What can be more divine than these Alps? Elsewhere I have called them "the common altar of Europe." And wherefore? Not on account of their height,—a little higher, or a little lower, one is no nearer heaven,—but because the grand harmony, elsewhere vague, is palpable here. The solidarity of life, the circulation of nature, the beneficent concord of the elements,—all is visible. It kindles a glorious illumination.
Each chain filters from its glacier, as a revelation of the inaccessible zone, a torrent which, concentrated, tranquillized and purified in an ample lake,—translated into pure and azure water,—emerges as a great river, and diffuses everywhere the soul of the Alps. From these innumerable waters reascend to the mountains the mists which renew the treasure of their glaciers.
All is in such perfect sympathy, and the perspectives are so noble, that the lakes and their rivers still reflect or survey, as they wander afar, the grave assemblage of the mountains, the upper snows, the sublime virgin peaks of which they are an emanation.
They face, they explain one another, harmonize with and love one another. But in what austerity! In their mutual love we recognize an identity of the strongest contrasts,—fixity and fluidity, rapidity and eternity, the snows above the verdure, forebodings of winter in summer.
Hence results a prudent nature, a general sagacity in the things themselves. One enjoys without forgetting that one's enjoyment will not be of long duration. But the heart is not the less moved by a world of such seriousness and purity. This brevity attracts, and this austerity takes one captive. From the gleaming snows to the lakes, from the woods to the rivers and to the fresh emerald meads, a sovereign virginity predominates over the whole country.
Such localities are for all the seasons of life. Old age grows strengthened by its association with nature, and greets without melancholy the grand shadows falling from the mountains. And hearts still young, which feel only the morning and the dawn, expand to the charming joys of religious tenderness,—tenderness for the Soul of the world, tenderness for its smallest infants.
The favourite place for our walks, and our usual studio, was a small grove of firs situated at a tolerable elevation above the lake, in the rear of the rock of Seeberg. We ascended thither by two routes doubly illuminated by the mighty radiance of the splendid mirror in which the four cantons are reflected. No landscape can be more gentle, if we look towards Lucerne; none more serious or solemn, in the direction of St. Gothard and the amphitheatre of mountains. But all this grandeur and brightness terminated suddenly at the first step we took beneath our firs. It was as if one had reached the end of the world. The light lessened; sounds seemed subdued; life itself appeared absent.
Such, at the first glance, is the customary effect of the woods. But at the second all is changed. The suffocation, or at least subordination, imposed by the fir upon all those plants which would fain grow in its shade, lets light into the depths; and when the eyes have become accustomed to this kind of gloaming, we see considerably further, and distinguish much more clearly, than in the inextricable labyrinth of ordinary forests where everything acts as an obstruction.