THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.

IV.—To CHAMOUNIX.

Chamounix, September 28, 1868. SHUT up by torrents of rain the last day of our stay at Slid, and meditating with some alarm on the exceedingly porous membrane which now alone stood between may feet and the drenched earth, I communicated with a Sixt cobbler on the subject of mountain boots, and obtained for sixteen franca a pair weigh- ing about as much as the rest of my manly person in its ordinary accoutrements, so that when standing in them I felt very much like those loaded figures in toy shops which are made to illustrate the principle of stable equilibrium,—or as astronomers tell one that one would feel if suddenly clapped down on the planet Jupiter, and subjected to the enormous additional attraction of its mighty bulk. However, they were a vast comfort in the mule journey over the Col d'Anterne and the Col de Brevent ; and, though adding a good deal to the physical effort of raising my legs, yet as I walked only in descending those heights, each foot was lifted through a much lees space than that through which it fell again to earth, and, of course, as the gravitating force exerted is " directly as the mass," my loaded feet were drawn downwards by a much more powerful at- traction than they would have been in the light and (now alas !) ex- coriated Londonbootsof my previous travels. In fact, the momentum acquired by my boots as falling bodies "in a unit of time," as they used to say in the books on dynamics, was at times almost alarm- ing to myself, who was inseparably identified with their orbit for better or worse, and compelled to pass through space at the same uniformly accelerated velocity. But my mule appeared quite insensible even to the joint weight of my boots and myself. He was strong and rather mecliant, as our guide subsequently admitted, and I have a fancy that they gave me a mule which they hoped might give me trouble, because I had positively declined the useless expense of hiring a couple of guides as well as a couple of mules. Formerly in Switzerland you never paid for both horses and guides, unless an experienced guide were essential for the safety of the party. Some attendant of the mules or horses accompanied them, as a matter of course, to see after them and bring them back, but nobody ever thought of ()barging for the service of such an attendant the full tariff for a regular guide. But now you can go nowhere with a mule without having a regular guide, at the full tariff, as well ; and not only so, but if you have more than one mule, a violent effort is made to force as many regular guides upon you as you have mules. I steadily resisted this imposition, even to the point of appealing to the deputy " Maire " of Sixt, a gentleman in shirt-sleeves, of pleasing demeanour, to support me. I stated, to the great disgust of my guide, in answer to his refusal to be " responsible" for me if I did not take a separate guide, that if he would be responsible for my wife and her mule, I was quite willing to be responsible for myself so far as following him was concerned. In order to punish me for my obstinacy, I rather think they gave me a me-chant mule ; but, if so, their object entirely failed, for a stronger climber I never mounted, and as far as I was concerned his bad temper only developed itself in three ways, general moral energy, which is not unfrequently a result of bad temper,—a voracious appetite for grass (he occupied at least half the time in grazing which his companion and leader occupied in climbing, and still kept up with her easily),—and lastly, a tendency to run at you viciously with his head down when you interrupted his midday meal. The first consequence was agreeable rather than unpleasant ; the second was, at least, highly amusing, if sometimes inconvenient; and the last, though alarming, did not result in serious consequences. In truth, my mule interested me greatly. He was exceedingly like the late Lord Brougham, possessing the same kind of dangerous eye, and long, flexible, expressive nose, the vibrations of which, in the near proximity of a tempting piece of turf or bush, were quite a study. When he rushed at me for attempting to catch him after his midday meal, his nose quivered so like Lord Brougham's when vehemently attacking a contemptible foe, that I asked myself if metempsychosis could be true ; and if he had not appeared in the world some seven years before the late lord left it, I should have considered it an argument of some strength in its favour. He evidently made a little calculation, before we had left Sixt for five minutes, of the time he could spare for eating and still keep up with the leading mule which bore my wife. He estimated it at just one-half of the whole time of ascent, and accordingly spent one minute in every two in voracious grazing, and in the other pushed on to his companion's heels. No matter at what angle he happened to be climbing, even if his fore feet happened to be all but perpendicularly over his hind, no matter though we had passed above the region of soft sweet turf, and were among the granite desolation of the mountain top, if there were a foot- hold enough for climbing, there was foothold enough for grazing, and though he didn't exactly eat the granite itself, he grabbed eagerly at any stray mosses which might have begun the work of carpeting those wild and ragged and barren summits. I parted with that mule with real regret,—though dragging him down the Brevent when he held on by his mouth to every visible tuft of grass was certainly a work of labour. In no other living creature have I ever seen, as Lord Lytton might say in one of those un- rivalled passages of meditative philosophy with which his works are gemmed,—" in no other living creature have I ever seen the twin principles of Energy and Appetite so absolutely co-ordinate. Usually, in organized beings, they alternate. Energy gives birth o Appetite, which in its turn regenerates Energy. But in this unexampled instance they were giant Yokefellows, coupled to-

