"Saturday, Aug. 12.—It is now half-past twelve o'clock, and I am sitting upon a sort of myrtle bed under a pine grove among the rocks, down which the headlong Aar cleaves its way, having dined in the cabin at Handeck, in close neighbourhood with our steeds. All that we have hitherto seen seemed at the moment but a faint preparation for the delights of this day. The beautiful valley we left behind us, the groves, the forest of oak and pine, the glades, the one particularly in which we met that 'Hoifer,' as we called him, with his heron's crest proudly reared upon his head, a little page carrying his accoutrements. He with many others, but none like this Hero, there was repairing to shoot for a prize at Meyringen. Then, those lovely vales, that circular one, the pride of them all, which led us to the savage Pass and giant Pines, where lurks this King of Waterfalls. What delicious couches to rest upon. Here to linger out a long summer's day would be a luxury. A more sober passage home—our spirits a little, but very little, damped by the stretch of enjoyment." (Mrs. Wordsworth's Journal.)
"Saturday, 12th August. Meyringen.—Crossed the stream, and re-crossed it, and from a stony hollow, uninhabited, came into the gloom of a pine forest, which led us, by a steep ascent, to the rocks surrounding the Fall of the Aar. Long before our approach, we heard the roaring, while that sound was deadened by the intermediate rocks and trees; but when standing on a bank, in front of the cataract, I could have believed at the first moment, that it was louder even than that of the Rhine at Schaffhausen. This impression, no doubt, was owing chiefly to its being confined within a narrow space. The pine-clad precipices, especially on the opposite side, are very lofty, rising from the rocks of the Pass, kept bare by continual wetting. The gloom of the forest-mountains, in harmony with the sombrous hue of the water, would, of itself, make this first view of this cataract much more impressive than that of the Reichenbach; but again we looked in vain—not for delicate passages in the stream;—those could not be thought of;—but for some of those minute graces, and those overgrowings that detain us in admiration beside our own pellucid waterfalls.[HN] There is a grey furnace-like smoke of water, and a desperate motion and ferment, that make the head dizzy and stun the ears." ... "We clambered upon other rocks; and, at leisure, noticed the variety of shrubby plants and flowers, which here (being higher than the stream) grew securely, nursed by perpetual dews. Luxuriant tufts of a very large sedum were lodged on the ledges, or hung from dark crevices; those tufts, in form and motion, as they waved and fluttered in the breeze of the cataract, resembling the plumes of a hearse, were an ornament well suited to the pine-clad steeps, and the heavenly beauty of the rainbow." (From Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, vol. i.)—Ed.
FOOTNOTES:
[HM] Compare Coleridge's Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni.—Ed.
[HN] Compare Wordsworth's remarks on Waterfalls, in his Description of the Scenery of the Lakes.—Ed.
XIII
MEMORIAL,
Near the Outlet of the Lake of Thun
"DEM
ANDENKEN
MEINES FREUNDES
ALOYS REDING
MDCCCXVIII"