WANDERINGS OF A PILGRIM IN THE SHADOW OF THE JUNGFRAU ALP. HAIL CHAPTER XXVI. INTRODUCTION.-THE SERIOUS SIDE OF TRAVEL. AIL to the Oberland Alps! As Mont Blanc is the Monarch of Mountains in all Switzerland, so the Jungfrau is the Maiden Queen, with her dazzling coronet of sky-piercing crystal crags for ever dropping from their setting, and her icy sceptre, and her robe of glaciers, with its fathomless fringe of snow. She too is "Earth's rosy Star," so beautiful, so glorious, that to have seen her light, if a man had leisure, would be worth a pilgrimage round the world. To have heard her voice, deep thunder without cloud, breaking the eternal stillness in the clear serene of heaven, and to have beheld her, shaking from her brow its restless battlements of avalanches, were an event one's life, from which to calculate the longitudes of years. But how can any man who has seen this describe it? To think of doing this perfectly is indeed perfectly hopeless; and yet any man may tell how it affected him. A celebrated treatise on self-knowledge has the following curious intellectual recipe: "Accustom yourself to speak naturally, pertinently, and rationally on all subjects and you will soon learn to think so on the best." This is somewhat as if a man should say, Learn to float well in all seas, and you will be able to swim in fresh-water rivers. But a man may both have learned to think and to speak, naturally, pertinently, and rationally, if not on in all subjects, yet on some, and still may find himself put to shame by a snow-covered mountain in the setting day, or beneath the keen full moon. 66 In attempting to paint scenery by words, you are conscious of the imperfection of language, which, being a creation of the mind, is by no means of so easy use, skilfully and accurately, in delineating form, as in conveying thought. I am reminded of the curious experience related by Coleridge. Some folk," he says, "apply epithets as boys do in making Latin verses. When I first looked upon the Falls of the Clyde, I was unable to find a word to express my feelings. At last a man, a stranger to me, who arrived about the same time, said—' How majestic!' It was the precise term, and I turned round and was saying-Thank you, sir, that is the exact word for it,' when he added in the same breath, Yes, how very pretty!" It is easier to tell how nature affects the heart and mind than to describe nature worthily; and the passages in our favourite poets which go down deepest into the heart, and are kept as odorous gums or bits of musk about our common thoughts, are those which express, not the features so much as the voice of nature, and the feelings wakened by it, and the answering tones from the Harp of Immortality within our own souls. It is much easier for the Imagination to create a fine picture, than for the mind to draw a real picture with power of Imagination; for the soul works more feelingly and intensely in the Ideal than the actual senses report ideally in the actual What an exquisite picture has the sensitive, sad genius of Henry Kirke White drawn of a Gothic tomb! Had he been to copy it from some fine old church-yard or cathedral, it would not have been half so affecting, so powerful. Lay me in the Gothic tomb, Carve a stately monument, And angels serve to hold my head, How then, says the authoress of some very beautiful letters to a Mother from abroad, speaking of the land of Tell, over which we are about to wander, "How then can I describe, for there I could only feel? And in truth, the country is so beautiful and sublime, that I believe had Schiller seen it, he would have feared endeavouring to embody it in his immortal play. How courageous is imagination! And is it not well that it is so, for how much should we lose, even of the real, if the Poet drew only from reality!" There is profound truth in this. And hence one of those homely and admirable observations, which, amidst gems of poetry, Coleridge was always dropping in conversation, as fast as a musician scatters sounds out of an instrument. "A poet, said he, "ought not to pick Nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory." And yet, how many are the books of Travellers, who have gone among the finest scenes of nature, and given us free and careless pictures and incidents, lively stories, anecdotes, the talk of men, the wayward etchings of wild life and manners, but have made no attempt whatever to connect with nature the eternal feeling and conscience of the soul. Perhaps they would call this sermonizing; as Charles Lamb once playfully translated one of Coleridge's mottos, sermoni propriora, properer for a sermon! But unless we travel with something in our hearts higher than the forms of earth, and a voice to speak of it, to report it, "little do we see in nature that is ours." And we bring ourselves under the Poet's condemnation: pray "Whose mind is but the mind of his own eyes, He is a slave the meanest we can meet." Therefore, if any reader thinketh that he finds things "more proper for a sermon " in our little picture of a pilgrimage, we him to remember that the sermons in stones are precisely the things in nature most generally overlooked; and we only wish that we had more of them and better reported. For mere pictures, ever so beautiful, are scarcely worth travelling so far to see, unless we link their sacred lessons to our inner selves. Many of Wordsworth's sonnets are gems beyond all price, because they embalm rich moral sentiments, like apples of gold in baskets of silver; and in his own words, man. "The Grove, the sky-built Temple, and the Dome, The immortal mind craves objects that endure." And it ought to have them, it ought to be accustomed to them; every man ought to endeavour to present them to his fellowAnd indeed how can a man go about the whole circle of our humanity, copying everywhere the hieroglyphics on its external temple, and yet elude all serious reference to our Immortality and Accountability? Say that these things will make his book less popular; why wish to make it popular, and not endeavour at the same time to make it useful? "Whole centuries," says Schiller, "have shown philosophers as well as artists busied in immersing truth and beauty in the depths of a vulgar humanity; the former sink, but the latter struggles victoriously, in her own indestructible energy." up How noble is that maxim of Schiller, how worthy of all endeavour to fulfil it :-" Live with your century, but be not its creature; bestow upon your contemporaries not what they praise, but what they need." The tendency of travel, in our day, is strong towards habits of outwardness, and forgetfulness of that which is inward. The world is in two great moving currents, each looking at the other as its spectacle, its show, its theatrical amusement. A book must be a comedy; there is scarcely such a thing possible as serious meditation. The world are divided between living for what other people will say of them, and living to see how other people live. Certes, this is an evil habit, and every record of external shows that does not lead the mind to better things tends to consolidate and fasten the world's incurable worldliness. Thus, the more a man knows of other things, the less he may know of his own being; and the more he lives upon the food of amusement, the less power will the Word of God, and those trains of thought that spring from it, and di |