RESULTING FORMS:--FIFTHLY, STONES.
Sec. 1. It is somewhat singular that the indistinctness of treatment which
has been so often noticed as characteristic of our present art shows
itself always most when there is least apparent reason for it. Modern
artists, having some true sympathy with what is vague in nature, draw
all that is uncertain and evasive without evasion, and render faithfully
whatever can be discerned in faithless mist or mocking vapors; but
having no sympathy with what is solid and serene, they seem to become
uncertain themselves in proportion to the certainty of what they see;
and while they render flakes of far-away cloud, or fringes of
inextricable forest, with something like patience and fidelity, give
nothing but the hastiest indication of the ground they can tread upon or
touch. It is only in modern art that we find any complete representation
of clouds, and only in ancient art that, generally speaking, we find any
careful realization of Stones.
Sec. 2. This is all the more strange, because, as we saw some time back,
the _ruggedness_ of the stone is more pleasing to the modern than the
mediaeval, and he rarely completes any picture satisfactorily to himself
unless large spaces of it are filled with irregular masonry, rocky
banks, or shingly shores: whereas the mediaeval could conceive no
desirableness in the loose and unhewn masses; associated them generally
in his mind with wicked men, and the Martyrdom of St. Stephen; and
always threw them out of his road, or garden, to the best of his power.
Yet with all this difference in predilection, such was the honesty of
the mediaeval, and so firm his acknowledgment of the necessity to paint
completely whatever was to be painted at all, that there is hardly a
strip of earth under the feet of a saint, in any finished work of the
early painters, but more, and better painted, stones are to be found
upon it than in an entire exhibition full of modern mountain scenery.
Sec. 3. Not better painted in every respect. In those interesting and
popular treatises on the art of drawing, which tell the public that
their colors should neither be too warm nor too cold, and that their
touches should always be characteristic of the object they are intended
to represent, the directions given for the manufacture of stones usually
enforce "crispness of outline" and "roughness of texture." And,
accordingly, in certain expressions of frangibility, irregular
accumulation, and easy resting of one block upon another, together with
some conditions of lichenous or mossy texture, modern stone-painting is
far beyond the ancient; for these are just the characters which first
strike the eye, and enable the foreground to maintain its picturesque
influence, without inviting careful examination. The mediaeval painter,
on the other hand, not caring for this picturesque general effect, nor
being in anywise familiar with mountain scenery, perceived in stones,
when he was forced to paint them, eminently the characters which they
had in common with figures; that is to say, their curved outlines,
rounded surfaces, and varieties of delicate color, and, accordingly, was
somewhat too apt to lose their angular and fragmentary character in a
series of muscular lines resembling those of an anatomical preparation;
for, although in large rocks the cleavable or frangible nature was the
thing that necessarily struck him most, the pebbles under his feet were
apt to be oval or rounded in the localities of almost all the important
schools of Italy. In Lombardy, the mass of the ground is composed of
nothing but Alpine gravel, consisting of rolled oval pebbles, on the
average about six inches long by four wide--awkward building materials,
yet used in ingenious alternation with the bricks in all the lowland
Italian fortresses. Besides this universal rotundity, the qualities of
stones which rendered them valuable to the lapidary were forced on the
painter's attention by the familiar arts of inlaying and mosaic. Hence,
in looking at a pebble, his mind was divided between its roundness and
its veins; and Leonardo covers the shelves of rock under the feet of St.
Anne with variegated agates; while Mantegna often strews the small
stones about his mountain caves in a polished profusion, as if some
repentant martyr princess had been just scattering her caskets of
pearls into the dust.
Sec. 4. Some years ago, as I was talking of the curvilinear forms in a
piece of rock to one of our academicians, he said to me, in a somewhat
despondent accent, "If you look for curves, you will see curves; if you
look for angles, you will see angles."
