“And is all your old national music of this gay Schnadder-hüpfen description?” asked Hamilton.
“Oh, no, we have melancholy and sentimental too, but our mountaineers are too gay and happy a people to allow the mournful to predominate, or even to have its due share in their music; the sorrowful thought of one verse is sure to find consolation in the jesting contradiction in the next. The Alpine songs are generally of this description, and the girls who have the charge of the cows on the Alps sing them together, and continue to do so after they have left the mountains, which has caused them to become familiar to the inhabitants of the valleys. Then there is the jodel, the song without words, which has so much resemblance to the ranz des vaches of the Swiss, and which requires both practice and compass of voice.”
“Oh, I remember,” said Hamilton, “what you and some of the others sang when we were on the chamois hunt last year; sometimes it sounded like water bubbling, and then came some queer high notes and a sort of shout—it was quite adapted to the mountains—quite beautiful when there was an echo. I should like to learn it.”
“You will find it more difficult than you imagine,” said Baron Z—, “that is if you have ever learned to sing; my wife has never been able to manage it, and she has often tried.”
“I shall learn to jodel and play the zither, too,” said Hamilton, “that is if I ever come to reside in Germany.”
“If,” said Baron Z—, and then he joined in the chorus of the song which was being sung at the table nearest them.
“How different the same scene looks in the gradually increasing light of early morning, and the deepening shades of approaching evening!” observed Baron Z—, as he leaned back in the carriage on their way home, and looked along the valley through which the road lay; it had become so narrow that it seemed about to close altogether, while a towering mountain, facing them as they advanced, appeared to prevent all further progress; “and yet I scarcely know which is to be preferred in a country of this description.”
“The evening, certainly the evening,” said Hamilton, looking round; “but a little earlier; the sun should still be on those rocks above us and make them successively yellow, red, copper-coloured, and violet, as I have seen them every evening from the garden of Hohenfels.”
“I wish,” said Baron Z—, “I wish that we could see them from the top of our alp to-night; we cannot expect this unclouded weather to last much longer.”