ted
fulness of mountain character (and that of the highest order), or which
appears to have been less disturbed by foreign agencies, than that which
borders the course of the Trient between Valorsine and Martigny. The
paths which lead to it out of the valley of the Rhone, rising at first
in steep circles among the walnut trees, like winding stairs among the
pillars of a Gothic tower, retire over the shoulders of the hills into a
valley almost unknown, but thickly inhabited by an industrious and
patient population. Along the ridges of the rocks, smoothed by old
glaciers into long, dark, billowy swellings, like the backs of plunging
dolphins, the peasant watches the slow coloring of the tufts of moss and
roots of herb which, little by little, gather a feeble soil over the
iron substance; then, supporting the narrow strip of clinging ground
with a few stones, he subdues it to the spade; and in a year or two a
little crest of corn is seen waving upon the rocky casque. The irregular
meadows run in and out like inlets of lake among these harvested rocks,
sweet with perpetual streamlets, that seem always to have chosen the
steepest places to come down, for the sake of the leaps, scattering
their handfuls of crystal this way and that, as the wind takes them,
with all the grace, but with none of the formalism, of fountains;
dividing into fanciful change of dash and spring, yet with the seal of
their granite channels upon them, as the lightest play of human speech
may bear the seal of past toil, and closing back out of their spray to
lave the rigid angles, and brighten with silver fringes and glassy films
each lower and lower step of sable stone; until at last, gathered
altogether again,--except, perhaps, some chance drops caught on the
apple-blossom, where it has budded a little nearer the cascade than it
did last spring,--they find their way down to the turf, and lose
themselves in that silently; with quiet depth of clear water furrowing
among the grass blades, and looking only like their shadow, but
presently emerging again in little startled gushes and laughing hurries,
as if they had remembered suddenly that the day was too short for them
to get down the hill.

Green field, and glowing rock, and glancing streamlet, all slope
together in the sunshine towards the brows of the ravines, where the
pines take up their own dominion of saddened shade; and with everlasting
roar in the twilight, the stronger torrents thunder down pale