It was different when I went there last. It was not in summer, but in autumn. The green of the meadows had given place to the brown tint which betokens the coming-on of winter. The trees on the slopes, as I toiled up the ascent toward the Wengern-Alp, were stripped of half their leaves; and the yellow and tattered remnants were sighing in a cool wind of October. The clouds hung low, and dashed fitfully across the heights. From hour to hour, great fragments of the glacier, loosened by the heavy rains of the previous night, fell thundering into distant mountain abysses. No sunlight rested upon the valley or upon the ice.
It hardly seemed to me the same spot of country which had so caught my fancy, and bewildered me with its quiet beauty years before. And yet there was a sublimity hanging about the landscape and the sky of which I had no sense on the former visit. At that time, the mountains, and the air, and even the lustrous glacier were subdued into quiet harmony with the valley and the valley-brook below. Even the song of the cottage-girl was an according symphony with the tone of nature.
Now, however, the gray landscape, unlighted by any ray of sun- light, wore a sober and solemn hue, that lifted even the meadow into grand companionship with the mountains and the glaciers; and the crash of falling icebergs quickened and gave force to the impressions of awe, which crept over me like a chill.
I began to understand, for the first time, that strange and savage reverence which the peasants feel for their mountains. And as the thunder of the falling glaciers echoed among the peaks, I grew insensibly into a fear of the great Power which lived and reigned in those regions of ice. It seemed to me that darkness would be only needed to drive away all rational estimate of the strange sounds which crashed, and the silence which brooded among the sombre cliffs. I entertained, with a willingness that almost frighted me, the old stories of ice-gods ruling and thundering among the glaciers.
The active, practical, reasoning world, with its throngs and talk, was far below. Greater things were around me, and challenged my fancy.
All the forces which man boasts of were little, compared with