The saying appeared to me an infinitely sad one. It was the utterance of
an experienced man; and in many ways true, for one of the most singular
gifts, or, if abused, most singular weaknesses, of the human mind is its
power of persuading itself to see whatever it chooses;--a great gift, if
directed to the discernment of the things needful and pertinent to its
own work and being; a great weakness, if directed to the discovery of
things profitless or discouraging. In all things throughout the world,
the men who look for the crooked will see the crooked, and the men who
look for the straight will see the straight. But yet the saying was a
notably sad one; for it came of the conviction in the speaker's mind
that there was in reality _no_ crooked and _no_ straight; that all so
called discernment was fancy, and that men might, with equal rectitude
of judgment, and good-deserving of their fellow-men, perceive and paint
whatever was convenient to them.
Sec. 5. Whereas things may always be seen truly by candid people, though
never _completely_. No human capacity ever yet saw the whole of a thing;
but we may see more and more of it the longer we look. Every individual
temper will see something different in it: but supposing the tempers
honest, all the differences are there. Every advance in our acuteness of
perception will show us something new; but the old and first discerned
thing will still be there, not falsified, only modified and enriched by
the new perceptions, becoming continually more beautiful in its harmony
with them and more approved as a part of the Infinite truth.
Sec. 6. There are no natural objects out of which more can be thus learned
than out of stones. They seem to have been created especially to reward
a patient observer. Nearly all other objects in nature can be seen, to
some extent, without patience, and are pleasant even in being half seen.
Trees, clouds, and rivers are enjoyable even by the careless; but the
stone under his foot has for carelessness nothing in it but stumbling;
no pleasure is languidly to be had out of it, nor food, nor good of any
kind; nothing but symbolism of the hard heart and the unfatherly gift.
And yet, do but give it some reverence and watchfulness, and there is
bread of thought in it, more than in any other lowly feature of all the
landscape.
Sec. 7. For a stone, when it is examined, will be found a mountain in
miniature. The fineness of Nature's work is so great, that, into a
single block, a foot or two in diameter, she can compress as many
changes of form and structure, on a small scale, as she needs for her
mountains on a large one; and, taking moss for forests, and grains of
crystal for crags, the surface of a stone, in by far the plurality of
instances, is more interesting than the surface of an ordinary hill;
more fantastic in form and incomparably richer in color,--the last
quality being, in fact, so noble in most stones of good birth (that is
to say, fallen from the crystalline mountain-ranges), that I shall be
less able to illustrate this part of my subject satisfactorily by means
of engraving than perhaps any other, except the color of skies. I say,
_shall_ be less able, because the beauty of stone surface is in so great
a degree dependent on the mosses and lichens which root themselves upon
it, that I must place my richest examples in the section on vegetation.
For instance, in the plate opposite, though the mass of rock is large
and somewhat distant, the effect of it is as much owing to the white
spots of silvery lichen in the centre and left, and to the flowing lines
in which the darker mosses, growing in the cranny, have arranged
themselves beyond, as to the character of the rock itself; nor could the
beauty of the whole mass be explained, if we were to approach the least
nearer, without more detailed drawing of this vegetation. For the
present I shall only give a few examples of the drawing of stones
roughly broken, or worn so as not to be materially affected by
vegetation.
[Illustration: 48. Bank of Slaty Crystallines.]
Sec. 8. We have already seen an example of Titian's treatment of mountain
crests as compared with Turner's; here is a parallel instance, from
Titian, of stones in the bed of a torrent (Fig. 108), in many ways good
and right, and expressing in its writhed and variously broken lines far
more of real stone structure than the common water-color dash of the
moderns. Observe, especially, how Titian has understood that the
fracture of the stone more or less depends on the undulating grain of
its crystalline structure, following the cavity of the largest stone in
the middle of the figure, with concentric lines; and compare in Plate
+21+ the top of Turner's largest stones on the left.
[Illustration: FIG. 108.]
