The view was perhaps the most beautiful, though not the most extensive,[47] I have seen from a snowy Alp, and the pleasure of it even in memory must be my excuse for having to some extent recalled its details.
But it is impossible to infuse into a catalogue of names any trace of the colouring of the original. I can only hope to induce some reader sceptical of the beauties of the snow-world to climb one of these Italian Alps for himself. But he must remember that it is not, as some critics of the Alpine Club seem to think, enough to have scaled a peak once or twice under unfavourable conditions in order to be capable and entitled to express an authoritative opinion on the scenery of the upper Alps. Time as well as place is required. One of those days, not rare in a southern summer, must be chosen, when the mountains are at rest from their task of moisture condensers, and stand basking in the sunshine and well-earned idleness.
At such moments the climber's toil is richly paid. Over his head stretches the pure vault of the sky, below lies a vast expanse of earth; the mountain-top seems poised between the two, a point in the centre of a hollow globe. From the refulgent snows of the neighbouring peak, glittering with such excess of light as to be scarcely endurable, the eye turns for relief to gaze up into the intense colour of the zenith, or wanders over miles of green and countless changes of blue distances to the saffron of the extreme chain which forms the link between earth and heaven.
Surely no one who has enjoyed such a view would deny the beauty of the forms and colours gathered round him. To represent to others the glory of the mountain-tops requires, it is true, either a poet or one of the greatest and rarest landscape painters. But even if these fail, if the scenery of the highest Alps proves altogether unpaintable and indescribable, it may yet be in the highest sense beautiful. The skill of the interpreter cannot be accepted as the measure of that which is to be interpreted, nor can the noble and delightful in nature be made subject to the limitations of art.
But the vision of those hours[48] on a great peak stretches beyond what is actually before the eyes. At such moments even the dullest soul shares with inarticulate emotion the feelings which poets have put into words for all ages. Our pulses beat in tune with the great pulse of Life which is breathing round us. We lose ourselves and become part of the vast order into the visible presence of which we seem for a brief space to have been translated. On a lesser height, whence some town is seen like a great ant-heap with the black insects hurrying backwards and forwards across its lanes, the insignificance of the human race is often painfully prominent. But here, removed by leagues of snow and ice and a mile or two of sheer height from the rest of our race, no such thought oppresses us. Man is merged in nature, cities have become specks, provinces are spread out like fields, the eye ranges across a kingdom. Through the stillness which fills the upper air the ear seems to catch from time to time some faint echo of
—— The deep music of the rolling world
Kindling within the strings of the waved air
Æolian modulations.
On its lofty standpoint the mind feels in harmony with the soul of the universe, and almost fancies itself to gain a glimpse of its workings.
Seen from the valley the sublimity of the mountain precipice may be due to a sentiment at root akin to terror. Grandeur is there shown in its most overpowering—a Frenchman might say brutal—form by some giant peak towering defiantly skywards, 'remote, serene, and inaccessible,' a chill colossus alien to human life. But on the peak we are conquerors; its terrors are left below and behind us. In our new scale of vision the Titans gathered in silent session round us are brothers. The masses which appeared from below 'confusedly hurled' have become ordered. The valleys unfold their labyrinths. The rivers, cleansed from all stain of early turbulence in the calm of heaven-reflecting lakes, are seen to set forth, at first gently directed and compelled by the lower hills, for the great plain where each has its own mission of life and bounty to fulfil. We are no longer, like the old-world theologian, frightened into thinking our mountain a monument of man's wickedness and God's anger, or like the modern philosopher, oppressed by the bulk of the giant; we know him in his true character as a