There we had the whole story. His enterprising neighbors had invaded the domestic hearth, shot his mother, and eaten her up, made her skin into chamois leather, and were keeping him till he got big enough for the same disposition, using his talents meanwhile to turn a penny upon; yet not a word of all this thought he; not a bit the less heartily did he caper; never speculated a minute on why it was, on the origin of evil, or any thing of the sort; or, if he did, at least never said a word about it. I gave one good look into his soft, round, glassy eyes, and could see nothing there but the most tranquil contentment. He had finished his cabbage leaf, and we had finished our call; so we will go on.
It was now drawing towards evening, and the air began to be sensibly and piercingly cold. One effect of this mountain air on myself is, to bring on the most acute headache that I ever recollect to have felt. Still, the increasing glory and magnificence of the scenery overcame bodily fatigue. Mont Blanc, and his army of white-robed brethren, rose before us in the distance, glorious as the four and twenty elders around the great white throne. The wonderful gradations of coloring in this Alpine landscape are not among the least of its charms. How can I describe it? Imagine yourself standing with me on this projecting rock, overlooking a deep, piny gorge, through which flow the brawling waters of the Arve. On the other side of this rise mountains whose heaving swells of velvet green, cliffs and dark pines, are fully made out and colored; behind this mountain, rises another, whose greens are softened and shaded, and seem to be seen through a purplish veil; behind that rises another, of a decided cloud-like purple; and in the next still the purple tint changes to rosy lilac; while above all, like another world up in the sky, mingling its tints with the passing clouds, sometimes obscured by them, and then breaking out between them, lie the glacier regions. These glaciers, in the setting sun, look like rivers of light pouring down from the clouds. Such was the scene, which I remember with perfect distinctness as enchaining my attention on one point of the road.
We had now got up to the valley of Chamouni. I looked before me, and saw, lying in the lap of the green valley, a gigantic pile of icy pillars, which, seen through the trees, at first suggested the idea of a cascade.
"What is that?" said I to the guide.
"The Glacier de Boisson."
I may as well stop here, and explain to you, once for all, what a glacier is. You see before you, as in this case, say thirty or forty mountain peaks, and between these peaks what seem to you frozen rivers. The snow from time to time melting, and dripping down the sides of the mountain, and congealing in the elevated hollows between the peaks, forms a half-fluid mass—a river of ice—which is called a glacier.
As it lies upon the slanting surface, and is not entirely solid throughout, the whole mass is continually pushing, with a gradual but imperceptible motion, down into the valleys below.
At a distance these glaciers, as I have said before, look like frozen rivers; when one approaches nearer, or where they press downward into the valley, like this Glacier de Boisson, they look like immense crystals and pillars of ice piled together in every conceivable form. The effect of this pile of ice, lying directly in the lap of green grass and flowers, is quite singular. The village of Chamouni itself has nothing in particular to recommend it. The buildings and every thing about it have a rough, coarse appearance. Before we had entered the valley this evening the sun had gone down; the sky behind the mountains was clear, and it seemed for a few moments as if darkness was rapidly coming on. On our right hand were black, jagged, furrowed walls of mountain, and on our left Mont Blanc, with his fields of glaciers and worlds of snow; they seemed to hem us in, and almost press us down. But in a few moments commenced a scene of transfiguration, more glorious than any thing I had witnessed yet. The cold, white, dismal fields of ice gradually changed into hues of the most beautiful rose color. A bank of white clouds, which rested above the mountains, kindled and glowed, as if some spirit of light had entered into them. You did not lose your idea of the dazzling, spiritual whiteness of the snow, yet you seemed to see it through a rosy veil. The sharp edges of the glaciers, and the hollows between the peaks, reflected wavering tints of lilac and purple. The effect was solemn and spiritual above every thing I have ever seen. These words, which had been often in my mind through the day, and which occurred to me more often than any others while I was travelling through the Alps, came into my mind with a pomp and magnificence of meaning unknown before—"For by Him were all things created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers; all things are by him and for him; and he is before all things, and by him all things subsist."
In this dazzling revelation I saw not that cold, distant, unfeeling fate, or that crushing regularity of power and wisdom, which was all the ancient Greek or modern Deist can behold in God; but I beheld, as it were, crowned and glorified, one who had loved with our loves, and suffered with our sufferings. Those shining snows were as his garments on the Mount of Transfiguration, and that serene and ineffable atmosphere of tenderness and beauty, which seemed to change these dreary deserts into worlds of heavenly light, was to me an image of the light shed by his eternal love on the sins and sorrows of time, and the dread abyss of eternity.