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Tell me, my soul, why art thou restless?
Why dost thou look forward to the future with
such strong desire? The present is thine,—and
the past;—and the future shall be! O that
thou didst look forward to the great hereafter with
half the longing wherewith thou longest for an
earthly future,—which a few days at most will
bring thee! to the meeting of the dead, as to the
meeting of the absent! Thou glorious spirit-land!
O, that I could behold thee as thou art,—the region
of life, and light, and love, and the dwelling-place
of those beloved ones, whose being has flowed
onward like a silver-clear stream into the solemn-sounding
main, into the ocean of Eternity.

Such were the thoughts that passed through the

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soul of Flemming, as he lay in utter solitude and
silence on the rounded summit of one of the mountains
of the Furca Pass, and gazed, with tears in
his eyes, and ardent longing in his heart, up into
the blue-swimming heaven overhead, and at the
glaciers and snowy mountain-peaks around him.
Highest and whitest of all, stood the peak of the
Jungfrau, which seemed near him, though it rose
afar off from the bosom of the Lauterbrunner Thal.
There it stood, holy and high and pure, the bride
of heaven, all veiled and clothed in white, and lifted
the thoughts of the beholder heavenward. O,
he little thought then, as he gazed at it with longing
and delight, how soon a form was to arise in
his own soul, as holy, and high, and pure as this,
and like this point heavenward.

Thus lay the traveller on the mountain summit,
reposing his weary limbs on the short, brown grass,
which more resembled moss than grass. He had
sent his guide forward, that he might be alone.
His soul within him was wild with a fierce and
painful delight. The mountain air excited him;

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the mountain solitudes enticed, yet maddened him.
Every peak, every sharp, jagged iceberg, seemed
to pierce him. The silence was awful and sublime.
It was like that in the soul of a dying man,
when he hears no more the sounds of earth. He
seemed to be laying aside his earthly garments.
The heavens were near unto him; but between
him and heaven every evil deed he had done arose
gigantic, like those mountain-peaks, and breathed
an icy breath upon him. O, let not the soul that
suffers, dare to look Nature in the face, where she
sits majestically aloft in the solitude of the mountains;
for her face is hard and stern, and looks not
in compassion upon her weak and erring child. It
is the countenance of an accusing archangel, who
summons us to judgment. In the valley she wears
the countenance of a Virgin Mother, looking at us
with tearful eyes, and a face of pity and love!

But yesterday Flemming had come up the valley
of the Saint Gothard Pass, through Amsteg,
where the Kerstelenbach comes dashing down the
Maderaner Thal, from its snowy cradle overhead.

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The road is steep, and runs on zigzag terraces.
The sides of the mountains are barren cliffs; and
from their cloud-capped summits, unheard amid the
roar of the great torrent below, come streams of
snowwhite foam, leaping from rock to rock, like
the mountain chamois. As you advance, the scene
grows wilder and more desolate. There is not a
tree in sight,—not a human habitation. Clouds,
black as midnight, lower upon you from the ravines
overhead; and the mountain torrent beneath
is but a sheet of foam, and sends up an incessant
roar. A sudden turn in the road brings
you in sight of a lofty bridge, stepping from cliff to
cliff with a single stride. A fearful cataract howls
beneath it, like an evil spirit, and fills the air with
mist; and the mountain wind claps its hands and
shrieks through the narrow pass, Ha! ha!—This
is the Devil's Bridge. It leads the traveller across
the fearful chasm, and through a mountain gallery
into the broad, green, silent meadow of Andermath.

Even the sunny morning, which followed this

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gloomy day, had not chased the desolate impression
from the soul of Flemming. His excitement
increased as he lost himself more and more among
the mountains; and now, as he lay all alone on the
summit of the sunny hill, with only glaciers and
snowy peaks about him, his soul, as I have said,
was wild with a fierce and painful delight.

A human voice broke his reverie. He looked,
and beheld at a short distance from him, the athletic
form of a mountain herdsman, who was approaching
the spot where he lay. He was a young
man, clothed in a rustic garb, and holding a long
staff in his hand. When Flemming rose, he stood
still, and gazed at him, as if he loved the face of
man, even in a stranger, and longed to hear a human
voice, though it might speak in an unknown
tongue. He answered Flemming's salutation in a
rude mountain dialect, and in reply to his questions
said;

“I, with two others, have charge of two hundred
head of cattle on these mountains. Through

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the two summer months we remain here night and
day; for which we receive each a Napoleon.”

