“If only to darken the darkness, O Thou in Thy heavens above,
Why dost Thou light for a moment the lamp of a beautiful thing?”
For in the Alps the lamp of Beauty burns without cessation; and where wondrous flowering pastures border some rough-cut lake, legacy from glaciers long since retired, the lamp burns always brightly.
By writing of inclemency in such full-flavoured tones, I am not trying to make the best of a bad case; I am simply and honestly setting forth the undoubted good there is in what may seem “impossible.” Any one who has lived with these things and has watched them springtime after springtime, is usually in no way eager to run away, although well aware that the sheltered distractions of the towns are within quite easy reach. One finds no really compensating counterpart in kursaals and shop-windows for an Alpine springtime where flowering pastures kiss “the crystal treasures of the liquid world.” One need not be a poet, one need not be a painter, one need not be a mystic, and one certainly need be no “neurasthenic” to appreciate the figurative sunshine of which spring’s Alpine inclemency is redolent. One has but to be natural—a sanely-simple human being, dismissing the hampering prejudices and conventions born of towns, and allowing the appeal of Nature to come freely into its own. Then oneself is busy a-weaving—a-weaving of cobweb dreams; and the cobwebs are woven of material worthy, substantial, and real. One’s dreams are not of that solid, sordid order, nor of that frail, unhealthy nature so common with dreams arising from unnatural town-life. They are children of completest sanity, and they are in no part begot of ennui. One builds, and one builds for health’s sake; nor does the building know aught of “castles in Spain.” There is no question here of anæmic fancy. All that one dreams is not only possible, but sound, touching upon realities which control and direct the best of destinies. Compared with town-life, one is in a new world; and it is often astounding to think that town-life is a necessity to which one is obliged to add the important word “imperative.”
And all this may be so even in wet weather. Here, even when clouds hold everything in damp and clinging embrace, we may
“Grow rich in that which never taketh rust.”
And grow rich quite comfortably; for have we not our mackintoshes and goloshes!
The Alps are not ours for climbing purpose only. They are not for us only when winter rules and gives us sports abounding, or when the snows retire to the cradles of the glaciers, and the days of late July and those of August and September grant us the conditions we most seek for long excursions. They are ours also for an intermediate season: a season of the utmost value, though, maybe, not for “sport.” Mr. Frederic Harrison, speaking of “the eternal mountains, vocal with all the most majestic and stirring appeals to the human spirit,” and of the treatment of them by those who think only of “rushing from pass to pass and from peak to peak in order to beat Tompkins time or establish a new record,” says: “Switzerland might be made one of the most exquisite schools of every sense of beauty, one of the most pathetic schools of spiritual wonder.” And Mr. Harrison is right: this school exists, and is no mere fiction wrought of sentimental thinking. Nor is it ever closed to students—although there be periods when the attendance is lamentably slack. We know that its doors stand wide open in the winter and in the summer; let it be known, and as well known, that they stand equally wide open in the spring. Let it be known, moreover, that in spite sometimes of fickle, fitful weather, it is in the spring, above all other seasons, that this school is “one of the most exquisite schools of every sense of beauty, one of the most pathetic schools of spiritual wonder.”
Then once again,