Sec. 9. If the reader sees nothing in this drawing (Fig. 108) that he can
like,--although, indeed, I would have him prefer the work of
Turner,--let him be assured that he does not yet understand on what
Titian's reputation is founded. No painter's name is oftener in the
mouth of the ordinary connoisseur, and no painter was ever less
understood. His power of color is indeed perfect, but so is
Bonifazio's. Titian's _supremacy_ above all the other Venetians, except
Tintoret and Veronese, consists in the firm truth of his portraiture,
and more or less masterly understanding of the nature of stones, trees,
men, or whatever else he took in hand to paint; so that, without some
correlative understanding in the spectator, Titian's work, in its
highest qualities, must be utterly dead and unappealing to him.
[Illustration: FIG. 109.]
[Illustration: FIG. 110.]
[Illustration: FIG. 111.]
[Illustration: FIG. 112.]
Sec. 10. I give one more example from the lower part of the same print
(Fig. 109), in which a stone, with an eddy round it, is nearly as well
drawn as it can be in the simple method of the early wood-engraving.
Perhaps the reader will feel its truth better by contrast with a
fragment or two of modern Idealism. Here, for instance (Fig. 110), is a
group of stones, highly entertaining in their variety of form, out of
the subject of "Christian vanquishing Apollyon," in the outlines to the
Pilgrim's Progress, published by the Art-Union, the idealism being here
wrought to a pitch of extraordinary brilliancy by the exciting nature
of the subject. Next (Fig. 111) is another poetical conception, one of
Flaxman's, representing the eddies and stones of the Pool of Envy
(Flaxman's Dante), which may be conveniently compared with the
Titianesque stones and streams. And, finally, Fig. 112 represents, also
on Flaxman's authority, those stones of an "Alpine" character, of which
Dante says that he
"Climbed with heart of proof the adverse steep."
It seems at first curious that every one of the forms that Flaxman has
chanced upon should be an impossible one--a form which a stone never
could assume: but this is the Nemesis of false idealism, and the
inevitable one.
Sec. 11. The chief incapacity in the modern work is not, however, so much
in its outline, though that is wrong enough, as in the total absence of
any effort to mark the surface roundings. It is not the _outline_ of a
stone, however true, that will make it solid or heavy; it is the
interior markings, and thoroughly understood perspectives of its sides.
In the opposite plate the upper two subjects are by Turner, foregrounds
out of the Liber Studiorum (Source of Arveron, and Ben Arthur); the
lower by Claude, Liber Veritatis, No. 5. I think the reader cannot but
feel that the blocks in the upper two subjects are massy and ponderous;
in the lower, wholly without weight. If he examine their several
treatment, he will find that Turner has perfect imaginative conception
of every recess and projection over the whole surface, and _feels_ the
stone as he works over it; every touch, moreover, being full of tender
gradation. But Claude, as he is obliged to hold to his outline in hills,
so also clings to it in the stones,--cannot round them in the least,
leaves their light surfaces wholly blank, and puts a few patches of dark
here and there about their edges, as chance will have it.
[Illustration: 49. Truth and Untruth of Stones.]
Sec. 12. Turner's way of wedging the stones of the glacier moraine together
in strength of disorder, in the upper subject, and his indication of the
springing of the wild stems and leafage out of the rents in the boulders
of the lower one, will hardly be appreciated unless the reader is
_fondly_ acquainted with the kind of scenery in question; and I cannot
calculate on this being often the case, for few persons ever look at any
near detail closely, and perhaps least of all at the heaps of debris
which so often seem to encumber and disfigure mountain ground. But for
the various reasons just stated (Sec. 7), Turner found more material for
his power, and more excitement to his invention, among the fallen stones
than in the highest summits of mountains; and his early designs, among
their thousand excellences and singularities, as opposed to all that had
preceded them, count for not one of the least the elaborate care given
to the drawing of torrent beds, shaly slopes, and other conditions of
stony ground which all canons of art at the period pronounced
inconsistent with dignity of composition; a convenient principle, since,
of all foregrounds, one of loose stones is beyond comparison the most
difficult to draw with any approach to realization. The Turnerian
subjects, "Junction of the Greta and Tees" (Yorkshire Series, and
illustrations to Scott); "Wycliffe, near Rokeby" (Yorkshire); "Hardraw
Fall" (Yorkshire); "Ben Arthur" (Liber Studiorum); "Ulleswater" and the
magnificent drawing of the "Upper Fall of the Tees" (England Series),
are sufficiently illustrative of what I mean.
