You cannot think how beautiful are these Alpine valleys. Our course,
all the first morning after we left Chamouni, lay beside a broad,
hearty, joyous mountain torrent, called, perhaps from the darkness of
its waters, Eau Noire. Charming meadows skirted its banks. All the way
along I could think of nothing but Bunyan's meadows beside the river
of life, "curiously adorned with lilies." _These_ were curiously
adorned, broidered, and inwrought with flowers, many and brilliant as
those in a western prairie. Were I to undertake to describe them, I
might make an inventory as long as Homer's list of the ships. There
was the Canterbury bell of our garden; the white meadow sweet; the
blue and white campanula; the tall, slender harebell, and a little,
short-tufted variety of the same, which our guide tells me is called
"Les Clochettes," or the "little bells"--fairies might ring them, I
thought. Then there are whole beds of the little blue forget-me-not,
and a white flower which much resembles it in form. I also noticed,
hanging in the clefts of the rocks around Tête Noir, the long golden
tresses of the laburnum. It has seemed to me, when I have been
travelling here, as if every flower I ever saw in a garden met me some
where in rocks or meadows.
There is a strange, unsatisfying pleasure about flowers, which, like
all earthly pleasure, is akin to pain. What can you do with them?--you
want to do something, but what? Take them all up, and carry them with
you? You cannot do that. Get down and look at them? What, keep a whole
caravan waiting for your observations! That will never do. Well, then,
pick and carry them along with you. That is what, in despair of any
better resource, I did. My good old guide was infinite in patience,
stopping at every new exclamation point of mine, plunging down rocks
into the meadow land, climbing to the points of great rocks, and
returning with his hands filled with flowers. It seemed almost
sacrilegious to tear away such fanciful creations, that looked as if
they were votive offerings on an altar, or, more likely, living
existences, whose only conscious life was a continued exhalation of
joy and praise.
These flowers seemed to me to be earth's raptures and aspirations
--her better moments--her lucid intervals. Like every thing else in
our existence, they are mysterious.
In what mood of mind were they conceived by the great Artist? Of what
feelings of his are they the expression--springing up out of the
dust, in these gigantic, waste, and desolate regions, where one would
think the sense of his almightiness might overpower the soul? Born in
the track of the glacier and the avalanche, they seem to say to us
that this Almighty Being is very pitiful, and of tender compassion;
that, in his infinite soul, there is an exquisite gentleness and love
of the beautiful, and that, if we would be blessed, his will to bless
is infinite.
The greatest men have always thought much of flowers. Luther always
kept a flower in a glass, on his writing table; and when he was waging
his great public controversy with Eckius, he kept a flower in his
hand. Lord Bacon has a beautiful passage about flowers. As to
Shakspeare, he is a perfect Alpine valley--he is full of flowers; they
spring, and blossom, and wave in every cleft of his mind. Witness the
Midsummer Night's Dream. Even Milton, cold, serene, and stately as he
is, breaks forth into exquisite gushes of tenderness and fancy when he
marshals the flowers, as in Lycidas and Comus.
But all this while the sun has been withering the flowers the guide
brought me; how they look! blue and white Canterbury bells, harebells,
clochettes, all bedraggled and wilted, like a young lady who has been
up all night at a ball.
"No, no," say I to the guide; "don't pick me any more. I don't want
them. The fact is, if they are pretty I cannot help it. I must even
take it out in looking as I go by."
One thing is evident; He who made the world is no utilitarian, no
despiser of the fine arts, and no condemner of ornament; and those
religionists, who seek to restrain every thing within the limits of
cold, bare utility, do not imitate our Father in heaven.
Cannot a bonnet cover your head, without the ribbon and the flowers,
say they? Yes; and could not a peach tree bear peaches without a
blossom? What a waste is all this colored corolla of flowers, as if
the seed could not mature without them! God could have created the
fruit in good, strong, homely bushel baskets, if he had been so
disposed.
"Turn off my eyes from beholding vanity," says a good man, when he
sees a display of graceful ornament. What, then, must he think of the
Almighty Being, all whose useful work is so overlaid with ornament?
There is not a fly's leg, nor an insect's wing, which is not polished
and decorated to an extent that we should think positive extravagance
in finishing up a child's dress. And can we suppose that this Being
can take delight in dwellings and modes of life or forms of worship
where every thing is reduced to cold, naked utility? I think not. The
instinct to adorn and beautify is from him; it likens us to him, and
if rightly understood, instead of being a siren to beguile our hearts
away, it will be the closest affiliating band.
