A Bye-Day in the Alps.

Of all that has been said or sung of mountain scenery there is one phrase which most frequently recurs to me. The teachers of the peasant noble, according to Wordsworth, had been, amongst others,

The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

The phrase exemplifies that mysterious charm with which a poet can invest the expression of the apparently most obvious thought in the simplest language. The silence of the stars, as Addison shows in his familiar hymn, is but another version of the music of the spheres. The sound is eloquent in the ear of reason because imperceptible to the ear of the sense. The sleep of the hills has been less frequently noticed, because it is only in modern times that the mountains have excited much human sympathy. And yet, in wandering amongst the glorious solitudes of the Alps, a mountaineer by affection is always sensible of that gentle and soothing influence which prompted Wordsworth's phrase. Sleep, indeed, is an article which varies at least as much in quality as wine. To say nothing of the sleep which intervenes between a public dinner and a morning headache, there is the sleep which rewards a young gentleman in training for a boat race, and the sleep which is kept at bay with damp towels or strong coffee by the competitor for university honours; the sleep which descends upon the weary compiler of copy for the press, and the sleep which he is the means of providing for his readers; there is a sleep which deserves all that Macbeth says of it, and a sleep which is merely another name for that suspension of the faculty of volition which leaves us for hours to suffer on an intellectual treadmill, wearily and mechanically repeating some round of vexatious thoughts. The sleep to be found amongst the mountains belongs to the finer growths, and it, too, might be divided into various classes. In "Blencathara's rugged coves," where it came to Wordsworth's hero, it is occasionally rather too full-bodied. The atmosphere of the English lakes is apt to be enervating; and the sleep which they impart might pass into slumbers as prolonged as those of Rip Van Winkle. The sleep of the high Alps is more refreshing and stimulating in its properties. To the happy refugee from London worries, it truly knits up the ravelled sleave of care. It soothes without stupifying, and is visited by no depressing dreams. I do not speak merely of the physical state, which supervenes upon a day of vigorous exercise in a pure atmosphere and amidst exquisite scenery; but rather of the sleep of the mind which may be enjoyed with open eyes and during the exertion of muscular activity.

Some people, I am aware, think whilst they walk, and I have known of a case in which a newspaper leader was composed during an ascent of the Jungfrau. But, in my own case, which I take to be an ordinary one, the brain during active walking (and the result is one of the great charms of that form of exercise) becomes merely an instrument for co-ordinating the muscular energies. Enough thought is secreted to make legs and arms work harmoniously, and to propel the organism in any required direction; but there is no surplus of cerebration to take the shape of conscious intellectual effort. Vague phantoms of ideas may possibly flit across the brain, but they give rise at most to some vague simmering of the mind rather than to anything which can be called reasoning, or even meditation. Thought, that is, becomes indistinguishable from emotion. The outside world is not a collection of objects to be classified, and still less does it suggest trains of speculation; it is merely the background of a dream; its presence is felt rather than perceived; it is like the tapestry of some gorgeous chamber which one vaguely watches with half-shut eyes during the initial stages of a quiet doze. The mountains and the sky are potent influences, but if one attempted to analyse the specific elements which they contribute to thought, the charm would vanish. Some people can enjoy such a frame of mind, when in a state of bodily inactivity. To me, I confess, this is very difficult. My body becomes a nuisance to me unless I provide it with occupation. When sitting by a stream or lying under a tree, I cannot forget the existence of legs and arms. Gnats tickle my nose, or ants creep into my shoes, or I find that, in attempting to wrap myself in a fit of abstraction, I have incurred a cramp or an attack of "pins and needles;" moreover, under such circumstances, I cannot keep the intellectual valves properly screwed down. And, therefore, I find that nothing is more conducive to the proper state of delicious drowsiness than the regular monotonous rise and fall of a pair of feet in hobnailed boots forcing me upwards through a perpendicular height of about 1,500 feet in an hour. A much quicker ascent calls for too much attention; a slower rate of motion allows the intellect to wriggle itself into superfluous activity. For this reason, though a professed cultivator of the art of doing nothing, I find that even the seaside is not equal in sedative power to the mountains. It is pleasant, indeed, to lie upon the sand on a calm day and watch the little waves playing at being a genuine surf. The ocean resembles an invalid just recovering strength enough to enjoy a languid motion of his limbs, which reminds him that no real exertion is necessary. But the amusement palls upon one after a time, and is apt to provoke a fidgety restlessness rather than the desired dreaminess. The mountain air stimulates without exhausting, and supplies, therefore, a more harmless opiate.