Flemming gave him half his summer wages.
He was glad to do a good deed in secret, and yet
so near heaven. The man received it as his due,
like a toll-keeper; and soon after departed, leaving
the traveller alone. And the traveller went his
way down the mountain, as one distraught. He
stopped only to pluck one bright blue flower,
which bloomed all alone in the vast desert, and
looked up at him, as if to say; “O take me with
you! leave me not here companionless!”

Ere long he reached the magnificent glacier of
the Rhone; a frozen cataract, more than two thousand
feet in height, and many miles broad at its
base. It fills the whole valley between two mountains,
running back to their summits. At the base
it is arched, like a dome; and above, jagged and
rough, and resembles a mass of gigantic crystals,
of a pale emerald tint, mingled with white. A
snowy crust covers its surface; but at every rent
and crevice the pale green ice shines clear in the

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sun. Its shape is that of a glove, lying with the
palm downwards, and the fingers crooked and
close together. It is a gauntlet of ice, which, centuries
ago, Winter, the King of these mountains,
threw down in defiance to the Sun; and year by
year the Sun strives in vain to lift it from the
ground on the point of his glittering spear. A
feeling of wonder and delight came over the soul
of Flemming when he beheld it, and he shouted
and cried aloud;

“How wonderful! how glorious!”

After lingering a few hours in the cold, desolate
valley, he climbed in the afternoon the steep
Mayen-Wand, on the Grimsel, passed the Lake of
the Dead, with its ink-black waters; and through
the melting snow, and over slippery stepping-stones
in the beds of numberless shallow brooks,
descended to the Grimsel Hospital, where he passed
the night, and thought it the most lone and
desolate spot, that man ever slept in.

On the morrow, he rose with the day; and the
rising sun found him already standing on the

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rustic bridge, which hangs over the verge of the Falls
of the Aar at Handeck, where the river pitches
down a precipice into a narrow and fearful abyss,
shut in by perpendicular cliffs. At right angles
with it comes the beautiful Aerlenbach; and halfway
down the double cascade mingles into one.
Thus he pursued his way down the Hasli Thal into
the Bernese Oberland, restless, impatient, he
knew not why, stopping seldom, and never long,
and then rushing forward again, like the rushing
river whose steps he followed, and in whose ice-cold
waters ever and anon he bathed his wrists, to
cool the fever in his blood; for the noonday sun
was hot.

His heart dilated in the dilating valley, that
grew broader and greener at every step. The
sight of human faces and human dwellings soothed
him; and through the fields of summer grain, in
the broad meadows of Imgrund, he walked with a
heart that ached no more, but trembled only, as our
eyelids when we have done weeping. As he
climbed the opposite hill, which hems in this

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romantic valley, and, like a heavy yoke, chafes the
neck of the Aar, he believed the ancient tradition,
which says, that once the valley was a lake. From
the summit of the hill he looked southward upon
a beautiful landscape of gardens, and fields of
grain, and woodlands, and meadows, and the ancient
castle of Resti, looking down upon Meyringen.
And now all around him were the singing
of birds, and grateful shadows of the leafy trees;
and sheeted waterfalls dropping from the woodland
cliffs, seen only, but unheard, the fluted columns
breaking into mist, and fretted with frequent spires
and ornaments of foam, and not unlike the towers
of a Gothic church inverted. There, in one white
sheet of foam, the Riechenbach pours down into
its deep beaker, into which the sun never shines.
Face to face it beholds the Alpbach falling from the
opposite hill, “like a downward smoke.” When
Flemming saw the innumerable runnels, sliding
down the mountain-side, and leaping, all life and
gladness, he would fain have clasped them in his
arms and been their playmate, and revelled with

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them in their freedom and delight. Yet he was
weary with the day's journey, and entered the village
of Meyringen, embowered in cherry-trees,
which were then laden with fruit, more like a way-worn
traveller than an enthusiastic poet. As he
went up the tavern steps he said in his heart, with
the Italian Aretino; “He who has not been at a
tavern, knows not what a paradise it is. O holy
tavern! O miraculous tavern! holy, because no
carking cares are there, nor weariness, nor pain;
and miraculous, because of the spits, which of
themselves turn round and round! Of a truth all
courtesy and good manners come from taverns, so
full of bows, and Signor, sì! and Signor, nò!”

But even in the tavern he could not rest long.
The same evening at sunset he was floating on the
lake of Brienz, in an open boat, close under the
cascade of the Giessbach, hearing the peasants
sing the Ranz des Vaches. He slept that night
at the other extremity of the lake, in a large
house, which, like Saint Peter's at Joppa, stood by
the water's side. The next day he wasted in

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writing letters, musing in this green nest, and paddling
about the lake again; and in the evening
went across the beautiful meadows to Interlachen,
where many things happened to him, and detained
him long.

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