If this power of producing the beautiful has been always so
fascinating that the human race for its sake have bowed down at the
feet even of men deficient in moral worth, if we cannot forbear loving
the painter, poet, and sculptor, how much more shall we love God, who,
with all goodness, has also all beauty!
But all this while we have been riding on till we have passed the
meadows, and the fields, and are coming into the dark and awful pass
of the Tête Noir, which C. has described to you.
One thing I noticed which he did not. When we were winding along the
narrow path, bearing no more proportion to the dizzy heights above and
below than the smallest insect creeping on the wall, I looked across
the chasm, and saw a row of shepherds' cottages perched midway on a
narrow shelf, that seemed in the distance not an inch wide. By a very
natural impulse, I exclaimed, "What does become of the little children
there? I should think they would all fall over the precipice!"
My guide looked up benevolently at me, as if he felt it his duty to
quiet my fears, and said in a soothing tone, "O, no, no, no!"
Of course, I might have known that little children have their angels
there, as well as every where else. "When they have funerals there,"
said he, "they are obliged to carry the dead along that road,"
pointing to a road that resembled a thread drawn on the rocky wall.
What a strange idea--such a life and death! It seemed to me, that I
could see a funeral train creeping along; the monks, with their black
cloaks, carrying tapers, and singing psalms; the whole procession
together not larger in proportion than a swarm of black gnats; and
yet, perhaps, hearts there wrung with an infinite sorrow. In that
black, moving point, may be a soul, whose convulsions and agonies
cannot be measured or counted by any thing human, so impossible is it
to measure souls by space.
What can they think of, these creatures, who are born in this strange
place, half way between heaven and earth, to whom the sound of
avalanches is a cradle hymn, and who can never see the sun above the
top of the cliff on either side, till he really gets into the zenith?
What they can be thinking of I cannot tell. Life, I suppose, is made
up of the same prosaic material there that it is every where. The
mother thinks how she shall make her goat's milk and black bread hold
out. The grandmother knits stockings, and runs out to see if Jaques or
Pierre have not tumbled over the precipice. Jaques and Pierre, in
return, tangle grandmother's yarn, upset mother's milk bucket, pull
the goat's beard, tear their clothes to pieces on the bushes and
rocks, and, in short, commit incredible abominations daily, just as
children do every where.
In the night how curiously this little nest of houses must look,
lighted up, winking and blinking at the solitary traveller, like some
mysterious eyes looking out of a great eternity! There they all are
fast asleep, Pierre, and Jaques, and grandmother, and the goats. In
the night they hear a tremendous noise, as if all nature was going to
pieces; they half wake, open one eye, say, "Nothing but an avalanche!"
and go to sleep again.
This road, through the pass of the Tête Noir, used to be dangerous; a
very narrow bridle-path, undefended by any screen whatever. To have
passed it in those old days would have had too much of the sublime to
be quite agreeable to me. The road, as it is, is wide enough, I should
think, for three mules to go abreast, and a tunnel has been blasted
through what seemed the most difficult and dangerous point, and a
little beyond this tunnel is the Hotel de la Couronne.
If any body wanted to stop in the wildest and lonesomest place he
could find in the Alps, so as to be saturated with a sense of
savageness and desolation, I would recommend this hotel. The chambers
are reasonably comfortable, and the beds of a good quality--a point
which S. and I tested experimentally soon after our arrival. I thought
I should like to stay there a week, to be left there alone with
Nature, and see what she would have to say to me.
But two or three hours' ride in the hot sun, on a mule's back,
indisposes one to make much of the grandest scenes, insomuch that we
were glad to go to sleep; and on awaking we were glad to get some
dinner, such as it was.
Well, after our dinner, which consisted of a dish of fried potatoes
and some fossiliferous bread, such as prevails here at the small
hotels in Switzerland, we proceeded onward. After an intolerably hot
ride for half an hour we began to ascend a mountain called the
Forclaz.
There is something magnificent about going up these mountains,
appalling as it seems to one's nerves, at particular turns and angles
of the road, where the mule stops you on the very "brink of forever,"
as one of the ladies said.
