cks can hold no more. The surplus does not
fall in the winter, because, fastened by continual frost, the quantity
of snow which an Alp can carry is greater than each single winter can
bestow; it falls in the first mild days of spring in enormous
avalanches. Afterwards the melting continues, gradually removing from
all the steep rocks the small quantity of snow which was all they could
hold, and leaving them black and bare among the accumulated fields of
unknown depth, which occupy the capacious valleys and less inclined
superfices of the mountain.

Hence it follows that the deepest snow does not take nor indicate the
actual forms of the rocks on which it lies, but it hangs from peak to
peak in unbroken and sweeping festoons, or covers whole groups of peaks,
which afford it sufficient hold, with vast and unbroken domes: these
festoons and domes being guided in their curves, and modified in size,
by the violence and prevalent direction of the winter winds.

We have, therefore, every variety of indication of the under mountain
form; first, the mere coating, which is soon to be withdrawn, and which
shows as a mere sprinkling or powdering after a storm on the higher
peaks; then the shallow incrustation on the steep sides glazed by the
running down of its frequent meltings, frozen again in the night; then
the deep snow more or less cramped or modified by sudden eminences of
emergent rock, or hanging in fractured festoons and huge blue irregular
cliffs on the mountain flanks, and over the edges and summits of their
precipices in nodding drifts, far overhanging, like a cornice, (perilous
things to approach the edge of from above;) finally, the pure
accumulation of overwhelming depth, smooth, sweeping, and almost
cleftless, and modified only by its lines of drifting. Countless
phenomena of exquisite beauty belong to each of these conditions, not to
speak of the transition of the snow into ice at lower levels; but all on
which I shall at present insist is that the artist should not think of
his Alp merely as a white mountain, but conceive it as a group of peaks
loaded with an accumulation of snow, and that especially he should avail
himself of the exquisite curvatures, never failing, by which the snow
unites and opposes the harsh and broken lines of the rock. I shall enter
into farther detail on this subject hereafter; at present it is useless
to do so, as I have no examples to refer to, either in ancient or modern
art. No state