Tennyson.
Although Nature is moving apace, and the poet declares he has even “heard the grasses springing underneath the snow”; although one set of flowers is surplanting another in startlingly swift succession, and the first-fruits of the Alpine year are already on the wane, we will take our own time and study this progress with deliberate care and attention. We have seen May smiling; we ought—nay, we are in duty bound—to see her frowning. Like the récluse of Walden, we ought each of us to become a “self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms.”
JUNE MEADOWS of Salvia, Lychnis, &c., in the Val Ferret, just before arriving at the village of Praz de Fort.
An undoubtedly noble and proper philosophy assures us that there is truth and beauty in no matter what condition, and that they who see nothing but what is tiresome or hideous in certain estates, draw the overplus of tiresomeness and hideousness from their own selves. “Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty,” says this philosophy; “how, then,” it queries, “can any condition be unbeautiful? Is it not yourselves who are in part lacking in a sense of loveliness, since truth can never really be unbeautiful?”
Now, whatever we think of this as a species of sophistry, it behoves us to look into it with quiet and decent care. An everyday world, deep in its old conventions, will declare that it is certainly straining a point to try thus to make all geese appear as swans. With the exception of the poet minded to verse the innate grandeur of gloom, the entire sublimity of storm, the entrancing mellowness of fog and rain, and the wild joy which comes with a blizzard; or perhaps of the painter minded to achieve in paint what the poet is doing in ink (both of them, most probably, contriving their rhapsodies within the snug seclusion of their rooms)—with the exception of these two privileged persons comfortably absorbed in justifying a bias, an everyday world, voting bad weather a kill-joy and mar-plot, will find happiness only in avoiding and forgetting it.
Be that as it may; be fog, wind, and cloud and driving rain and sleet a luxury in which we should revel—or not; of all places in the world in bad weather, the Alps at springtide and at the altitude at which we are now studying them, are probably among the most interesting and absorbing. Let an everyday world, or as much of it as can, come and judge for itself.
If in our composition we have a grain of love for Nature and for Nature-study, there is a fund of opportunity for exercising it even in cloudland at its gloomiest; and if, as in the present case, we are bent upon studying the flowers and the means for their more adequate reception into our English homelands, then bad weather holds for us an amount of experience such as will aid us materially in our object. “Inclemency” takes so large a share in the nurture of these flowers. By companying with them when steeped in cloud and swept by wind, we catch an important glimpse of the grim and forceful side of their existence which is a prime cause of the superlative loveliness that so impresses us when the sun does shine from out an immaculate azure.