow the finger of G.o.d as it engraved upon the stone tables of the earth the letters and the law of its everlasting form, as gulf by gulf the channels of the deep were ploughed; and cape by cape the lines were traced with Divine foreknowledge of the sh.o.r.es that were to limit the nations; and chain by chain the mountain walls were lengthened forth, and their foundations fastened for ever; and the compa.s.s was set upon the face of the depth, and the fields and the highest part of the dust of the world were made; and the right hand of Christ first strewed the snow on Lebanon, and smoothed the slopes of Calvary.

It is not, I repeat, always needful, in many respects it is not possible, to conjecture the manner or the time in which this work was done; but it is deeply necessary for all men to consider the magnificence of the accomplished purpose, and the depth of the wisdom and love which are manifested in the ordinances of the hills. For observe, in order to bring the world into the form which it now bears, it was not mere _sculpture_ that was needed; the mountains could not stand for a day unless they were formed of materials altogether different from those which const.i.tute the lower hills, and the surfaces of the valleys. A harder substance had to be prepared for every mountain chain, yet not so hard but that it might be capable of crumbling down into earth fit to nourish the Alpine forest, and the Alpine flower; not so hard but that in the midst of the utmost majesty of its enthroned strength there should be seen on it the seal of death, and the writing of the same sentence that had gone forth against the human frame, "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." And with this perishable substance the most majestic forms were to be framed that were consistent with the safety of man; and the peak was to be lifted and the cliff rent, as high and as steeply as was possible, in order yet to permit the shepherd to feed his flocks upon the slopes, and the cottage to nestle beneath their shadow. And observe, two distinct ends were to be accomplished in doing this. It was, indeed, absolutely necessary that such eminences should be created, in order to fit the earth in any wise for human habitation; for without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained, and the earth must have become for the most part plain, or stagnant marsh. But the feeding of the rivers and the purifying of the winds, are the least of the services appointed to the hills. To fill the thirst of the human heart for the beauty of G.o.d's working--to startle its lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of astonishment,--are their higher missions. They are as a great and n.o.ble architecture, first giving shelter, comfort, and rest; and covered also with mighty sculpture and painted legend. It is impossible to examine, in their connected system, the features of even the most ordinary mountain scenery, without concluding that it has been prepared in order to unite as far as possible, and in the closest compa.s.s, every means of delighting and sanctifying the heart of man: "as far as _possible_,"--that is, as far as is consistent with the fulfilment of the sentence of condemnation on the whole earth. Death must be upon the hills; and the cruelty of the tempests smite them, and the briar and thorn spring up upon them; but they so smite as to bring their rocks into the fairest forms, and so spring as to make the very desert blossom as the rose. Even among our own hills of Scotland and c.u.mberland, though often too barren to be perfectly beautiful, and always too low to be perfectly sublime, it is strange how many deep sources of delight are gathered into the compa.s.s of their glens and vales; and how, down to the most secret cl.u.s.ter of their far-away flowers, and the idlest leap of their straying streamlets, the whole heart of Nature seems thirsting to give, and still to give, shedding forth her everlasting beneficence with a profusion so patient, so pa.s.sionate, that our utmost observance and thankfulness are but, at last, neglects of her n.o.bleness, and apathy to her love. But among the true mountains of the greater orders, the Divine purpose of appeal at once to all the faculties of the human spirit becomes still more manifest. Inferior hills ordinarily interrupt, in some degree, the richness of the valleys at their feet; the grey downs of southern England and treeless coteaux of central France, and grey swells of Scottish moor, whatever peculiar charm they may possess in themselves, are at least dest.i.tute of those which belong to the woods and fields of the lowlands. But the great mountains _lift_ the lowlands on _their sides_. Let the reader imagine first the appearance of the most varied plain of some richly cultivated country; let him imagine it dark with graceful woods, and soft with deepest pastures; let him fill the s.p.a.ce of it, to the utmost horizon, with innumerable and changeful incidents of scenery and life; leading pleasant streamlets through its meadows, strewing cl.u.s.ters of cottages beside their banks, tracing sweet footpaths through its avenues, and animating its fields with happy flocks, and slow wandering spots of cattle; and when he has wearied himself with endless imagining, and left no s.p.a.ce without some loveliness of its own, let him conceive all this great plain, with its infinite treasures of natural beauty, and happy human life, gathered up in G.o.d's hands from one edge of the horizon to the other, like a woven garment, and shaken into deep falling folds, as the robes droop from a king's shoulders; all its bright rivers leaping into cataracts along the hollows of its fall, and all its forests rearing themselves aslant against its slopes, as a rider rears himself back when his horse plunges, and all its villages nestling themselves into the new windings of its glens, and all its pastures thrown into steep waves of greensward, dashed with dew along the edges of their folds, and sweeping down into endless slopes, with a cloud here and there lying quietly, half on the gra.s.s, half in the air,--and he will have as yet, in all this lifted world, only the foundation of one of the great Alps. And whatever is lovely in the lowland scenery, becomes lovelier in this change; the trees which grew heavily and stiffly from the level line of plain, a.s.sume strange curves of strength and grace as they bend themselves against the mountain side; they breathe more freely and toss their branches more carelessly as each climbs higher, looking to the clear light above the topmost leaves of its brother tree; the flowers which on the arable plain fall before the plough, now find out for themselves unapproachable places where year by year they gather into happier fellowship, and fear no evil; and the streams which in the level land crept in dark eddies by unwholesome banks, now move in showers of silver, and are clothed with rainbows, and bring health and life wherever the glance of their waves can reach....

