For this publicity there is no cure, and no alleviation;
but the storms of which you will complain so bitterly
while they endure, chequer and by their contrast brighten
the sameness of the fair-weather scenes. When
sun and storm contend together—when the
thick clouds are broken up and pierced by arrows of
golden daylight—there will be startling
rearrangements and transfigurations of the mountain
summits. A sun-dazzling spire of alp hangs suspended
in mid-sky among awful glooms and blackness; or perhaps
the edge of some great mountain shoulder will be designed
in living gold, and appear for the duration of a glance
bright like a constellation, and alone ‘in the
unapparent.’ You may think you know the
figure of these hills; but when they are thus revealed,
they belong no longer to the things of earth—meteors
we should rather call them, appearances of sun and
air that endure but for a moment and return no more.
Other variations are more lasting, as when, for instance,
heavy and wet snow has fallen through some windless
hours, and the thin, spiry, mountain pine trees stand
each stock-still and loaded with a shining burthen.
You may drive through a forest so disguised, the
tongue-tied torrent struggling silently in the cleft
of the ravine, and all still except the jingle of
the sleigh bells, and you shall fancy yourself in some
untrodden northern territory—Lapland, Labrador,
or Alaska.
Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning;
totter down stairs in a state of somnambulism; take
the simulacrum of a meal by the glimmer of one lamp
in the deserted coffee-room; and find yourself by
seven o’clock outside in a belated moonlight
and a freezing chill. The mail sleigh takes
you up and carries you on, and you reach the top of
the ascent in the first hour of the day. To trace
the fires of the sunrise as they pass from peak to
peak, to see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly
against the lighted sky, to be for twenty minutes
in a wonderland of clear, fading shadows, disappearing
vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half glorified
already with the day and still half confounded with
the greyness of the western heaven—these
will seem to repay you for the discomforts of that
early start; but as the hour proceeds, and these enchantments
vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther side
in yet another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black,
with such another long-drawn congeries of hamlets
and such another senseless watercourse bickering along
the foot. You have had your moment; but you
have not changed the scene. The mountains are
about you like a trap; you cannot foot it up a hillside
and behold the sea as a great plain, but live in holes
and corners, and can change only one for another.
