"Yes," she added, "strangers always admire our mountains."
"And don't you admire them?" said I, looking, I suppose, rather amused
into her bright eyes.
"No," she said, laughing. "Strangers come from hundreds of miles to
see them all the time; but we peasants don't care for them, no more
than the dust of the road."
I could but half believe the bright little puss when she said so; but
there was a lumpish, soggy fellow accompanying her, whose nature
appeared to be sufficiently unleavened to make almost any thing
credible in the line of stupidity. In fact, it is one of the greatest
drawbacks to the pleasure with which one travels through this
beautiful country, to see what kind of human beings inhabit it. Here
in the Alps, heaven above and earth beneath, tree, rock, water, light
and shadow, every form, and agent, and power of nature, seem to be
exerting themselves to produce a constant and changing poem and
romance; every thing is grand, noble, free, and yet beautiful: in all
these regions there is nothing so repulsive as a human dwelling.
A little further on we stopped at a village to refresh the horses. The
_auberge_ where we stopped was built like a great barn, with an
earth floor, desolate and comfortless. The people looked poor and
ground down, as if they had not a thought above the coarsest animal
wants. The dirty children, with their hair tangled beyond all hope of
combing, had the begging whine, and the trick of raising their hands
for money, when one looked at them, which is universal in the Catholic
parts of Switzerland. Indeed, all the way from the Sardinian frontier
we had been dogged by beggars continually. Parents seemed to look upon
their children as valuable only for this purpose; the very baby in
arms is taught to make a pitiful little whine, and put out its fat
hand, if your eye rests on it. The fact is, they are poor--poor
because invention, enterprise, and intellectual vigor--all that
surrounds the New England mountain farmer with competence and
comfort--are quenched and dead, by the combined influence of a
religion and government whose interest it is to keep people stupid
that they may be manageable. Yet the Savoyards, as a race, it seems to
me, are naturally intelligent; and I cannot but hope that the liberal
course lately adopted by the Sardinian government may at last reach
them. My heart yearns over many of the bright, pretty children, whose
little hands have been up, from time to time, around our carriage. I
could not help thinking what good schools and good instruction might
do for them. It is not their fault, poor little things, that they are
educated to whine and beg, and grow up rude, uncultured, to bring
forth another set of children just like themselves; but what to do
with them is the question. One generally begins with giving money; but
a day or two of experience shows that it would be just about as
hopeful to feed the locusts of Egypt on a loaf of bread. But it is
hard to refuse children, especially to a mother who has left five or
six at home, and who fancies she sees, in some of these little eager,
childish faces, something now and then that reminds her of her own.
For my part, I got schooled so that I could stand them all, except the
little toddling three-year olds--they fairly overcame me. So I
supplied my pocket with a quantity of sugar lozenges, for the relief
of my own mind. I usually found the little fellows looked exceedingly
delighted when they discovered the nature of the coin. Children are
unsophisticated, and like sugar better than silver, any day.
In this _auberge_ was a little chamois kid, of which fact we were
duly apprised, when we got out, by a board put up, which said, "Here
one can see a live chamois." The little live representative of
chamoisdom came skipping out with the most amiable unconsciousness,
and went through his paces for our entertainment with as much
propriety as a New England child says his catechism. He hopped up on a
table after some green leaves, which were then economically used to
make him hop down again. The same illusive prospect was used to make
him jump over a stick, and perform a number of other evolutions. I
could not but admire the sweetness of temper with which he took all
this tantalizing, and the innocence with which he chewed his cabbage
leaf after he got it, not harboring a single revengeful thought at us
for the trouble we had given him. Of course the issue of the matter
was, that we all paid a few sous for the sight--not to the chamois,
which would have been the most equitable way, but to those who had
appropriated his gifts and graces to eke out their own convenience.
"Where's his mother?" said I, desiring to enlarge my sphere of natural
history as much as possible.
"_On a tué sa mere_"--"They have killed his mother," was the
reply, cool enough.
There we had the whole story. His enterprising neighbors had invaded
the domestic hearth, shot his mother, and eaten her up, made her skin
into chamois leather, and were keeping him till he got big enough for
the same disposition, using his talents meanwhile to turn a penny
upon; yet not a word of all this thought he; not a bit the less
heartily did he caper; never speculated a minute on why it was, on the
origin of evil, or any thing of the sort; or, if he did, at least
never said a word about it. I gave one good look into his soft, round,
glassy eyes, and could see nothing there but the most tranquil
contentment. He had finished his cabbage leaf, and we had finished our
call; so we will go on.