Sleep, it is true, has been but too effectually dispelled from some Alpine districts. I do not quite share Mr. Ruskin's hatred for the railways which have disturbed many mountain solitudes, and amongst them the sacred scenery round the head of the Lake of Geneva. Few things,

to my taste, are more picturesque than one of the great Alpine carriageroads; and I do not see my way to a clear logical distinction between the zigzags across the Simplon and the tunnel beneath it. Any new object of course jars upon us at first; and there was a time when a plough was as great an innovation in agricultural scenery as a steam-engine at the present day. Object to machinery as machinery, and it is hard to see where the line is to be drawn. We are scandalised by Milton's use of earthly artillery in the wars of the angels; but there seems to be no good reason why cannon should be intrinsically less poetical than swords and bucklers. All things are harmonized by time; and perhaps some epic poet of the future-if epic poetry survives-may introduce telegraphic wires into a similar scene, with no more sense of discord than Milton felt in the introduction of cannon. Perhaps, indeed, the scream of the engine still brings up too many jarring associations; and, whatever may be the case with the mechanism of travel, it is unfortunately too clear that the travellers are in great need of some civilising process. The tourist who haunts the gigantic hotels of that lovely district is too frequently a person in whose company all poetical sentiment collapses, as steam is condensed by a jet of cold water. The lover of sleep would therefore do well to retire to one of the quiet old towns which slumber on the opposite shore. There, say at Evian, he at once sinks into the comparative calm of a century or so back. The quaint little street which has wedged itself between the lake-shore and the huge natural terrace behind, recalls the days when there were still such things as little independent duchies protected by the mountain fastnesses against the ambition of the greater powers. Though Savoy has been swallowed up in France, the town seems to be barely conscious of the change. Certain springs of disagreeable taste serve as a pretext for Parisians in search of a quiet holiday. But the hotel which they frequent is not as yet of American proportions; and the population generally dozes in tolerable indifference to its visitors. Here and there, perhaps, a shop consults the tastes of tourists by a display of attenuated alpenstocks; but competition is apparently not severe; and for the most part the shopkeeper seems to be still at that state of civilisation at which the entrance of a customer is considered as a fair pretext for a steady gossip, and a comparison of views upon the prospects of the harvest, or perhaps for inquiries into the state of the Thames Tunnel-an enterprise which, for some mysterious reason, seems to have a great interest for most remote populations. Evian, in short, still resembles an English country town in the days of Miss Austen; though from the terrace of the hotel there is a view to which no English town can produce a satisfactory rival. There, on one lovely summer evening of last year, we watched a sunset of magical beauty. Some fifty miles of the Jura rises like a wall to the west; and as the sun went down, it was converted into one broad band of glowing purple. The gleaming lake below reflected a breadth of strawcoloured sky above; the twin sails of one of the characteristic boats

