;
and its unchanging, senseless hurry is strangely tedious to witness. It
is a river that a man could grow to hate. Day after day breaks with the
rarest gold upon the mountain spires, and creeps, growing and glowing,
down into the valley. From end to end the snow reverberates the
sunshine; from end to end the air tingles with the light, clear and dry
like crystal. Only along the course of the river, but high above it,
there hangs far into the noon one waving scarf of vapour. It were hard
to fancy a more engaging feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to
believe that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a
creature of the incontinent stream whose course it follows. By noon the
sky is arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour--mild and pale and
melting in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of
purple blue. What with this darkness of heaven and the intolerable
lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos. An English painter,
coming to France late in life, declared with natural anger that "the
values were all wrong." Had he got among the Alps on a bright day he
might have lost his reason. And even to any one who has looked at
landscape with any care, and in any way through the spectacles of
representative art, the scene has a character of insanity. The distant
shining mountain peak is here beside your eye; the neighbouring
dull-coloured house in comparison is miles away; the summit, which is
all of splendid snow, is close at hand; the nigh slopes, which are black
with pine-trees, bear it no relation, and might be in another sphere.
Here there are none of those delicate gradations, those intimate, misty
joinings-on and spreadings-out into the distance, nothing of that art of
air and light by which the face of nature explains and veils itself in
climes which we may be allowed to think more lovely. A glaring piece of
crudity, where everything that is not white is a solecism and defies the
judgment of the eyesight; a scene of blinding definition; a parade of
daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more than scenically trying, and yet
hearty and healthy, making the nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile:
such is the winter daytime in the Alps. With the approach of evening all
is changed. A mountain will suddenly intercept the sun; a shadow fall
upon the valley; in ten minutes the thermometer will drop as many
degrees; the peaks that are no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts;
and meanw