wn bold and varied contrasts of light and shade. The
surface of the water is perhaps dark and overclouded; the little
upright sail is the only thing that has caught the light, and it
glitters there like a moving star. Or the water is all one dazzling
sheet of silver, tremulous with the vivid sunbeam, and now the little
sail is black as night, and steals with bewitching contrast over that
sparkling surface.

* * * * *

But we fly again to the mountain. Tourists are too apt to speak of the
waterfall as something independent, something to be visited as a
separate curiosity. There may be some such. But in general, the
waterfall should be understood as part of the mountain--as the great
fountain which adorns the architecture of its rocks, and the gardens
of its pine forests. It belongs to the mountain. Pass through the
valley, and look up; you see here and there thin stripes of glittering
white, noiseless, motionless. They are waterfalls, which, if you
approach them, will din you with their roar, and which are dashing
headlong down, covered with tossing spray. Or ascend the face of the
mountain, and again look around and above you. From all sides the
waterfalls are rushing. They bear you down. You are giddy with their
reckless speed. How they make the rock live! What a stormy vitality
have they diffused around them! You might as well separate a river
from its banks as a waterfall from its mountain.

And yet there is one which I could look at for hours together, merely
watching its own graceful movements. Let me sit again in imagination
in the valley of Lauterbrunnen, under the fall of the Staubbach. Most
graceful and ladylike of descents! It does not fall; but over the
rock, and along the face of the precipice, developes some lovely form
that nature had at heart;--diffuses itself in down-pointing pinnacles
of liquid vapour, fretted with the finest spray. The laws of gravity
have nothing to do with its movements. It is not hurled down; it does
not leap, plunging madly into the abyss; it thinks only of beauty as
it sinks. No noise, no shock, no rude concussion. Where it should dash
against the projecting rock, lo! its series of out-shooting pinnacles
is complete, and the vanishing point just kisses the granite. It
disappoints the harsh obstruction by its exquisite grace and most
beautiful levity, and springs a second time from the rock without
trace of ever having encountered it.

The whole