“Veil’d from eternity, the Jungfrau soars,”
not a single massive pyramid, but a series of crests rising terrace-fashion above each other, with a zone of névés and glaciers. The pure, unsullied snow which always covers this mountain, it is supposed, gave occasion to its name, which signifies “the virgin.” It is a prime favorite with the Swiss,—the great Diana of the Oberland range. There is some spell, some mysterious potency in it. A sight never to be forgotten, is to behold the marble dome of this stately temple of nature, kindling in the fire of the setting sun, or silvering in the light of a full moon, with the gold-fringed clouds playing wantonly about,—
“To bathe the virgin’s marble brow,
Or crown her head with evening gold.”
On the Wengern Mountain, in full view of the Jungfrau, in 1816, Byron composed three of his noblest poems,—“The Prisoner of Chillon,” the third canto of “Childe Harold,” and “Manfred,” in the latter of which he describes the Jungfrau as
“This most steep, fantastic pinnacle,
The fretwork of some earthquake,—where the clouds
Pause to repose themselves in passing by.”
All the Alps have, more or less, naked excrescences, which rise above the crest of the range, and which, in the language of the country, are not inaptly termed “dents,” from some fancied and plausible resemblance to human teeth.
Professor Tyndall, writing of the wondrous scene presented by the Swiss mountains, says: “I asked myself, how was this colossal work performed? Who chiselled these mighty and picturesque masses out of a mere protuberance of the earth? And the answer was at hand. Ever young, ever mighty, with the vigor of a thousand years still within him, the real sculptor was even then climbing up the eastern sky. It was he who raised aloft the waters which cut out the ravines; it was he who planted the glaciers on the mountain slopes, thus giving gravity a plough to open up the valleys; and it is he who, acting through the ages, will finally lay low these mighty mountains, rolling them gradually seaward, sowing the seeds of continents to be, so that the people of another earth may see mould spread and corn wave over the hidden rocks which at this moment bear the weight of the Jungfrau.”