The Spell of Switzerland Part 20

"'Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice And stopt at once amid their maddest plunge!

Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Who made you glorious as the Gates of Heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?

G.o.d! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, G.o.d!

G.o.d! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!

Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!

And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, G.o.d!

"'Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost!

Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest!

Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain-storm!

Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds!

Ye signs and wonders of the elements!

Utter forth G.o.d and fill the hills with praise!

"'Thou, too, h.o.a.r Mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks, Oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard, Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breast-- Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou That as I raise my head, awhile bowed low In adoration, upward from thy base Slow traveling with dim eyes suffused with tears, Solemnly seemest, like a vapory cloud, To rise before me--Rise, O ever rise, Rise like a cloud of incense from the Earth!

Thou kingly Spirit throned among the hills, Thou dread amba.s.sador from Earth to Heaven, Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky And tell the stars and tell yon rising sun Earth with her thousand voices praises G.o.d!'"

"I think it ends pretty feebly," said I. "He compares Mont Blanc first with a vapoury cloud, then to a cloud of incense; then calls it a kingly Spirit throned, then a dread amba.s.sador and then a Great Hierarch. What could be more mixed in its metaphors? But now let us take Sh.e.l.ley's 'Mont Blanc.'"

"I think it begins with a curious mixture," said Ruth. "He says the everlasting universe of things flows through the mind, where from secret springs the source of human thought brings its tribute of waters with a sound but half its own such as a feeble brook a.s.sumes in the wild woods. How can the eternal universe of things rolling rapid waves diminish itself to a feeble brook? But it goes on:--

"'In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap forever Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.'"

"It seems to me a hopeless mixture. The description of the Vale is better:--

"'Thus thou, Ravine of Arve--dark, deep Ravine-- Thou many-colored, many-voiced vale, Over whose pines and crags and caverns sail Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne, Bursting thro' these dark mountains like the flame Of lightning thro' the tempest;--thou dost lie, Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, Children of elder time, in whose devotion The chainless winds still come and ever came To drink their odors and their mighty swinging To hear--an old and solemn harmony; Thine earthly rainbows stretcht across the sweep Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep Which when the voices of the desert fail Wraps all in its own deep eternity;-- Thy caverns, echoing to the Arve's commotion, A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, Thou art the path of that unresting sound-- Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange To muse on my own separate fantasy, My own, my human mind which pa.s.sively Now renders....'"

"Oh stop, stop! Uncle, I can't follow it!"

"Very good, I will skip to where he tells how he is gazing on the naked countenance of earth. Listen:--

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

"What are rolling on, snakes, avalanches or far fountains?"

"'There many 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.

Yet not a city but a flood of ruin Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing....'"

"Oh, what a rhyme--ruin and strewin'. Do you suppose Sh.e.l.ley dropped his 'g''s?"

"Don't be irreverent. Listen:--

"'vast pines are strewing Its destined path, or in the mangled soil Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks drawn down From yon remotest waste, have overthrown The limits of the dead and living world....'

"I will omit about a dozen rather blind lines about man and his puniness and begin:--

"'Below, vast caves s.h.i.+ne in the rus.h.i.+ng torrents' restless gleam, Which from those secret chasms a tumult welling Meet in the vale, and one majestic River The breath and blood of distant lands, forever Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves, Breathes its swift vapors to the circling air.'

"Now he comes to Mont Blanc itself:--

"'Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:--the power is there, The still and solemn power of many sights, And many sounds and much of life and death.

In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, In the lone glare of day, the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the star-beams dart thro' them:--Winds contend Silently there and heap the snow with breath Rapid and strong but silently! Its home The voiceless lightning in these solitudes Keeps innocently and like vapor broods Over the snow. The secret strength of things Which governs thought and to the infinite dome Of heaven is as a law, inhabits there!

And what were thou and earth and stars and sea If to the human mind's imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy?'

"Well, what do you say? Which is the truer poetry?" I asked.

"I think that Sh.e.l.ley would have done better if he had not tried to rhyme his verses," said Ruth. "The attempt to find rhymes led him on and on into meanings that he didn't mean. But there are fine lines in both. By the way," she added with an abrupt dislocation of our literary talk, and yet it was suggested by it, "Will and I propose to take you to Chamonix. Would you like that?"

"Of course I would."

"We will get an early start to-morrow--that is, if the weather prove propitious."

The weather could not have been more kindly disposed. We started early in the morning and reached Villeneuve in less than an hour. Thence we rode up the at first broad and then ever narrowing valley of the mystic Rhone. I wished that I might see some of the strange things that it is said to conceal. Juste Olivier tells of its sandy nonchalant banks, its marshes and creeks of almost stagnant waters, the little bridges carrying fascinating paths, which later, glittering with silvery dust, suddenly plunge under long vaults where the light scarcely penetrates the green cool arches.

"Here and there," he says, "there are fantastic clearings. Old trunks of ancient willows, oddly wrapt around and still more oddly crowned now with creepers, now with young bushes which have climbed to their tops, and now with their own branches contorted and interlaced.

