nt; in a
climate favorable to vegetation, the gray cliff, itself covered with
lichens, shoots-up through a garment of foliage or verdure; and white,
bright cottages, tree-shaded, cluster around the everlasting granite. In
fine vicissitude, Beauty alternates with Grandeur; you ride through stony
hollows, along strait passes, traversed by torrents, overhung by high
walls of rock; now winding amid broken, shaggy chasms, and huge fragments;
now suddenly emerging into some emerald valley, where the streamlet
collects itself into a Lake, and man has again found a fair dwelling, and
it seems as if Peace had established herself in the bosom of Strength.

"To Peace, however, in this vortex of existence can the Son of Time not
pretend; still less if some Specter haunt him from the Past; and the
Future is wholly a Stygian Darkness, specter-bearing. Reasonably might the
Wanderer exclaim to himself: Are not the gates of this world's Happiness
inexorably shut against thee; hast thou a hope that is not mad?
Nevertheless, one may still murmur audibly, or in the original Greek if
that suit thee better: 'Whoso can look on death will start no shadows.'

"From such meditations is the Wanderer's attention called outward; for now
the valley closes in abruptly, intersected by a huge mountain mass, the
stony, water-worn ascent of which is not to be accomplished on horseback.
Arrived aloft, he finds himself again lifted into the evening sunset
light; and cannot but pause, and gaze round him, some moments there.

"An upland, irregular expanse of wold, where valleys in complex branchings
are suddenly or slowly arranging their descent toward every quarter of the
sky. The mountain-ranges are beneath your feet, and folded together; only
the loftier summits look down here and there as on a second plain; lakes
also lie clear and earnest in their solitude.

"No trace of man now visible; unless indeed it were he who fashioned that
little visible link of Highway, here, as would seem, scaling the
inaccessible, to unite Province with Province.

"But sunward, lo you! how it towers sheer up, a world of Mountains, the
diadem and center of the mountain region! A hundred and a hundred savage
peaks, in the last light of Day; all glowing, of gold and amethyst, like
giant spirits of the wilderness; there in their silence, in their
solitude, even as on the night when Noah's Deluge first dried!

"Beautiful, nay solemn, was the sudden aspect to our Wanderer. He g