SUNNY MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS.
Beauty in nature.
“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, not 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 and forms of worship where everything 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.
Flowers.
There is a strange, unsatisfying pleasure about flowers, which, like all earthly pleasures, 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 observation? That will never do. Well, then, pick and carry them along with you. That is what, in despair of any better resource, I did.... 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 continual exhalation of joy and praise.
These flowers seemed to me to be the Earth’s raptures and aspirations,—her better moments—her lucid intervals. Like everything 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 the 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.
Mountain air.
I look at the strange, old, cloudy mountains, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn, the Schreckhorn. A kind of hazy ether floats around them—an indescribable aerial halo—which no painter ever represents. Who can paint the air,—that vivid blue in which these sharp peaks cut their glittering images?
The mysterious in nature.
I like best these snow-pure glaciers seen through these black pines; there is something mysterious about them when you thus catch glimpses, and see not the earthly base on which they rest. I recollect the same fact in seeing the cataract of Niagara through trees, where merely the dizzying fall of water was visible, with its foam, and spray, and rainbow; it produced an idea of something supernatural....
Every prospect loses by being made definite. As long as we only see a thing by glimpses, and imagine that there is a deal more that we do not see, the mind is kept in a constant excitement and play; but come to a point where you can fairly and squarely take in the whole, and there your mind falls listless. It is the greatest proof, to me, of the infinite nature of our minds, that we almost instantly undervalue what we have thoroughly attained.... I remember once, after finishing a very circumstantial treatise on the nature of heaven, being oppressed with a similar sensation of satiety,—that which hath not entered the heart of man to conceive must not be mapped out,—hence the wisdom of the dim, indefinite imagery of the Scriptures; they give you no hard outline, no definite limit; occasionally they part as do the clouds around these mountains, giving you flashes and gleams of something supernatural and splendid, but never fully unveiling.
Cloud landscapes.
It is odd, though, to look at those cloud-caperings; quite as interesting, in its way, as to read new systems of transcendental philosophy, and perhaps quite as profitable. Yonder is a great white-headed cloud, slowly unrolling himself in the bosom of a black pine forest. Across the other side of the road a huge granite cliff has picked up a bit of gauzy silver, which he is winding around his scraggy neck. And now, here comes a cascade, right over our heads; a cascade, not of water, but of cloud; for the poor little brook that makes it faints away before it gets down to us; it falls like a shimmer of moonlight, or a shower of powdered silver, while a tremulous rainbow appears at uncertain intervals, like a half-seen spirit.
A cascade.
The cascade here, as in mountains generally, is a never-failing source of life and variety. Water, joyous, buoyant son of Nature, is calling to you, leaping, sparkling, mocking at you between bushes, and singing as he goes down the dells. A thousand little pictures he makes among the rocks as he goes.
Phases of nature.
There are phases in nature which correspond to every phase of human thought and emotion; and this stern, cloudy scenery [in the Alps] answers to the melancholy fatalism of Greek tragedy, or the kindred mournfulness of the book of Job.
Sublimity in nature.
Coming down I mentally compared Mont Blanc and Niagara, as one should compare two grand pictures in different styles of the same master. Both are of that class of things which mark eras in a mind’s history, and open a new door which no man can shut. Of the two, I think Niagara is the more impressive, perhaps because those aerial elements of foam and spray give that vague and dreamy indefiniteness of outline which seems essential in the sublime. For this reason, while Niagara is equally impressive in the distance, it does not lose on the nearest approach,—it is always mysterious, and therefore stimulating. Those varying spray-wreaths, rising like Ossian’s ghosts from its abyss; those shimmering rainbows, through whose veil you look; those dizzying falls of water that seem like clouds poured from the hollow of God’s hand; and that mystic undertone of sound that seems to pervade the whole being as the voice of the Almighty,—all these bewilder and enchant the discriminating and prosaic part of us, and bring us into that cloudy region of ecstasy where the soul comes nearest to Him whom no eye has seen or can see. I have sometimes asked myself if, in the countless ages of the future, the heirs of God shall ever be endowed by Him with a creative power, by which they shall bring into being things like these? In this infancy of his existence, man creates pictures, statues, cathedrals; but when he is made “ruler over many things,” will his Father intrust to him the building and adorning of worlds? the ruling of the glorious, dazzling forces of nature?
Mountain brooks.
Everybody knows, even in our sober New England, that mountain brooks are a frisky, indiscreet set, rattling, chattering, and capering, in defiance of all law and order, tumbling over precipices and picking themselves up at the bottom, no whit wiser or more disposed to be tranquil than they were at the top; in fact, seeming to grow more mad and frolicsome with every leap. Well, that is just the way brooks do here in the Alps.
Alpine air.
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 degree of the two. It is this prismatic hue, diffused over every object, which gives one of the most noticeable characteristics of the Alpine landscape.
Color-blending.
I have seen sometimes, in spring, set against a deep-blue sky, an array of greens, from lightest yellow to deepest blue of the pines, tipped and glittering with the afternoon sun, yet so swathed in some invisible, harmonizing medium, that the strong contrasts of color jarred upon no sense. All seemed to be bound by the invisible cestus of some celestial Venus. Yet what painter would dare attempt the same?
Nature’s anguish.
Mountains are nature’s testimonials of anguish. They are the sharp cry of a groaning and travailing creation. Nature’s stern agony writes itself on these furrowed brows of gloomy stone. These reft and splintered crags stand, the dreary images of patient sorrow, existing verdureless and stern because exist they must. In them, hearts that have ceased to rejoice, and have learned to suffer, find kindred, and here an earth worn with countless cycles of sorrow utters to the stars voices of speechless despair.
Pines.
I always love pines, to all generations. I welcome this solemn old brotherhood, which stand gray-bearded, like monks, old, dark, solemn, sighing a certain mournful sound—like a benedicite through the leaves.