Sec. 13. It is not, however, only, in their separate condition, as
materials of foreground, that we have to examine the effect of stones;
they form a curiously important element of distant landscape in their
aggregation on a large scale.
It will be remembered that in the course of the last chapter we wholly
left out of our account of mountain lines that group which was called
"Lines of Rest." One reason for doing so was that, as these lines are
produced by debris in a state of temporary repose, their beauty, or
deformity, or whatever character they may possess, is properly to be
considered as belonging to stones rather than to rocks.
Sec. 14. Whenever heaps of loose stones or sand are increased by the
continual fall of fresh fragments from above, or diminished by their
removal from below, yet not in such mass or with such momentum as
entirely to disturb those already accumulated, the materials on the
surface arrange themselves in an equable slope, producing a straight
line of profile in the bank or cone.
The heap formed by the sand falling in an hour-glass presents, in its
straight sides, the simplest result of such a condition; and any heap
of sand thrown up by the spade will show the slopes here and there,
interrupted only by knotty portions, held together by moisture, or
agglutinated by pressure,--interruptions which cannot occur to the same
extent on a large scale, unless the soil is really hardened nearly to
the nature of rock. As long as it remains incoherent, every removal of
substance at the bottom of the heap, or addition of it at the top,
occasions a sliding disturbance of the whole slope, which smooths it
into rectitude of line; and there is hardly any great mountain mass
among the Alps which does not show towards its foundation perfectly
regular descents of this nature, often two or three miles long without a
break. Several of considerable extent are seen on the left of Plate
+46+.
Sec. 15. I call these lines of rest, because, though the bulk of the mass
may be continually increasing or diminishing, the line of the profile
does not change, being fixed at a certain angle by the nature of the
earth. It is usually stated carelessly as an angle of about 45 degrees,
but it never really reaches such a slope. I measured carefully the
angles of a very large number of slopes of mountain in various parts of
the Mont Blanc district. The few examples given in the note below are
enough to exhibit the general fact that loose debris lies at various
angles up to about 30 deg. or 32 deg.; debris protected by grass or pines may
reach 35 deg., and rocky slopes 40 deg. or 41 deg., but in continuous lines of rest
I never found a steeper angle.[98]
Sec. 16. I speak of some rocky slopes as lines of rest, because, whenever
a mountain side is composed of soft stone which splits and decomposes
fast, it has a tendency to choke itself up with the ruins, and gradually
to get abraded or ground down towards the debris slope; so that vast
masses of the sides of Alpine valleys are formed by ascents of nearly
uniform inclination, partly loose, partly of jagged rocks, which break,
but do not materially alter the general line of ground. In such cases
the fragments usually have accumulated without disturbance at the foot
of the slope, and the pine forests fasten the soil and prevent it from
being carried down in large masses. But numerous instances occur in
which the mountain is consumed away gradually by its own torrents, not
having strength enough to form clefts or precipices, but falling on each
side of the ravines into even banks, which slide down from above as they
are wasted below.
