There was something subduing in the influence of that silent and solemn
and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the
indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial and
fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast.
One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation of a spirit,
not an inert mass of rocks and ice—a spirit which had looked down,
through the slow drift of the ages, upon a million vanished races of
men, and judged them; and would judge a million more—and still be there,
watching, unchanged and unchangeable, after all life should be gone and
the earth have become a vacant desolation.
While I was feeling these things, I was groping, without knowing it,
toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in the
Alps, and in no other mountains—that strange, deep, nameless influence,
which once felt, cannot be forgotten—once felt, leaves always behind it
a restless longing to feel it again—a longing which is like
homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning, which will plead, implore,
and persecute till it has its will. I met dozens of people, imaginative
and unimaginative, cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far
countries and roamed through the Swiss Alps year after year—they could
not explain why. They had come first, they said, out of idle curiosity,
because everybody talked about it; they had come since because they
could not help it, and they should keep on coming, while they lived, for
the same reason; they had tried to break their chains and stay away, but
it was futile; now, they had no desire to break them. Others came nearer
formulating what they felt: they said they could find perfect rest and
peace nowhere else when they were troubled; all frets and worries and
chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the
Alps: the Great Spirit of the Mountain breathed his own peace upon their
hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them; they could not think base
thoughts or do mean and sordid things here, before the visible throne of
God.