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But to the poor fluttering heart down there in the country these words came with a strange chill; and it seemed to her that her lover had suddenly withdrawn from her to a great distance, leaving the world around her dark enough. Her first impulse was to utter a piteous cry to him. She sate down and wrote, with trembling fingers, these words: "Dearest Hugh,

occupied at the time the Parliamentary | of argument was clear. How could she session having got on into June-com- fail to see her error? mitted the imprudence of making this suggestion in a letter. Had he been down at Willowby Hall, walking with Lady Sylvia in the still twilight, with the stars begin ning to tell in the sky, and the mist beginning to gather along the margin of the lake, he might have had another answer; but now she wrote to him that in her opinion so serious a step as marriage was not to be adventured upon in a hurry, and she added, too, with some pardonable pride, that it was not quite seemly on his part to point out how they could make their honeymoon trip coincide with the general autumn holiday. Was their marriage to appear to be a merely trivial or accidental thing, waiting for its accomplishment until Parliament should be prorogued?

66

than have you write to me like that.
I will do whatever you please, rather
66 Sylvia."

Probably, too, had she sent off this letter at once, he would have been struck by her simple and generous self-abnegation; and he would have instantly refused to demand from her any sacrifice of feeling He got the letter very late one night, whatever. But then the devil was abroad. when he was sorely fatigued, harassed, He generally is about when two sweethearts and discontented with himself. He had try to arrange some misunderstanding by lost his temper in the House that evening; the perilous process of correspondence. he had been called to order by Mr. Speak- Lady Sylvia began to recollect that, after er; as he walked home he was reviling all, something was due her womanly pride. himself for having been betrayed into a Would it not seem unmaidenly thus to rage. When he saw the letter lying on surrender at discretion on so all-important the table, he brightened up somewhat. a point as the fixing of the wedding-day? Here, at least, would be consolation. -a She would not have it said that they were tender message perhaps some gentle waiting for Parliament to rise before they intimation given that the greatest wish of got married. In any case, she thought his heart might soon be realized. Well, the time was far too short. Moreover, he opened the letter and read it. The was this the tone in which a man should disappointment he experienced doubtless ask a woman to fix the day of her marexaggerated what he took to be the cold-riage? ness of its terms. He paid no attention So she answered the letter in another to the real and honest expressions of affec- vein. If marriage, she said, was only one tion in it; he looked only at her refusal, of the ordinary facts of life, she at least and saw temper where there was only a did not regard it in that light at all. She natural and sensitive pride. cared for tittle-tattle as little as he; but she did not like the appearance of having her wedding-trip arranged as if it were an excursion to Scotland for grouse-shooting. And so forth. Her letter, too, was clever

Then the devil took possession of him, and prompted him to write in reply there and then. Of course he would not show temper, being a man. All the same, he felt called on to point out, politely but firmly, that marriage was after all only one among the many facts of life; and that it was not rendered any the more subline and mysterious by making it the occasion for a number of microscopic martyrdoms and petty sacrifices. He saw no reason why the opportunity offered by the close of the session should not be made use of; as for the opinion of other people on the seemliness of the arrangement, she would have to be prepared for the discovery that neither on that point nor on any other was he likely to shape his conduct to meet the views of a mass of strangers. And so forth. It was a perfectly sensible letter. The line

very clever, indeed, and sharp. Her face was a little flushed as she sealed it, and bade the servant take it to the postoffice the first thing in the morning. But apparently that brilliant piece of composition did not afford her much satisfaction afterwards; for she passed the night, not in healthful sleep, but in alternate fits of crying and bitter thinking, until it seemed to her that this new relationship into which she had entered with such glad anticipations was bringing her only sorrow after sorrow, grief after grief. For she had experienced no more serious troubles than these.

When Hugh Balfour received this letter,

he was in his bedroom, about eight o'clock | with the rush of early memories. I am in the evening; and he was dressed for not so happily constituted. Relics of the the most part in shabby corduroy, with a conventional kind have a perverse trick of wisp of dirty black silk round his neck. reviving those petty incidents which one His man Jackson had brought up from the would rather forget. They recall the old kitchen some ashes for the smearing of follies that still make one blush, or the his hands and face. A cadger's basket hasty word which one would buy back stood on the table hard by. with a year of the life that is left. Our English fields and rivers have the same malignant freakishness. Nature in our little island is too much dominated by the petty needs of humanity to have an affinity for the simpler and deeper emotions. With the Alps it is otherwise. There, as after a hot summer day the rocks radiate back their stores of heat, every peak and forest seems to be still redolent with the most fragrant perfume of memory. The trifling and vexatious incidents cannot adhere to such mighty monuments of bygone ages. They retain whatever of high and tender and pure emotion may have once been associated with them. If I were to

From The Cornhill Magazine.
THE ALPS IN WINTER.

