"Her beauty dazzles the thick wood; The mountains, as ye heard, rejoice Or of the "sweet Highland Girl," with her " very shower of beauty;" or of a Peri from Paradise weeping; or of a saint into Paradise entering, "having shot the gulf of death;" or of the feet upon the mountains, of them that bring the news of glad ness: "Or of some bird or star, Fluttering in woods or lifted far." When the Poet Wordsworth approached this celebrated cascade, he seems to have been assailed with a young troop of tattered mendicants, singing in a sort of Alpine whoop of welcome, in notes shrill and wild like those intertwined by some caverned witch chaunting a love-spell. His mind was so taken up, and his thoughts enthralled by this musical tribe haunting the place with regret and useless pity, that his Muse left him with but just one line for "This bold, this pure, this sky-born WATERFALL!" The traveller should see it with its rainbows, and may, if he choose, read Henry Vaughan's lines before it, which may set forth an image of the arches both of light and water. "When thou dost shine, darkness looks white and fair; Forms turn to music, clouds to smiles and air; Of thy Lord's hand, the object of his eye! There are some thirty cascades like this pouring over the cliffs in this remarkable Valley, hanging like long tassels or skeins of silver thread adown the perpendicular face of the crags, and seeming to dangle from the clouds, when the mist is suspended over the valley. Some of them spring directly from the icy glaciers, but others come from streams, which in the course of the summer are quite dried up. The name of the Valley, Lauterbrunnen, is literally nothing but fountains, derived from the multitude of little streams, which, after careering for some time out of sight on the higher mountain summits, spring over the vast abrupt wall of this deep ravine, and reach the bottom in so many rainbow showers of spray. Between these prodigious rock-barriers, the vale is sunk so deep, that the sun in the winter does not get down into it before twelve o'clock, and then speedily disappears. In the summer he stays some hours earlier and longer. The inhabitants of the village are about 1350, in houses sprinkled up and down along the borders of the torrent, that swiftly courses through the bottom of the Valley, about 2500 feet above the level of the sea. CHAPTER XVI. The Wengern Alp and morning landscape and music. AND now we leave the village, and the lovely waterfall, and rise from the Valley, to cross the Wengern Alp. We are full of expectation, but the scene on setting out is so indescribably beautiful, that even if dark clouds should settle on all the rest of the day, and shut out the glorious Jungfrau from our view, it would have been well worth coming thus far to see only the beginning of the glory. As we wind our way up the steep side of the mountain, the mists are slowly and gracefully rising from the depths of the Valley, along the face of the outjutting crags. It seems as if the genius of nature were drawing a white soft veil around her bosom. But now, as we rise still farther, the sun, pouring his fiery rays against the opposite mountain, makes it seem like a smoking fire begirt with clouds. You think of Mount Sinai all in a blaze with the glory of the steps of Deity. The very rocks are burning, and the green forests also. Then there are the white glittering masses of the Breithorn and the Mittachshorn in the distance, and a cascade shooting directly out from the glacier. Upwards the mists are still curling and hanging to the mountains, while below there are the clumps of trees in the sunlight, the deep exquisite green of spots of unveiled meadow, the winding stream, now hid and now revealed, the grey mist sleeping on the tender grass, the chalets shining, the brooks murmuring, the birds singing, the sky above and the earth beneath, in this "incense breathing morn uniting in a universal harmony of beauty, and melody of praise. "In such a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea, Which brought us hither; Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore !" And in such a season, on such a height as this, in such a morning, away from Home, as well as in the woodbine walk at Eve, that "dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home is sweetest," may not the sensitive mind experience the feeling, spoken of by John Foster as the sentiment of intent and devout observers of the material world, "that there is through all nature some mysterious element like soul, which comes, with a deep significance, to mingle itself with their own conscious being?" May not such observers find in nature "a scene marked all over with mystical figures, the prints and traces, as it were, of the frequentation and agency of superior spirits? They find it sometimes concentrating their faculties to curious and minute inspection, sometimes dilating them to the expansion of vast and magnificent forms; sometimes beguiling them out of all precise recognition of material realities, whether small or great, into visionary musings, and habitually and in all ways conveying into the mind trains and masses of ideas of an order not to be acquired in the schools, and exerting a modifying and assimilating influence on the whole mental economy.' A clear intellectual illustration of all this, Foster well remarks, would be the true Philosophy of Nature. A philosophy like this is yet but little known and less acknowledged. It cannot but be truth, and truth which finds utterance in the highest strains of poetic inspiration, in a quiet, meditative mind, like Cowper's, quiet, but not visionary, religious, not vaguely and mystically sentimental, that "One Spirit, His Who wore the platted crown with bleeding brows Rules universal nature. The soul that sees Him, or receives, sublimed, New faculties, or learns at least to employ Terrestrial in the vast and the minute; And wheels his throne upon the rolling worlds!" And how can an immortal being in God's world avoid acknowledging and feeling this? Can the soul of man be the only thing that does not praise God in such a scene? Alas, it may, if divine grace be not there. The landscape has his praise, but not its Author. Nay, you may sometimes hear the most tremendous oaths of admiration, where God's sacred name drops from the lips in blistering impiety, while meek unconscious nature, all undisturbed and quiet, singeth her matin hymn of gratitude and love. But again, you may see the eye of the gazer suffused with tears of ecstasy, and if you could look into the heart, you would see the whole being ascending with the choral harmony of nature, in a worship still more sacred and holy than her own. God be praised for the gift of his Spirit! What insensible, stupid, impious stones we should be, without divine grace. But let us go on; we are not the only mixture of good and evil that hath flitted across this mountain. We pass now the Wengern village, a few very neat chalets hanging to the mountain amidst plenty of verdure. Then we sweep round the circular base of a craggy perpendicular mountain ridge, which encloses us on one side, while the deep Valley of Lauterbrunnen is hid out of sight on the other. Here we stop to listen to the Alpine Horn, with its clear and beautiful echoes. It is nothing but a straight wooden trumpet, about six feet long, requiring no small quantity of breath to give it utterance. The Old Man of the Mountains, that old Musician, coeval with the first noise in creation, takes up the melody with his mighty reverberating concave wall of granite, and sends it back with a prolonged, undulating, ringing, clear, distinct tone, the effect of which is indescribably charming. Our lad of the horn has also a little cannon, which he fires off at the instance of the traveller, and the mountain sends it back with a thousand thunders, that roll in grand bursts of sound from the distant crags, and again, from still more distant ridges, reverberate magnificently. |