wreaths of the restless crashing abyss below, the blue of the
water, paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the sky through
white rain-cloud, while the shuddering iris stoops in tremulous
stillness over all, fading and flushing alternately through the
choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself at last among the
thick golden leaves which toss to and fro in sympathy with the wild
water,--their dripping masses lifted at intervals, like sheaves of
loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again
upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies away,--the dew gushing from
their thick branches through drooping clusters of emerald herbage, and
sparkling in white threads along the dark rocks of the shore, feeding
the lichens, which chase and chequer them with purple and silver.

[19] Well noticed. The drawing of the fall of Schaffhausen, which I made
at the time of writing this study, was one of the very few, either by
other draughtsmen or myself, which I have seen Turner pause at with
serious attention.

30. Close beside the path by which travellers ascend the Montanvert
from the valley of Chamouni, on the right hand, where it first begins
to rise among the pines, there descends a small stream from the foot
of the granite peak known to the guides as the Aiguille Charmoz. It is
concealed from the traveller by a thicket of alder, and its murmur is
hardly heard, for it is one of the weakest streams of the valley. But
it is a constant stream, fed by a permanent, though small, glacier;
and continuing to flow even to the close of summer, when more copious
torrents, depending only on the melting of the lower snows, have left
their beds,--"stony channels in the sun." The long drought which took
place in the autumn of 1854, sealing every source of waters except
these perpetual ones, left the torrent of which I am speaking, and
such others, in a state peculiarly favourable to observance of their
_least_ action on the mountains from which they descend. They were
entirely limited to their own ice fountains, and the quantity of
powdered rock which they brought down was, of course, at its minimum,
being nearly unmingled with any earth derived from the dissolution of
softer soil, or vegetable mould, by rains. At three in the afternoon,
on a warm day in September, when the torrent had reached its average
maximum strength for the day, I filled an ordinary Bordeaux wine flask
with the water where it was least tur