Or rain-storms on the glacier burst.”
It is easy to have cascades in Switzerland, with its vast bodies of snow at an elevation which does not preclude melting in summer, and from which the water has to find its way down rocky precipices, sometimes thousands of feet. The most noted of these cascades are the Giessbach and the Staubbach. The first consists of a succession of seven cascades, embowered in foliage, leaping from a height of eleven hundred feet, and finally losing themselves in the waters of the Lake of Brienz; the soft winds swing the spray as light as a mist of the sunrise or the gentle sway of a bridal veil, while the rainbow hues rest like kisses on its silver threads. The Falls of Staubbach, or Fall of Dust, is well named; it is so ethereal, or dust-like, that it appears at times about to sail away like a cloud on the wings of the wind; it apparently creeps down from its lofty rock, a thousand feet on high, and seems to throw itself timidly into the abyss, and to win slowly against the mass of air. This retarded appearance in the fall is caused by its being broken into mist soon after it leaves the shelf over which it is precipitated. In its centre the fall is purely vapor; but the rock advancing somewhat towards the base, it collects again into water as it strikes it and forms a stream at the bottom. It has been compared by poets to “the tail of the white horse on which death was mounted,” and called a “sky-born waterfall,” and Goethe describes it,—
“Streams from the high,
Steep, rocky wall,
The purest fount;
In clouds of spray,
Like silver dust,
It veils the rock
In rainbow hues
And, dancing down,