Well, at last we reached the top, and began to descend; and there, at
our feet, as if we were looking down at it out of a cloud, lay the
whole beautiful valley of the Rhone. I did not know then that this was
one of the things put down in the guide book, that we were expected to
admire, as I found afterwards it was; but nothing that I saw any where
through the Alps impressed me as this did. It seemed to me more like
the vision of "the land that is very far off" than any thing earthly.
I can see it now just as distinctly as I saw it then; one of these
flat, Swiss valleys, green as a velvet carpet, studded with buildings
and villages that looked like dots in the distance, and embraced on
all sides by these magnificent mountains, of which those nearest in
the prospect were distinctly made out, with their rocks, pine trees,
and foliage.
The next in the receding distance were fainter, and of a purplish
green; the next of a vivid purple; the next, lilac; while far in the
fading view the crystal summits and glaciers of the Oberland Alps rose
like an exhalation.
The afternoon sun was throwing its level beams in between these
many-colored ranges, and on one of them the ruins of an old Roman
tower stood picturesquely prominent. The Simplon road could be seen,
dividing the valley like an arrow.
I had gone on quite ahead of my company, and as my mule soberly paced
downward in the almost perpendicular road, I seemed to be poised so
high above the enchanting scene that I had somewhat the same sensation
as if I were flying. I don't wonder that larks seem to get into such a
rapture when they are high up in the air. What a dreamlike beauty
there is in distance, disappearing ever as we approach!
As I came down towards Martigny into the pasture land of the great
mountain, it seemed to me that the scenery might pass for that of the
Delectable Mountains--such beautiful, green, shadowy hollows, amid
great clumps of chestnut and apple trees, where people were making
their hay, which smelled so delightfully, while cozy little Swiss
cottages stood in every nook.
All were out in the fields, men, women, and children, and in one
hayfield I saw the baby's cradle--baby, of course, concealed from view
under a small avalanche of a feather bed, as the general fashion in
these parts seems to be. The women wore broad, flat hats, and all
appeared to be working rather lazily, as it was coming on evening.
This place might have done for Arcadia, or Utopia, or any other of
those places people think of when they want to get rid of what is, and
get into the region of what might be.
I was very far before my party, and now got off my mule, and sat down
on a log to wait till they came up. Then the drama enacted by C.'s
mule took place, which he has described to you. I merely saw a distant
commotion, but did not enter into the merits of the case.
As they were somewhat slow coming down, I climbed over a log into a
hayfield, and plucked a long, delicate, white-blossomed vine, with
which I garlanded the top of my flat hat.
One is often reminded of a text of Scripture in these valleys--"He
sendeth springs into the valleys, which run among the hills."
Every where are these little, lively, murmuring brooks falling down
the rocks, prattling through the hayfields, sociably gossiping with
each other as they go.
Here comes the party, and now we are going down into Martigny. How
tired we were! We had to ride quite through the town, then through a
long, long row of trees, to come to the Hotel de la Tour. How
delightful it seemed, with its stone entries and staircases, its
bedrooms as inviting as cleanliness could make them! The eating saloon
opened on to a beautiful garden filled with roses in full bloom. There
were little tables set about under the trees for people to take their
strawberries and cream, or tea, in the open air if they preferred it,
a very common and pleasant custom of continental hotels.
A trim, tidy young woman in a white cap, with a bunch of keys at her
girdle, ushered us up two flights of stone stairs, into a very clean,
nice apartment, with white muslin window curtains. Now, there is no
feature of a room that speaks to the heart like white muslin window
curtains; they always shed light on the whole scene.
After resting a while we were called down to a supper of strawberries
and cream, and nice little rolls with honey. This honey you find at
every hotel in Switzerland, as one of the inevitables of the breakfast
or tea table.
Here we were to part from our Chamouni guides, and engage new ones to
take us to St. Bernard. I had become so fond of mine that it really
went quite to my heart; we had an affecting leave-taking in the dark
stone entry, at the foot of the staircase. In the earnestness of my
emotion I gave him all the change I had in my pocket, to buy
_souvenirs_ for his little folks at home, for you know I told you
we had compared notes on sundry domestic points. I really flattered
myself that I was doing something quite liberal; but this deceitful
Swiss coin! I found, when I came to tell C. about it, that the whole
stock only amounted to about twenty cents: like a great many things in
this world, it looked more than it was. The good man, however, seemed
as grateful as if I had done something, wished all sorts of happiness
to me and my children, and so we parted. Peace go with him in his
Chamouni cottage.