Immense oaks loved by adventurous pairs of the wild pigeons which fill the solitude with their plaintive notes. Young alders countless in number and growing so closely the heifers can with difficulty force a way through between their smooth even trunks. In a word, a forest variegated by marshes, by patches of sand, by yellowish fields where the water contributes its murmur, the desert its solemnity, the infinite its mystery, the unknown its charm.

"This is what you find in these sh.o.r.es of the Rhone called Les Isles.

Sometimes strange noises come to the inhabited chalets and the reedy plain and startle the pa.s.ser-by and are lost in the neighboring fields; it is the voice of la Fennetta-des-Isles who sometimes bellows like the _bise_ in the trees, sometimes like the calves in the pastures, and seems to run over the wrinkled waters of the ca.n.a.l. If the clamor approach the fisherman pulls in his line and turns his head away, for he knows that any person who has caught sight under any form whatever of the fantastic being who thus howls in the gloomy woods has little more to expect from life."

We heard no bellowing Lady-of-the-Isles nor did we see her under any form. Probably electric trams, and corrective d.y.k.es, and the skeptical boldness of modern science has scared the Little Lady away. She will never come back.

We had a glance at the big chateau of Aigle and looked to see if we could recognize any of the fair black-eyed, plump-figured women for which that place is famous. We saw the waterfalls on the Grande Eau.

We pa.s.sed through "the smiling village of Bex" and Will asked me if I would like to take the time to visit the remarkable salt-works at Bex the Old--Bevieux--but I told him that I preferred Attic salt. Then we discussed the question how salt should have been deposited so high up among the mountains. Was it the relic of the vast ocean that once covered all Europe? This presence of salt-laden anhydrite and the occasional sulphur springs with high temperatures are extremely interesting. There is evidently heat enough under the Alps to start a volcano some day.

The sight of the mountains gathering about us menacingly made me again remember Juste Olivier's poetic description of the names of these Savoyan Alps. He advised his pupils to climb them, his word, as the word of every true Alpinist, is "conquer"--conquer them:--

"What marvellous treasures! What fragrant valleys! What flower-adorned slopes! What dazzling crystals! What depths of shade! What fountains!

Happy son of the Alps who has succeeded in taming the Genius of them.

From the highest summits like a cascade in the eternal chant, by a thousand brooks, by a thousand murmurs, over slate and granite down to the depths of staggering abysses, across mist-hung crags, by the side of mournful lakes, amid green and smiling hiding-places, along pasture-grounds spread with a network of light and shade, in fir-forests which roar like the sea, beds of thyme under beach-trees and laburnum, Poesy descends into the valleys and with the sunset turns back in jets of flame toward the skies.

"Go forth, young hearts! Go quench your thirst at this unknown spring.

Follow up the torrents and lose yourselves in the plaintive forests.

The Genius of the Alps is waiting for you, and there also is the secret home of the Genius of the Fatherland."

Rogers took this same route and wrote about it, almost a hundred years ago, at this very same Saint-Maurice where we now arrived:--

"Still by the Leman Lake, for many a mile, Among those venerable trees I went, Where damsels sit and weave their fis.h.i.+ng-nets, Singing some national song by the way-side.

But now the fly was gone, the gnat was come; Now glimmering light from cottage-windows broke.

'Twas dark; and, journeying upward by the Rhone, That there came down, a torrent from the Alps, I entered where a key unlocks a kingdom; The road and river, as they wind along Filling the mountain-pa.s.s. There, till a ray Glanced through my lattice and the household stir Warned me to rise, to rise and to depart."

There was much to interest us at Saint-Maurice, which traces its ancestry to an old Keltic town called Acaunum or Agaunum (as the Latins spelled it). Here once occurred an event which would have pleased Count Tolsto. A ma.n.u.script of the Ninth Century, discovered by Professor Emil Egli at Zurich, relates it as follows:--

"In the army of the Roman Emperor Maximilian who reigned from 286 until 306 A. D. was enrolled a legion brought from the east and called the Thebaean Legion. They hesitated about fighting brother-Christians.

The Emperor learned in the neighboring town of Octodurum that the legion was mutinous in the narrow pa.s.s of Agaunum. He ordered every tenth man to be beheaded. But when the legion persisted in its obstinacy he repeated the punishment. Those left mutually exhorted one another to persist and their leader Mauricius with two officers, Exuperius and Candidus advised them rather to perish than to fight against Christians.

"So they threw down their arms and were hacked to pieces."

The legion consisted of sixty-six hundred men. According to other legends--for this is only a legend which arose in the Fifth Century--some of the legion were subjected to a martyr's death elsewhere--Ursus, Victor and Verena at Solothurn, Felix and Regula at Zurich. However the story may be regarded, the town is supposed to have received its name from the leader of the Eastern legion. The abbey now occupied by Augustine canons who take pride (for a fee) in showing their treasures--a Saracen vase, a gold crozier and a silver ewer presented by Charlemagne, and other relics--is said to date back to the Fourth Century and was founded by Saint Theodore, one of Licinius' Greek officers, who was converted and put to death.