Sec. 17. By all these various expedients, Nature secures, in the midst of
her mountain curvatures, vast series of perfectly straight lines
opposing and relieving them; lines, however, which artists have almost
universally agreed to alter or ignore, partly disliking them
intrinsically, on account of their formality, and partly because the
mind instantly associates them with the idea of mountain decay. Turner,
however, saw that this very decay having its use and nobleness, the
contours which were significative of it ought no more to be omitted
than, in the portrait of an aged man, the furrows on his hand or brow;
besides, he liked the lines themselves, for their contrast with the
mountain wildness, just as he liked the straightness of sunbeams
penetrating the soft waywardness of clouds. He introduced them
constantly into his noblest compositions; but in order to the full
understanding of their employment in the instance I am about to give,
one or two more points yet need to be noticed.
Sec. 18. Generally speaking, the curved lines of convex, _fall_ belong to
mountains of hard rock, over whose surfaces the fragments _bound_ to the
valley, and which are worn by wrath of avalanches and wildness of
torrents, like that of the Cascade des Pelerins, described in the note
above. Generally speaking, the straight lines of _rest_ belong to softer
mountains, or softer surfaces and places of mountains, which, exposed to
no violent wearing from external force, nevertheless keep slipping and
mouldering down spontaneously or receiving gradual accession of material
from incoherent masses above them.
Sec. 19. It follows, rather, that where the gigantic wearing forces are in
operation, the stones or fragments of rock brought down by the torrents
and avalanches are likely, however hard, to be rounded on all their
edges; but where the straight shaly slopes are found, the stones which
glide or totter down their surfaces frequently retain all their angles,
and form jagged and flaky heaps at the bottom.
And farther, it is to be supposed that the rocks which are habitually
subjected to these colossal forces of destruction are in their own mass
firm and secure, otherwise they would long ago have given way; but that
where the gliding and crumbling surfaces are found without much external
violence, it is very possible that the whole framework of the mountain
may be full of flaws; and a danger exist of vast portions of its mass
giving way, or slipping down in heaps, as the sand suddenly yields in an
hour-glass after some moments of accumulation.
Sec. 20. Hence, generally, in the mind of any one familiar with mountains,
the conditions will be associated, on the one hand, of the curved,
convex, and overhanging bank or cliff, the roaring torrent, and the
rounded boulder of massive stone; and, on the other, of the straight and
even slope of bank, the comparatively quiet and peaceful lapse of
streams, and the sharp-edged and unworn look of the fallen stones,
together with a sense of danger greater, though more occult, than in the
wilder scenery.
[Illustration: J. M. W. Turner J. Cousen.
50. Goldau.]
The drawing of the St. Gothard, which we have so laboriously analyzed,
was designed, as before mentioned, from a sketch taken in the year 1843.
But with it was made another drawing. Turner brought home in that year a
series of sketches taken in the neighborhood of the pass; among others,
one of the Valley of Goldau, covered as it is by the ruins of the
Rossberg. Knowing his fondness for fallen stones, I chose this Goldau
subject as a companion to the St. Gothard. The plate opposite will give
some idea of the resultant drawing.
Sec. 21. _Some_ idea only. It is a subject which, like the St. Gothard, is
far too full of detail to admit of reduction; and I hope, therefore,
soon to engrave it properly of its real size. It is, besides, more than
usually difficult to translate this drawing into black and white,
because much of the light on the clouds is distinguished merely by
orange or purple color from the green greys, which, though not darker
than the warm hues, have the effect of shade from their coldness, but
cannot be marked as shade in the engraving without too great increase of
depth. Enough, however, has been done to give some idea of the elements
of Turner's design.
Sec. 22. Detailed accounts of the Rossberg Fall may be found in any
ordinary Swiss Guide; the only points we have to notice respecting it
are, that the mountain was composed of an indurated gravel, disposed in
oblique beds sloping _towards_ the valley. A portion of one of these
beds gave way, and half filled the valley beneath, burying five
villages, together with the principal one of Goldau, and partially
choking up a little lake, the streamlets which supplied it now forming
irregular pools among the fallen fragments. I call the rock, and
accurately, indurated gravel; but the induration is so complete that the
mass breaks _through_ the rolled pebbles chiefly composing it, and may
be considered as a true rock, only always in its blocks rugged and
formless when compared with the crystalline formations. Turner has
chosen his position on some of the higher heaps of ruin, looking down
towards the Lake of Zug, which is seen under the sunset, the spire of
the tower of Aart on its shore just relieved against the light of the
waves.