It may not, therefore, be altogether profitless or unnecessary to review briefly the nature of the three great offices which mountain ranges are appointed to fulfil, in order to preserve the health and increase the happiness of mankind. Their first use is, of course, to give motion to water. Every fountain and river, from the inch-deep streamlet that crosses the village lane in trembling clearness, to the ma.s.sy and silent march of the everlasting mult.i.tude of waters in Amazon or Ganges, owe their play, and purity, and power, to the ordained elevations of the earth. Gentle or steep, extended or abrupt, some determined slope of the earth's surface is of course necessary before any wave can so much as overtake one sedge in its pilgrimage; and how seldom do we enough consider, as we walk beside the margins of our pleasant brooks, how beautiful and wonderful is that ordinance, of which every blade of gra.s.s that waves in their clear water is a perpetual sign--that the dew and rain fallen on the face of the earth shall find no resting-place; shall find, on the contrary, fixed channels traced for them from the ravines of the central crests down which they roar, in sudden ranks of foam, to the dark hollows beneath the banks of lowland pasture, round which they must circle slowly among the stems and beneath the leaves of the lilies; paths prepared for them by which, at some appointed rate of journey, they must evermore descend, sometimes slow, and sometimes swift, but never pausing; the daily portion of the earth they have to glide over marked for them at each successive sunrise, the place which has known them knowing them no more, and the gateways of guarding mountains opened for them in cleft and chasm, none letting them in their pilgrimage; and, from afar off, the great heart of the sea calling them to itself!

"Deep calleth unto deep." I know not which of the two is the more wonderful,--that calm, gradated, invisible slope of the champaign land, which gives motion to the stream; or that pa.s.sage cloven for it through the ranks of hill, which, necessary for the health of the land immediately around them, would yet, unless so supernaturally divided, have fatally intercepted the flow of the waters from far-off countries. When did the great spirit of the river first knock at these adamantine gates? When did the porter open to it, and cast his keys away for ever, lapped in whirling sand? I am not satisfied--no one should be satisfied--with that vague answer, The river cut its way.