gether in the car of the same vigorous Organization." Don't you think I have almost risen to the level of Lord Lytton's own philo- sophic style?

The valley was covered with mist, through which the sun was struggling, as we wound our way up in the early morning through the pine woods above Sixt, catching now and then a silver gleam from the waterfalls on the opposite side of the glen, from the slender thread of the Rouget, with its branching lower falls, and from the bright, gently shelving rapids which the inhabitauta have so happily termed La Pleureuse. The grand brow of the Pointe de Salles at first only loomed darkly through the mist, and it was not till we approached Mr. Wills's beautiful chalet, " The Eagle's

Nest," that we could see much or far. But as we wound above it, and admired the loveliness of its situation, at once cosy and sub-

lime, nestling under heights so stupendous that those over which it towered, grand as they were in themselves, looked comfortable and homelike in the comparison, the sun came full out on the great mass of the Buet, and by the time that " The Eagle's Nest " had begun to look to us more like a lark's nest than an eagle's, so close to the very floor of the valley was it thrown from the great height from which we looked down upon it, the great glaciers of the Buet were glittering under a brilliant sky. Even then, however, the mists which clung round the Buet's lower levels behind us, and which kept sweeping capriciously over the precipitous range of the Chaine des Fys before us, now blotting it out for a moment, now dropping till the solid and barren summits seemed all built on mist, threatened a day by no means uniformly clear ; and we felt that we were fortunate in having had any satisfying views of the beautiful valley stretching away far beyond Samoens into a deep blue distance behind us, and of the imposing and massive mountain, whose heavy, glaciered summits seemed so near and se little above us, though its height is really far greater than any we reached. And, in fact, the mists spread again soon after midday, so that when we reached the desolate slanting grooves, rather than paths, in which the mules had to clamber and slide along at the top of the pass, the mist wrapped us close and struck cold upon us, and I feared that the grand prospect of Mont Blanc for which we hoped, might prove a total failure. In the mean time, we had to pass through the wild basin in which the green little Lac d'Anterne lies like an emerald set in the roughest stone. It was comparatively warm and cheerful in that sheltered little basin, and beside the green lake grew the richest bed of that brilliant

little gentian which the botanists call Gentiana Bavarica which we ever came upon among the Alps. The dark green water of

the tarn was bordered by a bright green turf, on which the dark blue (ultramarine blue, I suppose it would be called) of these brilliant little flowers sparkled as thick as ever did buttercups in an English meadow. And then above this ring of richly covered turf, the bleak, slaty, inhospitable sides of the basin rose steep on every side, at one side the jagged perpendicular ridge of the Auterne towering above it. Not a tree, not a bush was there ;- only the deep and shining little green lake, its soft and flowery border of turf, and the jagged, shelving sides, with here and there a petty patch of frozen snow or ice, adding to the bleakness of tone, without being large enough for individual effect. The whole scene produced on us the most curiously vivid image of imprisoned beauty,—of loveliness set in a shell of stern and barren desolation.