The Rossberg itself, never steep, and still more reduced in terror by
the fall of a portion of it, was not available to him as a form
_explanatory_ of the catastrophe; and even the slopes of the Righi on
the left are not, in reality, as uninterrupted in their slope as he has
drawn them; but he felt the connection of this structure with the ruin
amidst which he stood, and brought the long lines of danger clear
against the sunset, and as straight as its own retiring rays.
Sec. 23. If the reader will now glance back to the St. Gothard subject, as
illustrated in the two Plates +21+ and +37+, and compare it with this of
Goldau, keeping in mind the general conclusions about the two great
classes of mountain scenery which I have just stated, he will, I hope,
at last cease to charge me with enthusiasm in anything that I have said
of Turner's imagination, as always instinctively possessive of those
truths which lie deepest, and are most essentially linked together, in
the expression of a scene. I have only taken two drawings (though these
of his best period) for the illustration of all the structures of the
Alps which, in the course of half a volume, it has been possible for me
to explain; and all my half-volume is abstracted in these two drawings,
and that in the most consistent and complete way, as if they had been
made on purpose to contain a perfect summary of Alpine truth.
Sec. 24. There are one or two points connected with them of yet more
touching interest. They are the last drawings which Turner ever made
with unabated power. The one of the St. Gothard, speaking with strict
accuracy, is _the_ last drawing; for that of Goldau, though majestic to
the utmost in conception, is less carefully finished, and shows, in the
execution of parts of the sky, signs of impatience, caused by the first
feeling of decline of strength. Therefore I called the St. Gothard (Vol.
III. Ch. XV. Sec. 5) the last mountain drawing he ever executed with
perfect power. But the Goldau is still a noble companion to it--more
solemn in thought, more sublime in color, and, in certain points of
poetical treatment, especially characteristic of the master's mind in
earlier days. He was very definitely in the habit of indicating the
association of any subject with circumstances of death, especially the
death of multitudes, by placing it under one of his most deeply
_crimsoned_ sunset skies. The color of blood is this plainly taken for
the leading tone in the storm-clouds above the "Slave-ship." It occurs
with similar distinctness in the much earlier picture of Ulysses and
Polypheme, in that of Napoleon at St. Helena, and, subdued by softer
hues, in the Old Temeraire. The sky of this Goldau is, in its scarlet
and crimson, the deepest in tone of all that I know in Turner's
drawings. Another feeling traceable in several of its former works, is
an acute sense of the contrast between the careless interests and idle
pleasures of daily life, and the state of those whose time for labor, or
knowledge, or delight is passed for ever. There is evidence of this
feeling in the introduction of the boys at play in the churchyard of
Kirkby Lonsdale, and the boy climbing for his kite among the thickets
above the little mountain churchyard of Brignal-banks; it is in the same
tone of thought that he has placed here the two figures fishing, leaning
against these shattered flanks of rock,--the sepulchral stones of the
great mountain Field of Death.
Sec. 25. Another character of these two drawings, which gives them especial
interest as connected with our inquiries into mediaeval landscape, is,
that they are precisely and accurately illustrative of the two principal
ideas of Dante about the Alps. I have already explained the rise of the
first drawing out of Turner's early study of the "Male Bolge" of the
Splugen and St. Gothard. The Goldau, on the other hand, might have been
drawn in purposeful illustration of the lines before referred to (Vol.
III. Ch. XV. Sec. 13) as descriptive of a "loco _Alpestro_." I give now
Dante's own words:
"Qual' e quella ruina, che nel fianco
Di qua da Trento l'Adice percosse,
O per tremuoto, o per sostegni manco,
Che da cima del monte, onde si mosse,
Al piano e si la roccia discoscesa
Che alcuna via darebbe a chi su fosse;
Cotal di quel burrato era la scesa."
