en there are no tourists to be
met. The first is of the exquisite scenes of wintry Nature, as she shows
herself at this season, when none come to visit her--still, reposeful,
silent, veiled--how much more touching and impressive than when profaned
by the summer crowd! This is the moment when the Jura should be seen!
The pine woods on the hills are but faintly powdered with snow, and the
patches of dry rusty vegetation beneath lie on the gray stones like the
broad red stains of blood. Seeds hang here and there on the bare
branches, mixed with the tendrils of the wild vine, or with ghostly
clusters of what were the flowers of the clematis. The falling leaves
are golden; those already fallen are of an ashen gray. The delicate
tracery overhead is of infinite complexity, exquisite in its endless
detail; and the whole of this disrobed Nature, in its unadorned
simplicity, has an impress of sincerity that reminds you of the drawings
of Holbein. Flat pools of shallow water lie about, carpeted with mosses
and mirroring the sky; the smoke of the huts rises upward gaunt and
straight. No one is near; there are no passers-by; and there is no
sound, except that of a waterfall, fuller in its rush than at any other
season. Silence--a silence so fragile that the step of a single wayfarer
on the road would be enough to break it--reigns undisturbed, and covers
everything like a winding-sheet.

My second impression is of another kind, though almost as comforting, at
least by the contrast; it was given me by the conversation of the
peasant folk, plain humble mountaineers. The speech and thought of
these men is plain and direct, devoid of artifice, clear and fathomable;
they furnish you an unvarnished tale of their own simple experience--the
life experience of a man, no more! They neither invent nor disguise, and
are totally incapable of presenting either fact or circumstances in a
way that shall suggest to the hearer another or a different sense. Our
woeful habit of ridiculing what lies indeed at the bottom of our hearts
they have never learned; they copy, line by line and stroke by stroke,
the meaning that is in them, the intentions of their inner mind. In our
Parisian haunts, it seems to me that their success would be a problem;
but they are heedless of "success"; and to us, when we escape from our
vitiated centres, from an atmosphere poisoned by that perpetual
straining after effect, the pure undressed simplicity of these
"primitives" is