Children of the young June hours,
In their sweet haunts blow.”
Principal Shairp.
“On prête aux riches,” and here is Nature lending yet more wealth to fields that were already so wealthy! It is simply amazing with what doting enthusiasm she pours her floral riches upon the Alps! Many who know only the June fields in England think that we who write of the Swiss fields at this season are either in a chronic state of hysteria, or else do wilfully point our story as if it were a snake story or the story of a tiger-hunt. But, let the fact be known, in writing or speaking upon this subject, the exigencies of the English language oblige us to be temperate; it is quite impossible to exaggerate. We may use all the adjectives in Webster, yet have we not even then said enough. Acutely conscious of our ineffectual effort, we have, nevertheless, done our best. We could say no more: the rest we must feel, and endeavour that our readers shall feel with us.
In the EARLY JULY FIELDS at Champex.
Maybe it is with us as it was with Robert Louis Stevenson when he was at Davos in search of a remedy for the malady that afterwards drove him to Samoa and to an early grave upon her mountains—maybe all our “little fishes talk like whales”; but, believe us, whale-talk is the only talk befitting. If Stevenson finds “it is the Alps who are to blame,” we find it is quite as much the fault of the Alpine flora; and if Stevenson found comfort in the fact that he was not alone in being forced to “this yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting architecture of the sentence,” so also can we.
We English are not the only ones to find ourselves at the ineffectual extreme of language. The German tourist—and he is nowadays more enterprisingly early than are we in visiting the Alps—is equally at a loss, as he stands in wonderment and, with characteristic emphasis, repeatedly utters the one resounding word “Kolossal!” Even the Englishman loses his habitual reserve, and, if he does not voice his wonderment as loudly as does his Teutonic brother, he is at least amazed in his own insular way. Assuredly, if these flowers themselves could speak, and speak out frankly, they would declare our seemingly over-coloured appreciation a very tame performance; they would vouch that we are a long way from being in the shoes of the proverbial amateur fisherman.
But let me, without further ado, attempt to describe some of the cause for this. Let me turn again for example to Champex and to notes made on the spot, and speak of a seven-hours’ walk down the rapid southern slopes which fall away from the lake, by the village of Prassorny, along the Val Ferret to Praz de Fort and the massif of Saleinaz, and back again to Champex by that scramble of a path which mounts the slopes directly from the village of Ville d’Issert. This walk takes us from 4,800 feet down to some 3,300 feet, and affords us as representative a range of slopes and fields as we could find anywhere. Starting amid rolling hectares of Orchids and Lilies, passing along wide slopes bestrewn with Lychnis and Anthericum, winding through copse and forest-edge peopled with Everlasting Pea and Alpine Eglantine, we arrive by entrancing stages amid crowded meadows of Salvia, Bistort, Ranunculus, Campion, Marguerite, Geranium, Campanula, and Phyteuma—meadows which, in long and wide-flung swell, sweep like a multi-coloured wave to lave the snowy sides and graceful, flowing forms of the Groupe du Grand Saint-Bernard and Grand Golliaz.