Not so. The river _found_ its way. [22]I do not see that rivers in their own strength can do much in cutting their way; they are nearly as apt to choke their channels up as to carve them out. Only give a river some little sudden power in a valley, and see how it will use it. Cut itself a bed? Not so, by any means, but fill up its bed; and look for another in a wild, dissatisfied, inconsistent manner,--any way rather than the old one will better please it; and even if it is banked up and forced to keep to the old one, it will not deepen, but do all it can to raise it, and leap out of it. And although wherever water has a steep fall it will swiftly cut itself a bed deep into the rock or ground, it will not, when the rock is hard, cut a wider channel than it actually needs; so that if the existing river beds, through ranges of mountains, had in reality been cut by the streams, they would be found, wherever the rocks are hard, only in the form of narrow and profound ravines, like the well-known channel of the Niagara, below the fall; not in that of extended valleys. And the actual work of true mountain rivers, though often much greater in proportion to their body of water than that of the Niagara, is quite insignificant when compared with the area and depth of the valleys through which they flow; so that, although in many cases it appears that those larger valleys have been excavated at earlier periods by more powerful streams, or by the existing stream in a more powerful condition, still the great fact remains always equally plain, and equally admirable, that, whatever the nature and duration of the agencies employed, the earth was so shaped at first as to direct the currents of its rivers in the manner most healthy and convenient for man. The valley of the Rhone may have been in great part excavated, in early times, by torrents a thousand times larger than the Rhone; but it could not have been excavated at all, unless the mountains had been thrown at first into two chains, by which the torrents were set to work in a given direction. And it is easy to conceive how, under any less beneficent dispositions of their ma.s.ses of hill, the continents of the earth might either have been covered with enormous lakes, as parts of North America actually are covered; or have become wildernesses of pestiferous marsh; or lifeless plains, upon which the water would have dried as it fell, leaving them for great part of the year desert. Such districts do exist, and exist in vastness; the whole earth is not prepared for the habitation of man; only certain small portions are prepared for him,--the houses, as it were, of the human race, from which they are to look abroad upon the rest of the world; not to wonder or complain that it is not all house, but to be grateful for the kindness of the admirable building, in the house itself, as compared with the rest. It would be as absurd to think it an evil that all the world is not fit for us to inhabit, as to think it an evil that the globe is no larger than it is. As much as we shall ever need is evidently a.s.signed to us for our dwelling-place; the rest, covered with rolling waves or drifting sands, fretted with ice or crested with fire, is set before us for contemplation in an uninhabitable magnificence. And that part which we are enabled to inhabit owes its fitness for human life chiefly to its mountain ranges, which, throwing the superfluous rain off as it falls, collect it in streams or lakes, and guide it into given places, and in given directions; so that men can build their cities in the midst of fields which they know will be always fertile, and establish the lines of their commerce upon streams which will not fail.

[22] I attach great importance to the remaining contents of this pa.s.sage, and have had occasion to insist on them at great length in recent lectures at Oxford.

Nor is this giving of motion to water to be considered as confined only to the surface of the earth. A no less important function of the hills is in directing the flow of the fountains and springs from subterranean reservoirs. There is no miraculous springing up of water out of the ground at our feet; but every fountain and well is supplied from reservoirs among the hills, so placed as to involve some slight fall or pressure enough to secure the constant flowing of the stream; and the incalculable blessing of the power given to us, in most valleys, of reaching by excavation some point whence the water will rise to the surface of the ground in perennial flow, is entirely owing to the concave dispositions of the beds of clay or rock raised from beneath the bosom of the valley into ranks of enclosing hills.

