t " . " I saw him go, o'er the white Alps alone."—DONNE.]
WHY do the Alps and the glaciers attract us, and the " untrampled deserts where the snows are" draw us like a charm ? We, that is, those of us who love the mountains, lie awake in London and dream of the great stair of green ice that hangs down from the blue sky between the cliffs that close in the end of the Valais. We yearn to see once more the infant Rhone flow out of its azure cave, and the light lie imprisoned in the crevasse. No one who really feels the fascination of the high Alps can tolerate for a moment the notion that the delight comes merely from the change or the novelty. When the Swiss peasant was told about the Steppes by a Russian traveller he was full of delight. "What a beautiful country,—all plains covered with grass, and not a bill for hundreds of miles ! " People some- times try to explain the charm of the Alps to Englishmen on that principle. We live in a country without high mountains or glaciers or perpetual snow, and therefore by contrast we like the Alps. No doubt the novelty helps to make us enjoy Zermatt, but the contrast is not the chief or original cause of our pleasure,—it lies much deeper than that. Probably not a little of the charm is due to that love of the abstract, of things stripped bare to their origins, which exists in all human beings. Barely this must be the cause of the throbbing sense of joy—it is no other—which one feels in climbing among the &mos of a great glacier. The world has been reduced to blue and white, to sky and ice. One stands in a little valley between hills of whitey green ice piled fantastically on either band. The prospect of the dis- tant peaks, maybe of the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, is shut out by the nearness of the ice-hillocks, and thus there is no more view than when one crouches among sand-dunes. Overhead is the blue sky and at one's feet the floor of ice, either quite bare or half-covered with snow. Close beside one is a deep crevasse; its lips are white, but as its sides shelve down they glow with that mystic azure which Nature has bestowed nowhere else,—unless, indeed, it be in the bell of the gentian. There is only one other element, a trickle of humming water, which runs along the miniature valleys made by the ice needles, and burying itself in the crevasse forms a glacier "mill." As we have said, there is nothing to charm the eye but the sky and the hillocks of ice and the trickle of water, and yet the true lover of the Alps feels a thrill of pleasure not less authentic than that experienced in looking on the most beautiful of pictures or reading the noblest of poems. Without doubt the pleasure is in a great measure due to the fact that for the moment the world has been reduced to its elements,—has been abstracted to air and water. In the heart of the glacier, as in a ship on the open sea, far away from land and with the sun shining on the level fields of ocean, and on nothing else, we feel drawn to understand, and to understand by instinct, how it was "when the poles crashed and water was the world," when man was not, and when all the " lendings " of humanity, petty and great, trivial and awful, were as yet unthought and nncreated. The mind is awed, and yet relieved of some of its burdens, by coming thus into contact with the great, blind, primal forces of the earth. It stirs the heart to feel that there are places where man can still see Nature naked and -unprofaned.
But we must not write as if the fascination of the Alps were entirely made up of these abstractions. The greatest part of the charm of the Alps may lie in the glaciers and the snow-fields, in the mighty peaks that toss their heads skyward, and in the great ridges that shut out half the sky or wall in the valleys, but there are plenty of other delights. The pastoral portion of Swiss scenery is most delight-com- pelling. The little runnels of water that hurry through the -grass in the meadows and make the pinks and rock-flowers nod their heads, the Alps embroidered with violas and anemones, where the smaller gentians cluster and glow like stars, or where the great bell gentians await the onslaught of the bees,—theae, the fir-woods and the chalets and the little hamlets that sit astride the knees of the hills, or clamber up their sides, are never to be forgotten when we in dreams behold the Alps. Nor must the charm of sound be forgotten. The Elizabethan poet Peele must have been in the Alps—we know that he had been to Italy, and unless he went by sea he of coarse crossed the mountains—for he describes the palace of David as "seated in hearing of a hundred streams." It is because we were "seated in hearing of a hundred streams," and because we heard the waterfalls shout- ing to each other across the valleys and the rivers murmuring hoarsely in their beds that we remember so long and so lovingly our walks on the lower slopes of the hills or along some natural terrace among the pine-woods. What sound, too, is more delightful than the cow-bells of some hundred head of cattle ringing together on a great Alp at the head of one of the passes. As the Hospice comes in sight the hill- tops recede a little, and there beside a little green lake is a wide and rock-strewn pasture browsed over in common by the cattle of a dozen communes. As they feed the bells ring, and the little vale, not profound, but open, shallow, and windy, is "overflowing with the sound." But the Alps rely not only on the sense of sight and sound to fascinate their votaries. Who can deny that the sense of smell and the senses kindred to it are potent factors in the charm of the Alps P Milton speaks with an evident recollection of a deep personal experience of the "breath of vernal air from snowy Alp." That is the exact phrase, and awakens in an instant the intense delight which comes as the air from the higher pastures and the snow blows on our foreheads. Hardly less delicious is it to breathe the air of the pine-woods. At dawn, and while they are rustling with the wind that comes to them from the fields of sleep, the air is keen and wholesome and pleasure-giving, and at noon, when the sun has warmed the resin, they give off the sr-wood smell to perfection. In damper climates, and where the air is less pure and rarified, the pine-wood smell is some- times oppressive. In Switzerland there is never any ground for such complaint. All the natural scents there are refined and sublimated.
But we might ran on for ever with our laudations of Swiss scenery. Suffice it to say that the charm of the Alps does exist, and that it is a multiplex charm made up of several elements. That the moral basis of the charm of the Alps will ever be quite clearly analysed is, however, we admit, very doubtful. Meantime it is pleasant and interesting to find ,Sir John Lubbock, in a book on" The Scenery of Switzerland"
(Macmillan and Co.), just published, undertaking to show us the processes by which Nature prepared in her laboratory the mountains and glaciers, and the other phenomena which we call the Alps. Sir John Lubbock tells us how his Alpine walks made him long to know what forces raised the mountains, sunk the lakes, and directed the rivers. His book is the result of this desire to know the mechanism of Nature, and a very interesting and curious book it is. All who love glaciers will be delighted with his very full chapters on them, and especially with his notes as to the Rhone Glacier. Not less interesting are his accounts of how the peaks were formed, and how the hills are always being ground down by the action of rain and snow and ice.
"The hills are shadows and they flow
From form to form and nothing stands; They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go."
Very appropriately Sir John Lubbock places those wonderful lines—perhaps the best example of Tennyson's marvellous power of fusing science and poetry—at the head of his chapter on "The Origin of Mountains." They contain all that is essential for the understanding of the mountain's life. Indeed, the chapter in question is but an amplification of the ideas expressed by the poet. But we have no space to discuss Sir John Lubbock's delightful book in detaiL We can only put up a sign-post to point out its existence, and add that all tourists who go to Switzerland this summer, and have any scientific leanings, should put it in their portmanteaus.
Then they will be able to study Sir John Lubbock's sections and plates and diagrams in situ.
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