"As is that landslip, ere you come to Trent,
That smote the flank of Adige, through some stay
Sinking beneath it, or by earthquake rent;
For from the summit, where of old it lay,
Plainwards the broken rock unto the feet
Of one above it might afford some way;
Such path adown this precipice we meet."
CAYLEY.
Sec. 26. Finally, there are two lessons to be gathered from the opposite
conditions of mountain decay, represented in these designs, of perhaps a
wider range of meaning than any which were suggested even by the states
of mountain strength. In the first, we find the unyielding rock,
undergoing no sudden danger, and capable of no total fall, yet, in its
hardness of heart, worn away by perpetual trampling of torrent waves,
and stress of wandering storm. Its fragments, fruitless and restless,
are tossed into ever-changing heaps: no labor of man can subdue them to
his service, nor can his utmost patience secure any dwelling-place among
them. In this they are the type of all that humanity which, suffering
under no sudden punishment or sorrow, remains "stony ground," afflicted,
indeed, continually by minor and vexing cares, but only broken by them
into fruitless ruin of fatigued life. Of this ground not
"corn-giving,"--this "rough valley, neither eared nor sown,"[99] of the
common world, it is said, to those who have set up their idols in the
wreck of it--
"Among the smooth stones of the stream is thy portion. They, they
are thy lot."[100]
But, as we pass beneath the hills which have been shaken by earthquake
and torn by convulsion, we find that periods of perfect repose succeeded
those of destruction. The pools of calm water lie clear beneath their
fallen rocks, the water-lilies gleam, and the reeds whisper among their
shadows; the village rises again over the forgotten graves, and its
church-tower, white through the storm-twilight, proclaims a renewed
appeal to His protection in whose hand "are all the corners of the
earth, and the strength of the hills is His also." There is no
loveliness of Alpine valley that does not teach the same lesson. It is
just where "the mountain falling cometh to naught, and the rock is
removed out of his place," that, in process of years, the fairest
meadows bloom between the fragments, the clearest rivulets murmur from
their crevices among the flowers, and the clustered cottages, each
sheltered beneath some strength of mossy stone, now to be removed no
more, and with their pastured flocks around them, safe from the eagle's
stoop and the wolf's ravin, have written upon their fronts, in simple
words, the mountaineer's faith in the ancient promise--
"Neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh;
"For thou shalt be in league with the Stones of the Field; and the
beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee."
FOOTNOTES
[98]
Small fragments of limestone, five or six inches across, and
flattish, sharp, angular on edges, and quite loose; slope deg.
near fountain of Maglans 311/2
Somewhat larger stones, nearer Maglans; quite loose 313/4
Similar debris, slightly touched with vegetation 35
Debris on southern side of Maglans 331/2
Slope of Montagne de la Cote, at the bottom, as seen from the
village of Chamouni 403/4
Average slope of Montagne de Taconay, seen from Chamouni 38
Maximum slope of side of Breven 41
Slope of debris from ravine of Breven down to the village
of Chamouni 14
Slopes of debris set with pines under Aiguille Verte, seen
from Argentiere 36
General slope of Tapia, from Argentiere 34
Slopes of La Cote and Taconay, from Argentiere 273/4
Profile of Breven, from near the Chapeau (a point commanding the
valley of Chamouni in its truest longitude) 321/2
Average slope of Montanvert, from same point 391/2
Slope of La Cote, same point 361/2
Eastern slope of Pain de Sucre, seen from Vevay 33
Western " " " 361/2
Slope of foot of Dent de Morcles, seen from Vevay 381/2
" " Midi, " " 40
[99] Deut. xxi. 4. So Amos, vi. 12: "Shall horses run upon the rock;
will one plow here with oxen?"
[100] Is. lvii. 5, 6.