ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS.
32. The words which marked for us the purpose of the clouds are
followed immediately by those notable ones,--"And God 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 pass 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suddenly restrained rebellion, but withdrawn to its place in perfect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 space 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 God 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 shores that were to limit the nations; and chain
by chain the mountain walls were lengthened forth, and their
foundations fastened for ever; and the compass 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 constitute 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 God's
working--to startle its lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of
astonishment,--are their higher missions. They are as a great and
noble 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
compass, 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 Cumberland, 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 compass of their glens and
vales; and how, down to the most secret cluster 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
passionate, that our utmost observance and thankfulness are but, at
last, neglects of her nobleness, 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 destitute 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 space
of it, to the utmost horizon, with innumerable and changeful incidents
of scenery and life; leading pleasant streamlets through its meadows,
strewing clusters 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 space 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 God'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 grass, 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, assume 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
massy and silent march of the everlasting multitude 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 grass 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 passage 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 masses 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 assigned 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
passage, 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 masses 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 passes 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 grassless 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 grass
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 massy 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
gratitude 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 associate 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, passion, 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 Titan 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 mass 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 passes on before the clouds, and the
fitful opening of pale spaces 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 passing upon the
grass, and leaves, and waters, at the presence of some great spirit
commissioned to let the tempest loose; but the terror passes, 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 pass 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] Passage 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 passage. It is the old age, not the
childhood of earth, which Jeremiah describes in this passage. 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 mass 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 Jorasse 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 pass 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 masses 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
circumstances, 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 masses 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, noble 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 associated ranges of
the Buet, which, though commanding prospects of great nobleness, 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 grass 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 mass,
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 ashore 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 passage,--and I will venture to say of it,
as Albert Duerer, 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 principal 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 God 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?