which always recall the sharp wings of a swallow, showed their dark points against its surface; and in the immediate foreground stood out a mass of picturesque towers, and a bank of foliage, just green enough in the gathering gloom to be not absolutely black. Certainly, as an intense expression of perfect calm, nothing could be more exquisite; and yet— for the human mind is apt to be hypercritical even in the face of naturethere was something not quite satisfactory. Perhaps the scenery was a little too well composed; there was a dash of the melodramatic about it; one fancied that the effect was too much studied and arranged with too careful an observance of the rules of art; or, possibly, the presence of some fellow-creatures of an appreciative turn of mind produced a kind of perverse recalcitration. Perhaps it may be said as a general rule that things ought not to be too perfect; though it must in fairness be added that they very seldom fail in that direction. Anyhow, as I turned my back upon the scene for a moment, I was fascinated by a form in the opposite direction. The phantom of a rocky peak, pale and hardly definable in the twilight, was looking at me with a tacit significance, over the shoulder of a nearer hill. Mountains behave in a strangely capricious manner under such circumstances. Sometimes they seem to shrink into themselves as the daylight leaves; and what was a noble crag becomes no better than an insignificant undulation. On other occasions, and this was one of them, they gain a fresh charm by obscurity; and though this particular peak was but a grey and colourless rock scarcely to be distinguished, if the truth must be said, from the gable of a neighbouring house, and altogether humiliated by contrast with the gorgeous purple and gold of his Western rivals, he seemed to be distinctly beckoning to his humble servant. “I hear a voice you cannot hear," as somebody says, which on the present occasion declared it to be an unmistakeable duty to make a closer acquaintance with this apparently modest peak. To hear was to obey. No elaborate preparations were necessary to carry out so modest a scheme; and next morning, instead of summoning guides, ordering provisions, and testing ropes and axes, I surreptitiously conveyed a roll from the breakfast-table into my pocket, and started with a domestic walkingstick upon an exploring expedition.

The first couple of hours took me through a region which formed a kind of neutral ground between the realms of sleep and the outside wideawake world. The road-like many Alpine roads-is grand out of proportion to the traffic. A diligence might thunder along it at full speed, save for one or two sharp rises; but it leads past quiet old farmhouses to remote villages, and seems to be used only by peasants with agricultural carts. The houses, indeed, are such as may fitly be occupied by a population which regards Evian as a vortex of fashionable dissipation. They are solid high-shouldered stone edifices, whose ground floors are principally occupied by cows. Each is generally sheltered by a group of noble walnut or chestnut trees; coeval, apparently, with the venerable but slightly fusty edifice. In a drowsy region one must not expect to find too lively a worship

of certain modern idols. The scrubbing of floors and a rigid attention to drainage are not amongst the virtues of a land of sleep. Here, for example, is a scene which I noticed without attempting to convert it into an allegory. It is much at the service of any dealer in such wares, but I am content to turn it loose upon the world without specific application. A cluster of picturesque houses crowns the top of a long ascent, and between them one catches a glimpse through rich foliage of the broad blue waters of the lake. At one's feet and under one's nose stagnates a little pond of that queer green fluid so common in English farm-yards, and in the fluid dabbled certain contented ducks, whose aspirations are obviously quite satisfied with their immediate surroundings. A little further on is a symbol of a different kind. On the top of a rounded knoll lies a monstrous boulder

Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf

Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.

To me it

A noble chair it would make for a professor of geology. recalls an eastern legend which I have somewhere read. There is a stone column in Ceylon, if I remember rightly, which is now about six feet in length. Formerly, it is said, it was twice its present size; but once in every century, or, for it matters little, in every thousand years, an angel passes and just touches the corner of the pillar with the extreme hem of his aerial garment. The degradation produced by this contact has been the one cause of decay, and when the column is quite worn out something will happen-which does not much matter to the existing generation. The boulder wears away a little faster, but it too takes the mind back into a giddy abyss of years sufficient to crush the human imagination. It is pleasant to look at some minute channel on its surface and guess that when the rain first began to trace it, the Roman empire may still have been flourishing, and that a knob on its surface has been in process of carving ever since the pyramids were erected. The boulder marks a definite epoch, in that vast abyss of time, as distinctly as the seaweed washed ashore by the last tide. The great ice-wave reached just this point some inconceivable number of centuries back, and then began its slow retreat towards the central peaks. Meanwhile the old boulder is sleeping peacefully in the sun, whether at some remote future again to be lifted on the shoulders of a new glacier in another icy period, or to melt away like a lump of snow, and descend piecemeal into the lake. My own time being more limited, I was content to pass steadily forwards along the ridge of the huge natural embankment. In a couple of hours the road suddenly left off, and I found myself under the shadow of my friendly peak. A quaint little village marks the furthest limit of permanent civilized life. The sleep of the hills here begins to make itself perceptibly felt. The village repeats the ordinary features of all these remoter valleys. In the most central place is of course the inevitable fountain with its group of gossipping women. What they find to talk about is matter for speculation, but it may be presumed that the conversation has a general