The second great use of mountains is to maintain a constant change in the currents and nature of the _air_. Such change would, of course, have been partly caused by difference in soil and vegetation, even if the earth had been level; but to a far less extent than it is now by the chains of hills which--exposing on one side their ma.s.ses of rock to the full heat of the sun, (increased by the angle at which the rays strike on the slope,) and on the other casting a soft shadow for leagues over the plains at their feet--divide the earth not only into districts, but into climates; and cause perpetual currents of air to traverse their pa.s.ses in a thousand different states; moistening it with the spray of their waterfalls, sucking it down and beating it hither and thither in the pools of their torrents, closing it within clefts and caves, where the sunbeams never reach, till it is as cold as November mists; then sending it forth again to breathe lightly across the slopes of velvet fields, or to be scorched among sunburnt shales and gra.s.sless crags; then drawing it back in moaning swirls through clefts of ice, and up into dewy wreaths above the snow-fields; then piercing it with strange electric darts and flashes of mountain fire, and tossing it high in fantastic storm-cloud, as the dried gra.s.s is tossed by the mower, only suffering it to depart at last, when chastened and pure, to refresh the faded air of the far-off plains.

The third great use of mountains is to cause perpetual change in the _soils_ of the earth. Without such provision the ground under cultivation would in a series of years become exhausted, and require to be upturned laboriously by the hand of man. But the elevations of the earth's surface provide for it a perpetual renovation. The higher mountains suffer their summits to be broken into fragments, and to be cast down in sheets of ma.s.sy rock, full, as we shall see presently, of every substance necessary for the nourishment of plants; these fallen fragments are again broken by frost, and ground by torrents, into various conditions of sand and clay--materials which are distributed perpetually by the streams farther and farther from the mountain's base. Every shower that swells the rivulet enables their waters to carry certain portions of earth into new positions, and exposes new banks of ground to be mined in their turn. That turbid foaming of the angry water,--that tearing down of bank and rock along the flanks of its fury,--are no disturbances of the kind course of nature; they are beneficent operations of laws necessary to the existence of man, and to the beauty of the earth. The process is continued more gently, but not less effectively, over all the surface of the lower undulating country; and each filtering thread of summer rain which trickles through the short turf of the uplands is bearing its own appointed burden of earth to be thrown down on some new natural garden in the dingles beneath.

I have not spoken of the local and peculiar utilities of mountains. I do not count the benefit of the supply of summer streams from the moors of the higher ranges,--of the various medicinal plants which are nested among their rocks,--of the delicate pasturage which they furnish for cattle,--of the forests in which they bear timber for shipping,--the stones they supply for building, or the ores of metal which they collect into spots open to discovery, and easy for working.

All these benefits are of a secondary or a limited nature. But the three great functions which I have just described, those of giving motion and change to water, air, and earth, are indispensable to human existence; they are operations to be regarded with as full a depth of grat.i.tude as the laws which bid the tree bear fruit, or the seed multiply itself in the earth. And thus those desolate and threatening ranges of dark mountain, which in nearly all ages of the world men have looked upon with aversion, or with terror, and shrunk back from as if they were haunted by perpetual images of death, are in reality sources of life and happiness far fuller and more beneficent than all the bright fruitfulness of the plain. The valleys only feed; the mountains feed, and guard, and strengthen us. We take our idea of fearlessness and sublimity alternately from the mountains and the sea; but we a.s.sociate them unjustly. The sea-wave, with all its beneficence, is yet devouring and terrible; but the silent wave of the blue mountain is lifted towards heaven in a stillness of perpetual mercy; and the one surge, unfathomable in its darkness, the other unshaken in its faithfulness, for ever bear the seal of their appointed symbolism:--

"Thy _righteousness_ is like the great mountains;

"Thy _judgments_ are a great deep."

33. Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive energy, full of expression, pa.s.sion, and strength; the plains and the lower hills are the repose and the effortless motion of the frame, when its muscles lie dormant and concealed beneath the lines of its beauty,--yet ruling those lines in their every undulation. This then is the first grand principle of the truth of the earth. The spirit of the hills is action, that of the lowlands repose; and between these there is to be found every variety of motion and rest, from the inactive plain, sleeping like the firmament, with cities for stars, to the fiery peaks, which, with heaving bosoms and exulting limbs, with the clouds drifting like hair from their bright foreheads, lift up their t.i.tan heads to Heaven, saying, "I live for ever."

