Two seas have dwelt upon these summits; two streams of burning rock have erected these chains. What will be the next revolution? How long time will man yet last? A contraction of the crust which bears him will cause a wave of lava to gush forth or will displace the level of the seas. We live between two accidents of the soil; our history occupies, with room to spare, a line in the history of the earth; our life depends upon a variation in the heat; our duration is for a moment, and our force a nothing. We resemble the little blue forget-me-nots which you pluck as you go down the slope; their form is delicate, their structure admirable; nature lavishes them and crushes them; she uses all her industry in shaping them, and all her carelessness in destroying them. There is more art in them than in the whole mountain. Have they any ground for pretending that the mountain was made for them?
III.
Paul has climbed the Pic du Midi of Bigorre: here is his journal of the trip:—
“Set out in the mist at four o’clock in the morning. The pastures of Tau through the mist; the mist is distinctly visible. The lake of Oncet through the mist; same view.
“Howker of the Five Bears. Several whitish or grayish spots on a whitish or grayish ground. To form an idea of it, look at five or six wafers, of a dirty white, stuck behind a leaf of blotting-paper.
“Beginning of the steep rise; ascent at a footpace, head of one to tail of another; this recalls to me Leblanc’s riding-school, and the fifty horses advancing gracefully in the saw-dust, each one with his nose against the tail of the one before him, and his tail against the nose of his follower, as it used to be on Thursdays, the school-day for going out and for the riding lesson. I cradle myself voluptuously in the poetical remembrance.
