第41章

[*] Some one just here suggests that it was Jane who was faithful forever, not Frederic. That indeed makes the title appropriate, but does not relieve the atrocity of the plot.

There is this about mountains,--you cannot get away from them.

Low country may be beautiful, yet you may be preoccupied and pass through it or by it without consciousness; but the mountains rise, and there is no escape. Representatives of an unseen force, voices from an infinite past, benefactors of the valleys, themselves unblest, almoners of a charity which leaves them in the heights indeed, but the heights of eternal desolation, raised above all sympathies, all tenderness, shining but repellent, grand and cold, mighty and motionless,--we stand before them hushed. They fix us with their immutability. They shroud us with their Egyptian gloom. They sadden. They awe. They overpower.

Yet far off how different is the impression! Bright and beautiful, evanescent yet unchanging, lovely as a spirit with their clear, soft outlines and misty resplendence! Exquisitely says Winthrop:

"There is nothing so refined as the outline of a distant mountain;even a rose-leaf is stiff-edged and harsh in comparison. Nothing else has that definite indefiniteness, that melting permanence, that evanescing changelessness. [I did not know that I was using his terms.] Clouds in vain strive to imitate it; they are made of slighter stuff; they can be blunt or ragged, but they cannot have that solid positiveness. Even in its cloudy, distant fairness, there is a concise, emphatic reality altogether uncloudlike."Seeing them from afar, lovely rather than terrible, we feel that though between the mountain and its valley, with much friendly service and continual intercourse, there can be no real communion, still the mountain is not utterly lonely, but has yonder in the east its solace, and in the north a companion, and over toward the west its coterie. Solitary but to the lowly-living, in its own sphere there is immortal companionship, and this vast hall of the heavens, and many a draught of nectar borne by young Ganymede.

The Alpine House seems to be the natural caravansary for Grand Trunk travellers, being accessible from the station without the intervention of so much as an omnibus, and being also within easy reach of many objects of interest. Here, therefore, we lay over awhile to strike out across the mountains and into the valleys, and to gather health and serenity for the weeks that were to come, with their urgent claims for all of both that could be commanded.

Eastern Massachusetts is a very pretty place to live in, and the mutual admiration society is universally agreed by its members to be the very best society on this continent.

Nevertheless, by too long and close adherence to that quarter of the globe, one comes to forget how the world was made, and, in fact, that it ever was made. We silently take it for granted. It was always there. Smooth, smiling plains, gentle hills, verdurous slopes, blue, calm streams, and softly wooded banks,--a courteous, well-bred earth it is, and we forget that it has not been so from the beginning. But here among the mountains, Genesis finds exegesis. We stand amid the primeval convulsions of matter,--the first fierce throes of life. Marks of the struggle still linger; nay, the struggle itself is not soothed quite away. No more unexceptionable surfaces, but yawns and fissures, chasms and precipices, deep gashes in the hills, hills bursting up from the plains, rocks torn from their granite beds and tossed hither and thither in some grand storm of Titan wrath, rivers with no equal majesty, but narrow, deep, elfish, rising and falling in wild caprice, playing mad pranks with their uncertain shores, treacherous, reckless, obstreperous.

Here we see the changes actually going on. The earth is still a-making. More than one river, scorning its channel, has, within the memory of man, hewn out for itself another, and taken undisputed, if not undisturbed possession. The Peabody River, which rolls modestly enough now, seeming, indeed, a mere thread of brook dancing through a rocky bed by far too large for it, will by and by, when the rains come, rise and roar and rush with such impetuosity that these great water-worn stones, now bleaching quietly in the sun, shall be wrenched up from their resting-places, and whirled down the river with such fury and uproar that the noise of their crashing and rolling shall break in upon your dreams at night. Wild River, a little farther down, you may ford almost dry-shod, and in four hours it shall reach such heights and depths as might upbear our mightiest man-of-war. Many and many a gully, half choked with stones and briers, lurks under the base of an overtopping hill, and shows where a forgotten Undine lived and loved. The hills still bear the scars of their wounds.

No soft-springing greenness veils the tortuous processes.

Uncompromising and terrible, the marks of their awful rending, the agony of their fiery birth, shall remain. Time, the destroyer of man's works, is the perfecter of God's. These ravages are not Time's; they are the doings of an early force, beneficent, but dreadful. It is Time's to soothe and adorn.

We connect the idea of fixity with the mountains, but they seem to me to be continually pirouetting with each other,--exchanging or entirely losing their identity. You are in the Alpine Valley.