ey charge certain
centimes. The unlucky glacier reminds me at his latter end of a wretched
whale stranded on a beach, dissolving into masses of blubber, and hacked
by remorseless fishermen, instead of plunging at his ease in the deep
blue water. Far above, where the glacier begins his course, he is seen
only by the true mountaineer. There are vast amphitheatres of pure snow,
of which the glacier known to tourists is merely the insignificant
drainage, but whose very existence they do not generally suspect. They
are utterly ignorant that from the top of the icefall which they visit
you may walk for hours on the eternal ice. After a long climb you come
to the region where the glacier is truly at its noblest; where the
surface is a spotless white; where the crevasses are enormous rents
sinking to profound depths, with walls of the purest blue; where the
glacier is torn and shattered by the energetic forces which mould it,
but has an expression of superabundant power, like a full stream
fretting against its banks and plunging through the vast gorges that it
has hewn for itself in the course of centuries. The bases of the
mountains are immersed in a deluge of cockneyism--fortunately a shallow
deluge--whilst their summits rise high into the bracing air, where
everything is pure and poetical.

The difference which I have thus endeavoured to indicate is more or
less traceable in a wider sense. The mountains are exquisitely
beautiful, indeed, from whatever points of view we contemplate them; and
the mountaineer would lose much if he never saw the beauties of the
lower valleys, of pasturages deep in flowers, and dark pine-forests with
the summits shining from far off between the stems. Only, as it seems to
me, he has the exclusive prerogative of thoroughly enjoying one--and
that the most characteristic, though by no means only, element of the
scenery. There may be a very good dinner spread before twenty people;
but if nineteen of them were teetotalers, and the twentieth drank his
wine like a man, he would be the only one to do it full justice; the
others might praise the meat or the fruits, but he would alone enjoy the
champagne; and in the great feast which Nature spreads before us (a
stock metaphor, which emboldens me to make the comparison), the high
mountain scenery acts the part of the champagne. Unluckily, too, the
teetotalers are very apt, in this case also, to sit in judgment upon
their more adventurous neighbours. Especia