34. Where they are,[23] they seem to form the world; no mere bank of a river here, or of a lane there, peeping out among the hedges or forests, but from the lowest valley to the highest clouds, all is theirs,--one adamantine dominion and rigid authority of rock. We yield ourselves to the impression of their eternal unconquerable stubbornness of strength; their ma.s.s seems the least yielding, least to be softened, or in anywise dealt with by external force, of all earthly substance. And behold, as we look further into it, it is all touched and troubled, like waves by a summer breeze; rippled far more delicately than seas or lakes are rippled; _they_ only undulate along their surfaces--this rock trembles through its every fibre, like the chords of an Eolian harp, like the stillest air of spring, with the echoes of a child's voice. Into the heart of all those great mountains, through every tossing of their boundless crests, and deep beneath all their unfathomable defiles, flows that strange quivering of their substance. Other and weaker things seem to express their subjection to an Infinite Power only by momentary terrors: as the weeds bow down before the feverish wind, and the sound of the going in the tops of the taller trees pa.s.ses on before the clouds, and the fitful opening of pale s.p.a.ces on the dark water, as if some invisible hand were casting dust abroad upon it, gives warning of the anger that is to come, we may well imagine that there is a fear pa.s.sing upon the gra.s.s, and leaves, and waters, at the presence of some great spirit commissioned to let the tempest loose; but the terror pa.s.ses, and their sweet rest is perpetually restored to the pastures and the waves. Not so to the mountains. They, which at first seem strengthened beyond the dread of any violence or change, are yet also ordained to bear upon them the symbol of a perpetual fear. The tremor which fades from the soft lake and gliding river is sealed to all eternity upon the rock; and while things that pa.s.s visibly from birth to death may sometimes forget their feebleness, the mountains are made to possess a perpetual memorial of their infancy--that infancy which the prophet saw in his vision,[24]--"I beheld the earth, and lo, it was without form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light. I beheld the mountains, and lo, they _trembled_, and all the hills moved _lightly_."

[23] Pa.s.sage written after I had got by some years cooler and wiser than when I wrote No. 33, describing however the undulation of the gneiss rocks, which, 'where they are, seem, to form the world,' in terms more fanciful than I now like.

[24] Utter misinterpretation of the pa.s.sage. It is the old age, not the childhood of earth, which Jeremiah describes in this pa.s.sage. See its true interpretation in 'Fors Clavigera,' Letter XLVI.

