sparkle of its stream are shut out; and you look straight across upon the Dust-Fall, where it leaps from the cliff abreast of you; and see it shiver, and grow white, and hear it afterward go murmuring away through its valley-bed.
At other times, as you pass farther up, the waterfall seems only a bit of gauze, which is lost over the edge of the cliff; and the heights above, from which the stream comes, break into sight and tower aloft in a way that quite dwarfs the poor valley beneath, and makes it seem a mere nook in the hills.
But by far the grandest sight of all those which belong to this mountain neighborhood, is that of the glacier which shuts up the head of the valley. It is not, indeed, larger or whiter than many others of Switzerland; but like the crown of a monarch, its green, lustrous crystals rise over the forehead of Lauterbrunnen, and charm you by such contrast of the fierce glory of winter, with the soft smile of summer, as can be seen nowhere else.
My first visit to this spot, many years ago, was on a midsummer's afternoon. The mountains were clear of clouds; and their snow-tops, and the green spurs of the glacier in the distance, seemed to wear the same warm glow of sunlight which fell upon the slopes around me, and upon the meadows beneath. I could see the brook trailing white in the bed of the valley; and the Dust-Fall gushing from the cliff into feathery, cloud-like vapor; and the peasants in the meadows, gathering their July crop of hay—yet so far below me, that no murmur of their toil came to my ear; but, in place of it, a mountain girl, from a cottage upon the heights, was singing, in the hope of a few pennies, a plaintive Swiss song, which floated pleasantly on the air, and mingled gracefully with the tinkle of the scattered bells, which the kids wore upon the cliffs above. Except these sounds, a silence haunted the whole region. As I lay under the shadow of a broad-limbed walnut, whose leaves scarce stirred in the summer air, the song, and the tinkle of the bells, and the glow of light upon the distant snow-cliffs, and the delicious haze that lingered over the Arcadian valley beneath me, seemed to belong each to each, and to make up a scene in which a life-time might be dreamed away, without a thought of labor or of duty.