As we filed out of the little basin of the Lac d'Anterne to the edge of the Col, we ought to have come upon a magnificent view of Mont Blanc and his neighbours. But the mists were driving wildly about, and we only saw the great white-seamed peak of the Aiguille du Midi, rising now and then out of the mist, then lost in it again. Here we descended from our mules, for we had a very steep valley before us, to climb down to the bottom of the cup, as it were, between the Anterno and Brevent, before ascending the latter. Half way down we came on a little fresh green plateau, where we stopped to feed the mules and to eat our own lunch, and fortunately the sun came out warm while we performed that refreshing operation. Then onwards we plunged again, down and down through the spongy track,—barberries, wild raspberries, wild cineraria (or something very like it) growing.

thick on every side, and the steep mountains rising all round, with now and then the white-ribbed Aiguille du Midi gleaming over the side of the ravine. We were not sorry at last to mount again, though the path up which we .had to wind ran for some time so close to the edge of the precipice that my wife needed all her nerve to ride. For three good hours we zigzagged up the side of the mountain, passing nothing living but a few black pigs and the tenant of one lonely chalet, who seemed thankful for a chance of communication with the external world and eagerly asked us the

time, till, at about five o'clock, we reached the wilderness of boulders and glacier on the summit,—a scene of desolation so unmi- tigated that my wife called out we had got to the end of the world. The wind was high and intensely cold, the mist drove past us through the draughty clefts of the rocks, like whiffs of smoke, the starlings rose in whirlpools, the marmot screamed, and even my voracious mule could find neither moss nor herb to snatch at. It was as perfect a realization as it was possible to meet with of the old rhymes,—

" In puffs the wild wind hurried through That ice-patched world of rock and sky ; In swirling clouds the starlings flew, And lonely broke the marmot's cry."

We hurried to the edge of the Col. A world of dense mist was before us. Our guide shrugged his shoulders. " Il n'y a ricu it voir," he said, and so it was. Gloomily we dismounted from our mules and gazed at the cruel mist which hid such mighty shapes.

Even as we gazed, it partly rose. The curtain drew up so far that we saw the four great monster glaciers sweeping down in great curvilinear segments into the very valley of Chamounix, and, divided by mountains which under the shadow of that hanging mist looked preternaturally black. It was a marvellous sight, even though the mountains still hid their heads, and only the great irruptions of glacier, the startling blue and white of the four huge but grandly curved promontories of ice, betrayed the frozen heights from which they were fed. It was the very view which Shelley might have had when he wrote, in his flue ode to Mont Blanc,

" The glaciers creep, Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains Slowly rolling on."

We were compelled to be satisfied and begin our steep descent. But we had better fortune in store. As we stopped for some hot coffee at the Plam-Praz, about half an hour's walk beneath the summit, and about two hours still above Chamounix, precisely over which we were poised throughout our descent, the mists drew off, first at the western end of the valley, leaving Mont Joli and the Aiguille and Dome du Goutd brilliantly clear, and then the great, solid head of Mont Blanc itself was uncovered before us. Some- how, by its mass, solidity, and grandeur, and the human kingliness of its statuesque repose, it kept haunting me oddly enough as resembling Shakespeare standing among his brother poets. Perhaps, though I had utterly forgotten the lines, I was really thinking of

Matthew Arnold's fine sonnet on Shakespeare,— "Others abide our question. Thou art free.

We ask and ask : Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill That to the stars uncrowna his majesty, Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, Making the Heaven of Heavens his dwelling-place, Spares but the cloudy border of his baso To the foiled searching of mortality.

And thou who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honoured, self-secure, Didst walk on earth unpleased at. Better so !

All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow, Find their solo voice in that victorious brow."

I had wholly forgotten this sonnet. But it expresses with wonderful force the class of feelings with which I first saw Mont Blanc's great head unveiled. " Self-scanned, self-honoured, self-secure,"—that is the impression which the first sight of Mont Blanc thrilled through me,—and as the mist flew away eastwards, leaving all the white needles of that wonderful ridge bright and bare, till the grand Aiguille Verte itself towered up, with just a flush of the western light upon it, above the Mer de Glace, the impression of the self-reliant majesty of Mont Blanc among that forest of tapering mountain-spires grew stronger and more vivid.

