There is something rather curious about these pools. Our guide saw us
measuring the depth of one of them, which was full of greenish-blue
water, colored only by the refraction of the light. He took our long
alpenstock, and poising it, sent it down into the water, as a man
might throw a javelin. It disappeared, but in a few seconds leaped up
at us out of the water, as if thrown back again by an invisible hand.
A poet would say that a water spirit hurled it back; perhaps some old
under-ground gnome, just going to dinner, had his windows smashed by
it, and sent it back with a becoming spirit, as a gnome should.
It was a sultry day, and the sun was exercising his power over the
whole ice field. I sat down by a great ice block, about fifty feet
long, to interrogate it, and see what I could make of it, by a cool,
confidential proximity and examination. The ice was porous and spongy,
as I have seen it on the shores of the Connecticut, when beginning to
thaw out under the influence of a spring sun. I could see the little
drops of water percolating in a thousand tiny streams through it, and
dropping down on every side. Putting my ear to it, I could hear a fine
musical trill and trickle, and that still small click and stir, as of
melting ice, which showed that it was surely and gradually giving way,
and flowing back again.
Drop by drop the cold iceberg was changing into a stream, to flow down
the sides of the valley, no longer an image of coldness and death, but
bearing fertility and beauty on its tide. And as I looked abroad over
all the rifted field of ice, I could see that the same change was
gradually going on throughout. In every blue ravine you can hear the
clink of dropping water, and those great defiant blocks of ice, which
seem frozen with uplifted warlike hands, are all softening in that
beneficent light, and destined to pass away in that benignant change.
So let us hope that those institutions of pride and cruelty, which are
colder than the glacier, and equally vast and hopeless in their
apparent magnitude, may yet, like that, be slowly and surely passing
away. Like the silent warfare of the sun on the glacier, is that
overshadowing presence of Jesus, whose power, so still, yet so
resistless, is now being felt through all the moving earth.
Those defiant waves of death-cold ice might as well hope to conquer
the calm, silent sun, as the old, frozen institutions of human
selfishness to resist the influence which he is now breathing through
the human heart, to liberate the captive, to free the slave, and to
turn the ice of long winters into rivers of life for the new heaven
and the new earth.
All this we know is coming, but we long to see it now, and breathe
forth our desires with the Hebrew prophet, "O that thou wouldst rend
the heavens, that thou wouldst come down, that the mountains might
flow down at thy presence."
I had, while upon this field of ice, that strange feeling which often
comes over one, at the sight of a thing unusually beautiful and
sublime, of wanting, in some way, to appropriate and make it a part of
myself. I looked up the gorge, and saw this frozen river, lying
cradled, as it were, in the arms of needle-peaked giants of
amethystine rock, their tops laced with flying silvery clouds. The
whole air seemed to be surcharged with tints, ranging between the
palest rose and the deepest violet--tints never without blue, and
never without red, but varying in the degrees of the two. It is this
prismatic hue diffused over every object which gives one of the most
noticeable characteristics of the Alpine landscape.
This sea of ice lies on an inclined plane, and all the blocks have a
general downward curve.
I told you yesterday that the lower part of the glacier, as seen from
La Flégère, appeared covered with dirt. I saw to-day the reason for
this. Although it was a sultry day in July, yet around the glacier a
continual high wind was blowing, whirling the dust and _débris_
of the sides upon it. Some of the great masses of ice were so
completely coated with sand as to appear at a distance like granite
rocks. The effect of some of these immense brown masses was very
peculiar. They seemed like an army of giants, bending forward, driven,
as by an invisible power, down into the valley.