ng which is not death nor sleep, but the pure image of both.
The hands are not lifted in prayer, neither folded, but the arms are
laid at length upon the body, and the hands cross as they fall. The
feet are hidden by the drapery, and the form of the limbs concealed,
but not their tenderness.

86. I do not know any district possessing a more pure or uninterrupted
fulness of mountain character, (and that of the highest order,) or
which appears to have been less disturbed by foreign agencies, than
that which borders the course of the Trient between Valorsine and
Martigny. The paths which lead to it out of the valley of the Rhone,
rising at first in steep circles among the walnut trees, like winding
stairs among the pillars of a Gothic tower, retire over the shoulders
of the hills into a valley almost unknown, but thickly inhabited by an
industrious and patient population. Along the ridges of the rocks,
smoothed by old glaciers into long, dark, billowy swellings, like the
backs of plunging dolphins, the peasant watches the slow colouring of
the tufts of moss and roots of herb, which little by little gather a
feeble soil over the iron substance; then, supporting the narrow slip
of clinging ground with a few stones, he subdues it to the spade; and
in a year or two a little crest of corn is seen waving upon the rocky
casque. The irregular meadows run in and out like inlets of lake among
these harvested rocks, sweet with perpetual streamlets that seem
always to have chosen the steepest places to come down for the sake of
the leaps, scattering their handfuls of crystal this way and that, as
the wind takes them with all the grace, but with none of the
formalism, of fountains; dividing into fanciful change of dash and
spring, yet with the seal of their granite channels upon them, as the
lightest play of human speech may bear the seal of past toil, and
closing back out of their spray to lave the rigid angles, and brighten
with silver fringes and glassy films each lower and lower step of
sable stone; until at last, gathered altogether again,--except perhaps
some chance drops caught on the apple blossom, where it has budded a
little nearer the cascade than it did last spring,--they find their
way down to the turf, and lose themselves in that, silently; with
quiet depth of clear water furrowing among the grass-blades, and
looking only like their shadows but presently emerging again in little
startled gushes and laughing hurries, as