MEN of science have recently called our attention to the phenomena of dual consciousness. To the unscientific mind it often seems that consciousness in its normal state must be rather multiple than dual. We lead, habitually, many lives at once, which are blended and intercalated in strangely complex fashion. Particular moods join most naturally, not with those which are contiguous in time, but with those invent a new idolatry (rather a needless which owe a spontaneous affinity to their task) I should prostrate myself, not before identity of composition. When in my beast, or ocean, or sun, but before one of study, for example, it often seems as if those gigantic masses to which, in spite of that part alone of the past possessed all reason, it is impossible not to attribute reality which had elapsed within the same some shadowy personality. Their voice walls. All else— the noisy life outside, is mystic and has found discordant internay, even the life, sometimes rather noisy preters; but to me at least it speaks in too, in the next room, becomes dreamlike. tones at once more tender and more aweI can fancy that my most intimate self has inspiring than that of any mortal teacher. never existed elsewhere, and that all other The loftiest and the sweetest strains of experiences recorded by memory have oc- Milton or Wordsworth may be more articcurred to other selves in parallel but notulate, but do not lay so forcible a grasp continuous currents of life. And so, after upon my imagination. a holiday, the day on which we resume harness joins on to the day on which we dropped it, and the interval fades into a mere hallucination.

There are times when this power (or weakness) has a singular charm. We can take up dropped threads of life, and cancel the weary monotony of daily drudgery; though we cannot go back to the well-beloved past, we can place ourselves in immediate relations with it, and break the barriers which close in so remorsely to hide it from longing eyes. To some of us the charm is worked instantaneously by the sight of an Alpine peak. The dome of Mont Blanc or the crags of the Wetterhorn are spells that disperse the gathering mists of time. We can gaze upon them till we beget the golden time again." And there is this peculiar fascination about the eternal mountains. They never recall the trifling or the vulgarizing associations of old days. There are times when the bare sight of a letter, a ring, or an old house, overpowers some people

In the summer there are distractions. The business of eating, drinking, and moving is carried on by too cumbrous and clanking a machinery. But I had often fancied that in the winter, when the whole region becomes part of dreamland, the voice would be more audible and more continuous. Access might be attained to those lofty reveries in which the true mystic imagines time to be annihilated, and rises into beatific visions untroubled by the accidental and the temporary. Pure undefined emotion, indifferent to any logical embodiment, undisturbed by external perception, seems to belong to the sphere of the transcendental. Few people have the power to rise often to such regions or remain in them long. The indulgence, when habitual, is perilously enervating. But most people are amply secured from the danger by incapacity for the enjoyment. The temptation assails very exceptional natures. We - the positive and matter-of-fact part of the world — need be no more afraid of dreaming too

much than the London rough need be warned against an excessive devotion to the fine arts. Our danger is the reverse. Let us, in such brief moments as may be propitious, draw the curtains which may exclude the outside world, and abandon ourselves to the passing luxury of abstract meditation; or rather, for the word meditation suggests too near an approach to ordinary thought, of passive surrender to an emotional current.

