There is something like benediction in a night-vision of the magic Jungfrau—peerless “bride of quietness.” With such an appealing spectacle in view, what wonder that the houses have so many windows, or the night “a thousand eyes.” It is the master touch to Interlaken, completing and glorifying the picture as it banks the far end of the valley with towering clouds of snow. Neither Mont Blanc nor the Matterhorn may rival this queen of the Alps, so charming in outline, vast in bulk, and ravishing in purity. It could not fail to dominate any region of earth, and Interlaken acknowledges its supremacy with a completeness that is not without a certain flavor of proprietorship. Each hillside has its view-pavilion, belvedere, or simple clearing, like so many chapels for devotion. We come each morning for our sunrise view, pass the day in adoration, marvel at sunset and the afterglow, and close the evening with a wonderwist contemplation of the phantom peak in moonlight. Of these “stations” of the mount, the afterglow is the climax. Nor is the reason far to seek, once you have stood among the awed and reverent throng that crowds the Höhenmatte each late afternoon, and have seen black night about you in the valley, while, for an hour or more after, the snowfields of the Jungfrau’s summits still continued to blaze brilliantly in full sunshine. And then, as we watched, there came the color-miracle of glittering white merging into every hue of the rose, into scarlet stains and a deluge of crimson, into deepening tints and sombre shades of blue, and finally fading gradually to a misty, grayish, cloudy shadow as the last fires burned out and the great mountain paled to a phantom of the night.
“When daylight dies,
The azure skies
Seem sparkling with a thousand eyes,
That watch with grace
From depths of space
The sleeping Jungfrau’s lovely face.”
How spirit-like, how faint and fair the magic mountain swims at night among its silver cloud veils! What serenity and majesty invest it! Did God here plan another flood, and stay His hand when He had heaped an angry ocean into this dread tidal wave and left it piled in suspended motion, with giant frozen seas, furious with foam, mounting to that appalling crest that seems to dash its icy spray against the very skies? No man may look with undaunted heart upon the chaos of its glittering snowy plains, vast, chaste, and spectral in the moonlight. How base and contemptible appear the petty pursuits of man in the presence of such thrilling sublimity! It reconciles him to his lot in life, where his “much” is really so very little; and inspires courage, and shames the heart from low, ignoble ends.
There is reverent awe in thoughts of the breathless hush of the far, white vales no man has trod; the remote and shuddering abysses into which the very birds of the air look down with affright. There is magic of inspiration in its sublime aloofness—as with those “unheard melodies that are sweetest,” those supremest joys that lie beyond attainment. Through the hidden, echoing caverns of this fair, pallid mount wan spirits of Snowland may even now be dancing; along its lonely, lovely glades are “horns of elfland faintly blowing.” Of its profoundest and most secret mysteries not even the friendly moon may have too curious knowledge—mysteries unknown of man since first the morning stars sang together.