35. The longer I stayed among the Alps, and the more closely I examined them, the more I was struck by the one broad fact of there being a vast Alpine plateau, or ma.s.s of elevated land, upon which nearly all the highest peaks stood like children set upon a table, removed, in most cases, far back from the edge of the plateau,--as if for fear of their falling; while the most majestic scenes in the Alps are produced, not so much by any violation of this law, as by one of the great peaks having apparently walked to the edge of the table to look over, and thus showing itself suddenly above the valley in its full height. This is the case with the Wetterhorn and Eiger at Grindelwald, and with the Grande Jora.s.se above the Col de Ferret. But the raised bank or table is always intelligibly in existence, even in these apparently exceptional cases; and for the most part, the great peaks are not allowed to come to the edge of it, but remain like the keeps of castles far withdrawn, surrounded, league beyond league, by comparatively level fields of mountain, over which the lapping sheets of glacier writhe and flow, foaming about the feet of the dark central crests like the surf of an enormous sea-breaker hurled over a rounded rock, and islanding some fragment of it in the midst. And the result of this arrangement is a kind of division of the whole of Switzerland into an upper and lower mountain world,--the lower world consisting of rich valleys, bordered by steep, but easily accessible, wooded banks of mountain, more or less divided by ravines, through which glimpses are caught of the higher Alps; the upper world, reached after the first banks of 3,000 or 4,000 feet in height have been surmounted, consisting of comparatively level but most desolate tracts of moor and rock, half covered by glacier, and stretching to the feet of the true pinnacles of the chain. It can hardly be necessary to point out the perfect wisdom and kindness of this arrangement, as a provision for the safety of the inhabitants of the high mountain regions. If the great peaks rose at once from the deepest valleys, every stone which was struck from their pinnacles, and every snow-wreath which slipped from their ledges, would descend at once upon the inhabitable ground, over which no year would pa.s.s without recording some calamity of earth-slip or avalanche; while in the course of their fall both the stones and the snow would strip the woods from the hillsides, leaving only naked channels of destruction where there are now the sloping meadow and the chestnut glade. Besides this, the ma.s.ses of snow, cast down at once into the warmer air, would all melt rapidly in the spring, causing furious inundation of every great river for a month or six weeks. The snow being then all thawed, except what lay upon the highest peaks in regions of nearly perpetual frost, the rivers would be supplied during the summer only by fountains, and the feeble tricklings on sunny days from the high snows. The Rhone, under such circ.u.mstances, would hardly be larger, in summer, than the Severn, and many Swiss valleys would be left almost without moisture. All these calamities are prevented by the peculiar Alpine structure which has been described. The broken rocks and the sliding snow of the high peaks, instead of being dashed at once to the vales, are caught upon the desolate shelves, or shoulders, which everywhere surround the central crests. The soft banks which terminate these shelves, traversed by no falling fragments, clothe themselves with richest wood, while the ma.s.ses of snow heaped upon the ledge above them, in a climate neither so warm as to thaw them quickly in the spring, nor so cold as to protect them from all the power of the summer sun, either form themselves into glaciers, or remain in slowly wasting fields even to the close of the year,--in either case supplying constant, abundant, and regular streams to the villages and pastures beneath, and to the rest of Europe, n.o.ble and navigable rivers.

Now, that such a structure is the best and wisest possible,[25] is indeed sufficient reason for its existence, and to many people it may seem useless to question farther respecting its origin. But I can hardly conceive any one standing face to face with one of these towers of central rock, and yet not also asking himself, Is this indeed the actual first work of the Divine Master, on which I gaze? Was the great precipice shaped by His finger, as Adam was shaped out of the dust?

Were its clefts and ledges carved upon it by its Creator, as the letters were on the tables of the law, and was it thus left to bear its eternal testimony to His beneficence among these clouds of Heaven?

Or is it the descendant of a long race of mountains, existing under appointed laws of birth and endurance, death and decrepitude? There can be no doubt as to the answer. The rock itself answers audibly by the murmur of some falling stone or rending pinnacle. It is _not_ as it was once. Those waste leagues around its feet are loaded with the wrecks of what it was. On these perhaps, of all mountains, the characters of decay are written most clearly; around these are spread most gloomily the memorials of their pride, and the signs of their humiliation.

[25] Of course I had seen every other tried before giving this favourable judgment.

What then were they once? The only answer is yet again--"Behold the cloud!"

36. There are many spots among the inferior ridges of the Alps, such as the Col de Ferret, the Col d'Anterne, and the a.s.sociated ranges of the Buet, which, though commanding prospects of great n.o.bleness, are themselves very nearly types of all that is most painful to the human mind. Vast wastes of mountain ground,[26] covered here and there with dull grey gra.s.s or moss, but breaking continually into black banks of shattered slate, all glistening and sodden with slow tricklings of clogged, incapable streams; the snow-water oozing through them in a cold sweat, and spreading itself in creeping stains among their dust; ever and anon a shaking here and there, and a handful or two of their particles or flakes trembling down, one sees not why, into more total dissolution, leaving a few jagged teeth, like the edges of knives eaten away by vinegar, projecting, through the half-dislodged ma.s.s, from the inner rock; keen enough to cut the hand or foot that rests on them, yet crumbling as they wound, and soon sinking again into the smooth, slippery, glutinous heap; looking like a beach of black scales of dead fish cast ash.o.r.e from a poisonous sea, and sloping away into foul ravines, branched down immeasurable slopes of barrenness, where the winds howl and wander continually, and the snow lies in wasted and sorrowful fields covered with sooty dust, that collects in streaks and stains at the bottom of all its thawing ripples.

