Earth’s universal face, deep hid, and chill,
Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide
The works of man. Drooping, the laborer ox
Stands covered o’er with snow——”
But let us away to the mountains! Far up in a gorge of the Alleghanies we will stand, with the clouds whirling wildly around and beneath, and the wind whistling shrilly far down in some ravine, which we may not see; for all around us is, as it were, a shoreless ocean, buried in a ghastly mist, from which the tall cliffs jut up like islands—and ever, ever comes to our ears from this boiling vortex a sound as of many waves chafing against the shore, like that which the priest of Apollo listened to as he walked all disconsolate, bereft of his fair-haired daughter, back from the tents of the stern Hellenes to the towers of Ilium. The air is full of snow-flakes, driving hither and thither—thick, thick, thicker they descend—you cannot see a fathom before you. Take care how you tread, for a false step may plunge you into an abyss a thousand feet plumb down. Not far from here is the very spot where an unwary traveller, on a night like this, but a bare twelve-month since, slipped from the edge of the precipice, and was never heard of again, until the warm sunny breath of April, melting the snows from beneath the shadows of the hills, disclosed him lying unburied, with his face turned up, as if in mockery, to the bright heavens on which his eye might never look again. In vain had loved ones watched for his coming until their eyes grew weary, and their hearts turned to fountains of tears within them—in vain had a wife or mother kindled the cheery fire, or smoothed for him the bed of down, to welcome him after his absence—for
“——his sheets are more white,
And his canopy grander,
And sounder he sleeps
Where the hill-foxes wander.”
We are in the mountains, in the midst of a snow-storm, and, as we look around, we feel that Jehovah, as when Moses heard the noise of a mighty wind, is passing by. There is a vague emotion of mingled wonder, fear and awe, overshadowing our soul as we stand here alone in the tempest. See how the drift is spinning in the whirlwind; and now it streams out like a pennant on the night. Hark! to the deep organ peal of the hurricane as it thunders among the peaks high up above us—listen to the wild shrieks rising, we know not whither, as if the spirits of the mountain were writhing on beds of torture, as the olden legends say, all unpardoned by their Creator. And now—louder and wilder than the rest—sounding upwards from the gulf below, a voice of agony and might—sublime even in its tribulation, awful in its expression of gigantic suffering—like that of him whom the seer of the Apocalypse beheld bound hand and foot and cast into the bottomless pit, despite an unyielding conflict of twice ten thousand years. Ruin!—ruin!—all is ruin around us. We see not the burying of hamlets, we hear not the descent of avalanches, but the sky is lit up with a wan glare, the whole air is full of mysterious sounds, and we feel, with a strange all-pervading fear, that destruction will glut herself ere morning. God help the traveller who is abroad to-night!