It was now drawing towards evening, and the air began to be sensibly
and piercingly cold. One effect of this mountain air on myself is, to
bring on the most acute headache that I ever recollect to have felt.
Still, the increasing glory and magnificence of the scenery overcame
bodily fatigue. Mont Blanc, and his army of white-robed brethren, rose
before us in the distance, glorious as the four and twenty elders
around the great white throne. The wonderful gradations of coloring in
this Alpine landscape are not among the least of its charms. How can I
describe it? Imagine yourself standing with me on this projecting
rock, overlooking a deep, piny gorge, through which flow the brawling
waters of the Arve. On the other side of this rise mountains whose
heaving swells of velvet green, cliffs and dark pines, are fully made
out and colored; behind this mountain, rises another, whose greens are
softened and shaded, and seem to be seen through a purplish veil;
behind that rises another, of a decided cloud-like purple; and in the
next still the purple tint changes to rosy lilac; while above all,
like another world up in the sky, mingling its tints with the passing
clouds, sometimes obscured by them, and then breaking out between
them, lie the glacier regions. These glaciers, in the setting sun,
look like rivers of light pouring down from the clouds. Such was the
scene, which I remember with perfect distinctness as enchaining my
attention on one point of the road.
We had now got up to the valley of Chamouni. I looked before me, and
saw, lying in the lap of the green valley, a gigantic pile of icy
pillars, which, seen through the trees, at first suggested the idea of
a cascade.
"What is that?" said I to the guide.
"The Glacier de Boisson."
I may as well stop here, and explain to you, once for all, what a
glacier is. You see before you, as in this case, say thirty or forty
mountain peaks, and between these peaks what seem to you frozen
rivers. The snow from time to time melting, and dripping down the
sides of the mountain, and congealing in the elevated hollows between
the peaks, forms a half-fluid mass--a river of ice--which is called a
glacier.
As it lies upon the slanting surface, and is not entirely solid
throughout, the whole mass is continually pushing, with a gradual but
imperceptible motion, down into the valleys below.
At a distance these glaciers, as I have said before, look like frozen
rivers; when one approaches nearer, or where they press downward into
the valley, like this Glacier de Boisson, they look like immense
crystals and pillars of ice piled together in every conceivable form.
The effect of this pile of ice, lying directly in the lap of green
grass and flowers, is quite singular. The village of Chamouni itself
has nothing in particular to recommend it. The buildings and every
thing about it have a rough, coarse appearance. Before we had entered
the valley this evening the sun had gone down; the sky behind the
mountains was clear, and it seemed for a few moments as if darkness
was rapidly coming on. On our right hand were black, jagged, furrowed
walls of mountain, and on our left Mont Blanc, with his fields of
glaciers and worlds of snow; they seemed to hem us in, and almost
press us down. But in a few moments commenced a scene of
transfiguration, more glorious than any thing I had witnessed yet. The
cold, white, dismal fields of ice gradually changed into hues of the
most beautiful rose color. A bank of white clouds, which rested above
the mountains, kindled and glowed, as if some spirit of light had
entered into them. You did not lose your idea of the dazzling,
spiritual whiteness of the snow, yet you seemed to see it through a
rosy veil. The sharp edges of the glaciers, and the hollows between
the peaks, reflected wavering tints of lilac and purple. The effect
was solemn and spiritual above every thing I have ever seen. These
words, which had been often in my mind through the day, and which
occurred to me more often than any others while I was travelling
through the Alps, came into my mind with a pomp and magnificence of
meaning unknown before--"For by Him were all things created in heaven
and on earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or
dominions, or principalities, or powers; all things are by him and for
him; and he is before all things, and by him all things subsist."
In this dazzling revelation I saw not that cold, distant, unfeeling
fate, or that crushing regularity of power and wisdom, which was all
the ancient Greek or modern Deist can behold in God; but I beheld, as
it were, crowned and glorified, one who had loved with our loves, and
suffered with our sufferings. Those shining snows were as his garments
on the Mount of Transfiguration, and that serene and ineffable
atmosphere of tenderness and beauty, which seemed to change these
dreary deserts into worlds of heavenly light, was to me an image of
the light shed by his eternal love on the sins and sorrows of time,
and the dread abyss of eternity.