public room, and, out in the dimly moonlit night, saw a faintly-shimmering ghostly peak far up in the air at distance undefined, haunting the valley, haunting the house, haunting my heart, never henceforth to let it go free from its lovely terrible presence? I had been looking at that same mountain an hour or two before, when the mists on the sides of the valley shone lurid in the sunset. No red touched its cold peaks: it looked on, hard and unresponsive; dead with whiteness, and hard with black rocks. But in the moonlight it glimmered out gentle as the ghost of a maiden.

"It was, however, when I climbed the opposing hill, on the back of an animal called a horse, but made very like a giraffe, that I felt the first full impression of what a mountain is. For across the valley rose a vast upheaved desert, a wilderness of mountain heaps, ranges, slopes, and peaks, of which the nearest outwork, forming the side of the valley up whose corresponding side I was ascending, was a precipice that filled me with horror. This horror was not fear exactly, for I could not fall down that precipice, whatever other I might fail to escape. But its stony wall, starting from such a height, and sinking plump-down out of sight in the narrow valley, the bottom of which I could not see, fronted me like the stare of a nameless dismay. I strove against it, and not without success, although the overpowering wonder of that which rose above this wall was not strengthening to the nerves or soothing to the imagination. I knew, even while I gazed upon it, that I should not remember what I saw or felt, or be able to describe it. It was such a chaotic loveliness and awfulness intermingled in savage harmony!—a changeful vision

of glaciers, of shifting clouds, of rocks, of falling streams, of snow, of waste wild peaks, of stretches of all kinds of mass, and shape, and surface, mingling in all degrees of height and shadow. And this they said was the foot of the Jungfrau! Down below, in the valley we had left, lay fields of bright green, looking as smooth as a shaven lawn, dotted all over with little brown, wooden, toylike houses, the shelter of the goats in winter, to which were visible no paths to destroy the perfect green smoothness. These fields (or indeed lawns would be the nearer word) sloped up, with more or less inclination, to the foot of precipices of rock, on the top of which came other green lawns, dotted in like manner with little wooden houses of a rich brown, and sloping also to other precipices rising above them in turn. But the fields grew more rugged and bare upon the ascending terrraces, and great lumps of stone came sticking through them, until at last rose the naked mountain, 'horrid all with' rock, over which wandered the feeble clouds. And down into the midst of the rocks came the tongues, and jags, and roots of the snow and ice, which higher and higher drew closer and closer together, till the peaks were one smooth, sunshiny whiteness, except where precipices, on which no snow could lie, rose black in the midst, seeming to retire, like dark hollows, from the self-assertion of the infinite glitter, while the projecting rocks looked like holes in the snow. And here and there, over the mountain, lay the glaciers, looking lovelily uneven; fretted, purfled, and wrinkled, like a wrought architectural surface; mostly white, but mottled with touches of colour, which seemed to me mostly green, though at times I could not say that it was

not blue; in either case a colour most delicate and delectable to behold.

"I wandered about here for a day or two, haunting the borders of the terrible gulf in whose unseen depth lay the pleasant fields of the lower valley, down into which, at night, I had met the deer-like goats trooping with their multitudinous patter of feet, branching of horns, and ringing of bells. But out of this lovely depth below would suddenly sweep up a mass of vapour, as if all beneath had been a caldron set upon an awful fire, and not the green pleasant places of the earth. It would drift about in the valley as in a trough, and then all at once steaming up, swathe and obliterate, in a few moments, the whole universe of heights and hollows, snows and precipices-everything but a yard or two of the earth around me. I would know that all that land of enchantment and fear lay there, but could see nothing, although through the mist might come the prolonged roll of the avalanche falling, far off, down the slopes and steeps of the Jungfrau. This might happen twenty times in a day. Then the mist would suddenly part a little, high towards the heavens perhaps, and you would see a solitary glitter, whiter than the mist-the peak of a dweller in the sky. And the mist would range and change, and darken and clear, a perfect embodiment of lovely lawlessness, revealing such dazzling wastes of whiteness, here more dazzling, and there melting into the cloud, so that you could not part cloud and snow. In another place, where the snow had fallen along the ribs of a precipice in furrows converging from the top, you would seem to look upon the fierce explosion of a snow-mine, radiating from