Trees, herds, and swains involving in the sweep,
The mass flies furious from the aerial steep,
Leaps down the mountain’s side, with many a bound,
In fiery whirls, and smokes along the ground.”[95]
Every movement that is grand or beautiful in the course of rushing waters seems to be the mission of mountain streams to illustrate. The fierce rivers rush over rocks with such aimless force that the violence of the torrent creates a back sweep of the overdriven, mad waves; here and there in the bed of these rivers are seen blocks of stone, many of them as large as a good-sized house, heaped up most strangely, jammed in by their angles, in equilibrium on a point, or forming perilous bridges over which you may with proper precaution pick your way to the other side. The quarry from which the materials of this bridge came is just above your head, and the miners are still at work,—air, water, frost, weight, and time. Other blocks are only waiting for the last moment of the great lever of nature to take the horrid leap, and bury under some hundred feet of new chaotic ruins the trees and the verdant lawn below. All round is the sound of water, the beat of the waves on the shore, the onward flowing of the river, the rush of the torrent, the splash of the waterfall, or the bubbling of some little stream; everywhere the music of a hurrying stream accompanies you. Every valley has its roar and rush of water and cataracts leaping to join the chorus of torrents below, making one appreciate Wordsworth’s line,—
“The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep.”
There is something which fascinates more in the free life, the young energy, the sparkling transparency, and merry music of the smaller streams. The upper Swiss valleys are sweet with perpetual streamlets, that seem always to have “chosen the steepest places to come down for the sake of the leaps, scattering their handfuls of crystals this way and that, as the wind takes them, with all the grace, but with none of the formalism of fountains, until at last they find their way down to the turf, and lose themselves in that, silently; with quiet depth of clear water furrowing among the grass-blades and looking only like their shadows, but presently emerging again in little startled gushes and laughing hurries, as if they had remembered suddenly that the day was too short for them to get down the hill.” On summer days even the glaciers are furrowed with thousands of threads of water; innumerable little rills, which run and sparkle over its sides like streams of quicksilver, and which disappear suddenly in the moulins, at the bottom of which invisible canals join the extremity of the glacier. At night all these brooklets are silent, and stopped; the cold congeals and imprisons them in a thin coating of ice, which evaporates again the next day. Of these mountain streams our own poet Bryant writes,—
“Thy springs are in the cloud; thy stream
Begins to move and murmur first
Where ice-peaks feed the noonday beam,