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Suddenly it makes a leap of thirty feet in three dark masses, and rolls in silver spray down a funnel of verdure. A fine dew gushes over the turf and gives life to it, and its rolling pearls sparkle as they glide along the leaves. Our northern fields afford no notion of such vividness; this unceasing coolness with this fiery sun is needed in order to paint the vegetable robe with such a magnificent hue.
I saw a great, wooded mountain-side stretch sloping away before me; the noonday sun beat down upon it; the mass of white rays pierced through the vault of the trees; the leaves glowed in splendor, either transparent or radiated. Over all this lighted slope no shadow could be distinguished; a warm, luminous evaporation covered all, like the white veil of a woman. I have often since seen this strange garb of the mountains, especially towards evening; the bluish atmosphere enclosed in the gorges becomes visible; it grows thick, it imprisons the light and makes it palpable. The eye delights in penetrating into the fair network of gold that envelopes the ridges, sensitive to the softness and depth of it; the salient edges lose their hardness, the harsh contours are softened; it is heaven, descending and lending its veil to cover the nakedness of the savage daughters of the earth. Pardon me these metaphors; I appear, perhaps, to be studying turns of expression, and yet I am only recounting my sensations.
From this place a meadow-path leads to the gorge of the Serpent: this is a gigantic notch in the perpendicular mountain. The brook that runs through it crawls along overborne by heaped-up blocks; its bed is nothing but a ruin.