make upon one in summer. Then when an avalanche is discharged down the gorges of the Jungfrau, one fancies it the signal gun of a volley of artillery. It seems to betoken the presence of some huge animal, crouching in suspense but in perpetual vigilance, and ready at any moment to spring into portentous activity. In the winter the sound recalls the uneasy movement of the same monster, now lapped in sevenfold dreams. It is the rare interThe winter Alps provide some such ruption to a silence which may be felt — a curtain. The very daylight has an unreal single indication of the continued existence glow. The noisy summer life is sus- of forces which are for the time lulled into pended. A scarce audible hush seems to absolute repose. A quiet sea or a moonlit be whispered throughout the region. The forest on the plains may give an impression first glacier stream that you meet strikes of slumber in some sense even deeper. the keynote of the prevailing melody. In But the impression is not so vivid because summer the torrent comes down like a less permanent and less forcibly concharge of cavalry—all rush and roar and trasted. The lowland forest will soon foam and fury-turbid with the dust return to such life as it possesses, which ground from the mountain's flanks by the is after all little more than a kind of enice-share, and spluttering and writhing in tomological buzzing. The ocean is the its bed like a creature in the agonies of only rival of the mountains. But the six strangulation. In winter it is transformed months' paralysis which locks up the into the likeness of one of the gentle energies of the Alps has a greater dignity brooks that creeps round the roots of than the uncertain repose of the sea. It Scawfell, or even one of those sparkling is as proper to talk of a sea of mountains trout-streams that slide through a water as of a mountain wave; but the comparison meadow in the south. It is perfectly always seems to me derogatory to the transparent. It babbles round rocks in- scenery which has the greatest appearance stead of clearing them at a bound. It can of organic unity. The sea is all very well at most fret away the edges of the huge in its way; but it is a fidgety uncomfortable white pillows of snow that cap the boulders. kind of element; you can see but a little High up it can only show itself at intervals bit of it at a time; and it is capable of between smothering snow-beds which form being horribly monotonous. All poetry continuous bridges. Even the thundering to the contrary notwithstanding, I hold that fall of the Handeck becomes a gentle even the Atlantic is often little better than thread of pure water creeping behind aa bore. Its sleep chiefly suggests absence broad sheet of ice, more delicately carved of the most undignified of all ailments; and moulded than a lady's veil, and so and it never approaches the grandeur of diminished in volume that one wonders the strange mountain trance. how it has managed to festoon the broad rock faces with so vast a mass of pendent icicles. The pulse of the mountains is beating low; the huge arteries through which the life-blood courses so furiously in summer have become a world too wide for this trickle of pellucid water. If one is still forced to attribute personality to the peaks, they are clearly in a state of suspended animation. They are spell bound, dreaming of dim abysses of past time or of the summer that is to recall them to life. They are in a trance like that of the Ancient Mariner when he heard spirit voices conversing overhead in mysterious murmurs.

This dream-like impression is everywhere pervading and dominant. It is in proportion to the contrary impression of stupendous, if latent, energy which the Alps

There are dreams and dreams. The special merit of the mountain structure is in the harmonious blending of certain strains of emotion not elsewhere to be enjoyed together. The winter Alps are melancholy, as everything sublime is more or less melancholy. The melancholy is the spontaneous recognition by human nature of its own pettiness when brought into immediate contact with what we please to regard as eternal and infinite. It is the starting into vivid consciousness of that sentiment which poets and preachers have tried, with varying success, to crystalize into definite figures and formula; which is necessarily more familiar to a man's mind, as he is more habitually conversant with the vastest objects of thought; and which is stimulated in the mountains in proportion as they are less dominated by

the petty and temporary activities of daily life. In death, it is often said, the family likeness comes out which is obscured by individual peculiarities during active life. So in this living death or cataleptic trance of the mountains, they carry the imagination more easily to their permanent relations with epochs indefinitely remote.

show something of the sadness of a hard struggle for life; but never in the wildest of storms could it condescend to sentimentalism. The

But it is time to descend to detail. Alps in winter belong, I have said, to dreamland. From the moment when the traveller catches sight, from the terraces The melancholy, however, which is of the Jura, of the long encampment of shared with all that is sublime or lovely peaks, from Mont Blanc to the Wetterhas here its peculiar stamp. It is at once horn, to the time when he has penetrated exquisitely tender and yet wholesome and to the innermost recesses of the chain, he stimulating. The Atlantic in a December is passing through a series of dreams gale produces a melancholy tempered by within dreams. Each vision is a portal to the invigorating influence of the human one beyond and within, still more unsublife that struggles against its fury; but stantial and solemn. One passes, by slow there is no touch of tenderness in its be- gradations, to the more and more shadowy havior; it is a monster which would take regions, where the stream of life runs a cruel pleasure in mangling and disfigur- lower and the enchantment binds the ing its victim. A boundless plain is often senses with a more powerful opiate. at once melancholy and tender, especially Starting, for example, from the loveliest of when shrouded in snow; but it is depress- all conceivable lakes, where the Blumlis ing as the vapors which hang like palls Alp, the Jungfrau, and Schreckhorn form a over a dreary morass. The Alps alone marvellous background to the old towers possess the merit of at once soothing and of Thun, one comes under the dominion stimulating. The tender half-tones, due of the charm. The lake-waters, no longer to the vaporous air, the marvellous delicacy clouded by turbid torrents, are mere liqof light and shade on the snow-piled ranges, uid turquoise. They are of the color of and the subtlety of line, which suggests which Shelley was thinking when he dethat some sensitive agent has been mould- scribed the blue Mediterranean awakened ing the snow covering to every gentle con- from his summer dreams "beside a pumtour of the surface, act like the media ice isle in Baiaæ's Bay." Between the which allow the light-giving rays to pass, lake and the snow-clad hills lie the withwhilst quenching the rays of heat; they ered forests, the delicate reds and browns transmit the soothing and resist the de- of the deciduous foliage giving just the pressing influences of nature. The snow touch of warmth required to contrast the on a half-buried chalet suggests a kind coolness of the surrounding scenery. hand laid softly on a sick man's brows. And higher up, the pine forests still disAnd yet the nerves are not relaxed. The play their broad zones of purple, not air is bright and bracing as the purest quite in that uncompromising spirit which breeze on the seashore, without the slight- reduces them in the intensity of summer est trace of languor. It has the inspiring shadow to mere patches of pitchy blackquality of the notorious "wild north-east-ness, but mellowed by the misty air, and er," without its preposterous bluster. with their foliage judiciously softened with Even in summer the same delicious atmo- snow-dust like the powdered hair of a lastsphere may be breathed amongst the century beauty. There is no longer the higher snow-fields in fine weather. In fierce glare which gives a look of parched winter it descends to the valleys, and the monotony to the stretches of lofty pasture nerves are strung as firmly as those of a under an August sun. The perpetual race-horse in training, without being over- greens, denounced by painters, have disexcited. The effect is heightened by the appeared, and in their place are ranges of intensity of character which redeems every novel hue and texture which painters may detail of a mountain region from the com- possibly dislike-for I am not familiar monplace. The first sight of a pine-tree, with their secrets - but which they may bearing so gallantly-with something, one certainly despair of adequately rendering. may almost say, of military jauntiness The ranges are apparently formed of a its load of snow crystals destroyed to me delicate material of creamy whiteness, unforever the charm of one of Heine's most like the dazzling splendors of the eternal frequently quoted poems. It became once snows, at once so pure and so mellow that for all impossible to conceive of that least it suggests rather frozen milk than ordimorbid of trees indulging in melancholy nary snow. If not so ethereal, it is softer longing for a southern palm. It may and more tender than its rival on the

