express the inexpressible. The sky of the mountain is “rosy violet,” which blends with “the deep zenithal blue”; it wears “a strange and supernatural air”; he sees clear spaces of amber and ethereal green; the blue light in the cave of the glacier presents an aspect of “magical beauty.” There is true worship of the idol in the following lines descriptive of sunrise on Mont Blanc:
The mountain rose for a time cold and grand, with no apparent stain upon his snows. Suddenly the sunbeams struck his crown and converted it into a boss of gold. For some time it remained the only gilded summit in view, holding communion with the dawn, while all the others waited in silence. These, in the order of their heights, came afterwards, relaxing, as the sunbeams struck each in succession, into a blush and smile.
Tyndall holds the mastership of polychromatic description of the beauties of the mountain; he makes us feel his own response to their call to the depths of æsthetic perception in the human soul. Words gush forth from him in a fervour of gratitude for the pleasures of the eye. He may measure and weigh, he may set out as an emissary of cold scientific investigation: he returns hot with admiration and raving of the marvels of God upon the
hills. But even he reaches a point where the realization of the utter inadequacy of expression paralyses the desire to convey the emotion to others. “I was absolutely struck dumb by the extraordinary majesty of this scene,” he writes of one evening, “and watched it silently till the red light faded from the highest summits.”
Verestchagin astonished his wife by painting his studies of snow in the Himalayas at an altitude of 14,000 feet, tormented by hunger and thirst and supported by two coolies, who held him on each side. She had the pluck and the endurance to follow him on his long climbs, but being a less exalted mortal, her sense of fitness was unduly strained by the intensity of Verestchagin's devotion to clouds and mountain-tops. “His face is so frightfully swollen,” she tells us, “that his eyes look merely like two wrinkles, the sun scorches his head, his hand can scarcely hold the palette, and yet he insists on finishing his sketches. I cannot imagine,” she reflects, “how Verestchagin could make such studies.” There were, nevertheless, occasions when the inaction, following on intense æsthetic emotion, stayed Verestchagin's busy brush. One day, relates
Madame Verestchagin, he went out to sketch the sunset:
He prepared his palette, but the sight was so beautiful that he waited in order to examine it better. Several thousand feet below us all was wrapped in a pure blue shadow; the summits of the peaks were resplendent in purple flames. Verestchagin waited and waited and would not begin his sketch. “By and by, by and by,” said he; “I want to look at it still; it is splendid!” He continued to wait, he waited until the end of the evening—until the sun was set and the mountains were enveloped in dark shadows. Then he shut up his paint-box and returned home.
As I read these lines I find myself wondering how many paint-boxes have been shut up by the sight of the mountains. I know many have been opened, and, amongst these, not a few which might have served humanity better by remaining shut. But we may safely assume that despite the general tendency of mountain worshippers to attempt to paint—in colours strong and language divine—the effect on their minds, there are exceptional instances of noble and self-imposed dumbness. Not the dumbness which is practising the old device of—
Reculer pour mieux sauter,