At length he came in sight of the Alpine regions. Far off, the
heads of the great mountains rose into the upper countries of cloud,
where the snows settled on their stony heads, and the torrents ran
out from beneath the frozen mass to gladden the earth below with the
faith of the lonely hills. The mighty creatures lay like grotesque
animals of a far-off titanic time, whose dead bodies had been first
withered into stone, then worn away by the storms, and covered with
shrouds and palls of snow, till the outlines of their forms were
gone, and only rough shapes remained like those just blocked out in
the sculptor's marble, vaguely suggesting what the creatures had
been, as the corpse under the sheet of death is like a man. He came
amongst the valleys at their feet, with their blue-green waters
hurrying seawards--from stony heights of air into the mass of 'the
restless wavy plain'; with their sides of rock rising in gigantic
terrace after terrace up to the heavens; with their scaling pines,
erect and slight, cone-head aspiring above cone-head, ambitious to
clothe the bare mass with green, till failing at length in their
upward efforts, the savage rock shot away and beyond and above them,
the white and blue glaciers clinging cold and cruel to their ragged
sides, and the dead blank of whiteness covering their final despair.
He drew near to the lower glaciers, to find their awful abysses
tremulous with liquid blue, a blue tender and profound as if fed
from the reservoir of some hidden sky intenser than ours; he
rejoiced over the velvety fields dotted with the toy-like houses of
the mountaineers; he sat for hours listening by the side of their
streams; he grew weary, felt oppressed, longed for a wider outlook,
and began to climb towards a mountain village of which he had heard
from a traveller, to find solitude and freedom in an air as lofty as
if he climbed twelve of his beloved cathedral spires piled up in
continuous ascent.
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