Flowers.
There is a strange, unsatisfying pleasure about flowers, which, like all earthly pleasures, is akin to pain. What can you do with them?—you want to do something, but what? Take them all up and carry them with you? You cannot do that. Get down and look at them? What, keep a whole caravan waiting for your observation? That will never do. Well, then, pick and carry them along with you. That is what, in despair of any better resource, I did.... It seemed almost sacrilegious to tear away such fanciful creations, that looked as if they were votive offerings on an altar, or, more likely, living existences, whose only conscious life was a continual exhalation of joy and praise.
These flowers seemed to me to be the Earth’s raptures and aspirations,—her better moments—her lucid intervals. Like everything else in our existence, they are mysterious.
In what mood of mind were they conceived by the great Artist? Of what feelings of His are they the expression,—springing up out of the dust, in the gigantic, waste, and desolate regions, where one would think the sense of His almightiness might overpower the soul? Born in the track of the glacier and the avalanche, they seem to say to us that this Almighty Being is very pitiful, and of tender compassion; that, in His infinite soul, there is an exquisite gentleness and love of the beautiful, and that, if we would be blessed, His will to bless is infinite.
Mountain air.
I look at the strange, old, cloudy mountains, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn, the Schreckhorn. A kind of hazy ether floats around them—an indescribable aerial halo—which no painter ever represents. Who can paint the air,—that vivid blue in which these sharp peaks cut their glittering images?
The mysterious in nature.