a crevasse; the mountaineer
remembers that it is the top of a huge chasm, thirty feet across, and
perhaps ten times as deep, with perpendicular sides of glimmering blue
ice, and fringed by thick rows of enormous pendent icicles. The marks
that are scored in delicate lines, such as might be ruled by a diamond
on glass, have been cut by innumerable streams trickling in hot weather
from the everlasting snow, or ploughed by succeeding avalanches that
have slipped from the huge upper snowfields above. In short, there is no
insignificant line or mark that has not its memory or its indication of
the strange phenomena of the upper world. True, the same picture is
painted upon the retina of all classes of observers; and so Porson and a
schoolboy and a peasant might receive the same physical impression from
a set of black and white marks on the page of a Greek play; but to one
they would be an incoherent conglomeration of unmeaning and capricious
lines, to another they would represent certain sounds more or less
corresponding to some English words; whilst to the scholar they would
reveal some of the noblest poetry in the world, and all the associations
of successful intellectual labour. I do not say that the difference is
quite so great in the case of the mountains; still I am certain that no
one can decipher the natural writing on the face of a snow-slope or a
precipice who has not wandered amongst their recesses, and learnt by
slow experience what is indicated by marks which an ignorant observer
would scarcely notice. True, even one who sees a mountain for the first
time may know that, as a matter of fact, a scar on the face of a cliff
means, for example, a recent fall of a rock; but between the bare
knowledge and the acquaintance with all which that knowledge
implies--the thunder of the fall, the crash of the smaller fragments,
the bounding energy of the descending mass--there is almost as much
difference as between hearing that a battle has been fought and being
present at it yourself. We have all read descriptions of Waterloo till
we are sick of the subject; but I imagine that our emotions on seeing
the shattered well of Hougomont are very inferior to those of one of the
Guard who should revisit the place where he held out for a long day
against the assaults of the French army.

Now to an old mountaineer the Oberland cliffs are full of memories; and,
more than this, he has learnt the language spoken by every crag and
every