n the absence which
leaves the mind free to contemplate it, work even more good than in its
presence.

At length he came in sight of the Alpine regions. Far off, the heads of
the great mountains rose into the upper countries of cloud, where
the snows settled on their stony heads, and the torrents ran out from
beneath the frozen mass to gladden the earth below with the faith of
the lonely hills. The mighty creatures lay like grotesque animals of
a far-off titanic time, whose dead bodies had been first withered into
stone, then worn away by the storms, and covered with shrouds and palls
of snow, till the outlines of their forms were gone, and only rough
shapes remained like those just blocked out in the sculptor's marble,
vaguely suggesting what the creatures had been, as the corpse under the
sheet of death is like a man. He came amongst the valleys at their feet,
with their blue-green waters hurrying seawards--from stony heights of
air into the mass of 'the restless wavy plain'; with their sides of rock
rising in gigantic terrace after terrace up to the heavens; with their
scaling pines, erect and slight, cone-head aspiring above cone-head,
ambitious to clothe the bare mass with green, till failing at length
in their upward efforts, the savage rock shot away and beyond and above
them, the white and blue glaciers clinging cold and cruel to their
ragged sides, and the dead blank of whiteness covering their final
despair. He drew near to the lower glaciers, to find their awful abysses
tremulous with liquid blue, a blue tender and profound as if fed from
the reservoir of some hidden sky intenser than ours; he rejoiced over
the velvety fields dotted with the toy-like houses of the mountaineers;
he sat for hours listening by the side of their streams; he grew weary,
felt oppressed, longed for a wider outlook, and began to climb towards
a mountain village of which he had heard from a traveller, to find
solitude and freedom in an air as lofty as if he climbed twelve of his
beloved cathedral spires piled up in continuous ascent.

After ascending for hours in zigzags through pine woods, where the only
sound was of the little streams trotting down to the valley below, or
the distant hush of some thin waterfall, he reached a level, and
came out of the woods. The path now led along the edge of a precipice
descending sheer to the uppermost terrace of the valley he had left. The
valley was but a cleft in the mass of the mountain: a li