It certainly was a very exciting vision,—the more as we bad abandoned hope, and the curtain drew up so suddenly. As we descended we could not keep our eyes off the wonderful sight. The white chain seemed to watch us as we entered the pine woods, kept glancing at us, as the twilight fell, through every opening, till we felt quite furtive and haunted by the ghostly heads towering in front of us. And when the lights glimmered close in the hospit- able inns of Chamounix, and the buzz of the streets fell upon our ears, we were almost as glad of the rest for our minds as for our bodies. We had seen

"Power dwell apart in its tranquillity, Remote, serene, and inaccessible," till our minds ached for either the stir of varied life, or the con- templation of that sort of power which rests the mind because it offers something on which to lean. 'There is nothing of this to me

about Mont Blanc. how Shelley, for the time inverting, as it were, the wonderful sublimity of Wordsworth's Ode to Duty, and instead of attributing to conscience the power to " preserve the stars from wrong," and to make 'the most ancient heavens' for ever fresh and strong,' could say to Mont Blanc,

"Thou halt a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Largo codes of fraud and woe," seems to me a puzzle. That might no doubt be said of Shake- speare, of whom Mont Blanc seems to me a sort of image, on account

of his wonderful tenderness and variety of human insight, but it is not this in Shakespeare, it is only his impenetrable solitude, his self-sustained grandeur which Mont Blanc brings home so powerfully to the mind. It is the immutability of power, not repeal or revolution of any sort, which is imaged by that white still dome above the clouds :—

"The secret strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the inflnito dome Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!"

We have found Chamounix. delightful. The valley, with all its sublimity, is so sunny, so beautiful, so green, so homelike. We have done, of course, what every one does,—gone with the troop of pilgrims who climb the Montanvert, cross the Mer de Glace, wonder at the grandeur of the solitary Dent du Geaut rising sheer up out of the great spreading sea of ice, traverse the limestone cliff

above Chapeau, and return by the source of the Arveiron to Chamounix. That " course " is so absolutely de riplellr that scores of pilgrims paraded before and after us on the very day we per- formed our pilgrimage, and I am bound to say it is well worthy of

its popularity. But what we have, I think, enjoyed most here, though we were not quite so fortunate in our day, was the excur- sion to the Pierre Pointue, a rock the first stage in the ascent of Mont Blanc, from which you gain a most marvellous side view of the great glacier of the Bosons. We sat for half-au-hour on the rocks at the very edge of the glacier, gazing at a confusion of domes and pinnacles in ice, all in grand relief against a dark wall of rock on the other side of the glacier. There were distant ice domes like St. Paul's, a ruined fort, a crowd of spires and minarets,

and beneath them all, gaping within a few yards of us, a great, black, yawning cave, from which one of the many glacier-fmders

of the Arve issued forth,—

" There ninny a precipice Frost and the sun in scorn of mortal power Have piled—dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, A city of death distinct with many a tower And wall impregnable of beaming ice."

Far above, the great smooth snows of the Diane (In Gout; gleamed in time uncertain sun, and beside us we found just one solitary blossom of the same lovely little gentian which carpeted so thickly the border of the Lac d'Anterne. The distant valley far beyond Les Ouches was dyed, by overhanging clouds, the richest purple.

No other scene had ever given us so perfect a conception of the desolate grandeur of a glacier. As we returned, Chamounix seemed specially cheerful and lovely. The low sun was on the meadows. The cattle were slowly returning towards their homes.

The heaps of flax lay spread out in the shape of fans to dry upon the fields. The peasant women were reaping anxiously their late.

corn. An old priest was walking meditatively amid the crop, a folded newspaper in his hand, but looking more at his wheat than his news ;—the whole valley was a picture of cheery labour and wealth, iu strange contrast to the icy desolation of the acetic we had

just quitted. A WORKING MAN IN SEARCH OF REST.