[26] This is a fourth volume pa.s.sage,--and I will venture to say of it, as Albert Durer, when he was pleased with his work--that for what it has to do, it cannot be much better done. It is a study on the Col de Bon Homme.

I know of no other scenes so appalling as these in storm, or so woful in sunshine. Where, however, these same rocks exist in more favourable positions--that is to say, in gentler banks and at lower elevations--they form a ground for the most luxuriant vegetation; and the valleys of Savoy owe to them some of their loveliest solitudes--exquisitely rich pastures, interspersed with arable and orchard land, and shaded by groves of walnut and cherry. Scenes of this kind, and of that just described, so singularly opposed, and apparently brought together as foils to each other, are however peculiar to certain beds of the slaty coherents, which are both vast in elevation, and easy of destruction. In Wales and Scotland the same groups of rocks possess far greater hardness, while they attain less elevation; and the result is a totally different aspect of scenery.

The severity of the climate, and the comparative durableness of the rock, forbid the rich vegetation; but the exposed summits, though barren, are not subject to laws of destruction so rapid and fearful as in Switzerland, and the natural colour of the rock is oftener developed in the purples and greys which, mingled with the heather, form the princ.i.p.al elements of the deep and beautiful distant blue of the British hills. Their gentler mountain streams also permit the beds of rock to remain in firm, though fantastic, forms along their banks, and the gradual action of the cascades and eddies upon the slaty cleavage produces many pieces of foreground scenery to which higher hills can present no parallel.

37. Unlike Chamouni Aiguilles, there is no aspect of destruction about the Matterhorn cliffs. They are not torn remnants of separating spires, yielding, flake by flake, and band by band, to the continual process of decay. They are, on the contrary, an unaltered monument, seemingly sculptured long ago, the huge walls retaining yet the forms into which they were first engraven, and standing like an Egyptian temple;--delicately fronted, softly coloured, the suns of uncounted ages rising and falling upon it continually, but still casting the same line of shadows from east to west; still, century after century, touching the same purple stains on the lotus pillars; while the desert sand ebbs and flows about their feet, as those autumn leaves of rock lie heaped and weak about the base of the Cervin.

Is not this a strange type in the very heart and height of these mysterious Alps--these wrinkled hills in their snowy, cold, grey-haired old age, at first so silent, then, as we keep quiet at their feet, muttering and whispering to us garrulously in broken and dreaming fits, as it were, about their childhood,--is it not a strange type of the things which "out of weakness are made strong"? If one of these little flakes of mica sand, hurried in tremulous spangling along the bottom of the ancient river, too light to sink, too faint to float, almost too small for sight, could have had a mind given to it as it was at last borne down with its kindred dust into the abysses of the stream, and laid, (might it not have been thought?) for a hopeless eternity, in the dark ooze, the most despised, forgotten, and feeble of all earth's atoms; incapable of any use or change; not fit, down there in the diluvial darkness, so much as to help an earth wasp to build its nest, or feed the first fibre of a lichen; what would it have thought, had it been told that one day, knitted into a strength as of imperishable iron, rustless by the air, infusible by the flame, out of the substance of it, with its fellows, the axe of G.o.d should hew that Alpine tower?--that against _it_--poor, helpless mica flake!--the wild north winds should rage in vain; beneath _it_--low-fallen mica flake!--the snowy hills should lie bowed like flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth fade away in unregarded blue; and around _it_--weak, wave-drifted mica flake!--the great war of the firmament should burst in thunder and yet stir it not; and the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven should light, one by one as they rose, new cressets upon the points of snow that fringed its abiding-place on the imperishable spire?