LIVING AGE.

VOL. XVIII. 888

loftier peaks. It is moulded into the mangled trunks of "patrician trees," same magic combination of softness and which strain to the utmost the muscles of delicacy by shadows so pure in color that their drawers. As the edge of an open they seem to be woven out of the bluest slope is reached, a tumultuous glissade sky itself. Lake and forest and mountain takes place to the more level regions. are lighted by the low sun, casting strange | Each sleigh puts out a couple of legs in misty shadows to portentous heights, to advance, like an insect's feelers, which fade in the vast depths of the sky, or agitate themselves in strange contortions, to lose themselves imperceptibly on the resulting by some unintelligible process in mountain flanks. As the steamboat runs steering the freight past apparently insuinto the shadow of the hills, a group of perable obstacles. One may take a seat pine-trees on the sky-line comes near the upon one of these descending thunderbolts sun, and is suddenly transformed into as one may shoot the rapids of the St. molten silver; or some snow-ridge, pale as Lawrence; but the process is slightly death on the nearest side, is lighted up alarming to untrained nerves. along its summit with a series of points glowing with intense brilliancy, as though the peaks were being kindled by a stupendous burning-glass. The great snow mountains behind stand glaring in spectral calm, the cliffs hoary with frost, but scarcely changed in outline or detail from their summer aspect. When the sun sinks, and the broad glow of gorgeous coloring fades into darkness, or is absorbed by a wide expanse of phosphoric moonlight, one feels fairly in the outer court of dreamland.

Scenery, even the wildest which is really enjoyable, derives half its charm from the Occult sense of the human life and social forms moulded upon it. A bare fragment of rock is ugly till enamelled by lichens, and the Alps would be unbearably stern but for the picturesque society preserved among their folds. In summer the true life of the people is obscured by the rank | overgrowth of parasitic population. In winter the stream of existence shows itself in more of its primitive form, like the rivulets which represent the glacier torrents. As one penetrates further into the valleys, and the bagman element — the only representative of the superincumbent summer population disappears, one finds the genuine peasant, neither the parasite which sucks the blood of summer tourists nor the melodramatic humbug of operas and picture-books. He is the rough athletic laborer, wrestling with nature for his immediate wants, reducing industrial life to its simplest forms, and with a certain capacity not to be quite overlooked for the absorption of schnaps. Even Sir Wilfred Lawson would admit the force of the temptation after watching a day's labor in the snow-smothered forests. The village is empty of its male inhabitants in the day, and towards evening one hears distant shouts and the train of sleighs emerges from the skirts of the forest, laden with masses of winter fodder, or with the

As the sun sinks the lights begin to twinkle out across the snow from the scattered cottages, more picturesque than ever under their winter covering. There is something pathetic, I hardly know why, in this humble illumination which lights up the snowy waste and suggests a number of little isolated foci of domestic life. One imagines the family gathered in the low, close room, its old stained timbers barely visible by the glimmer of the primitive lamp, and the huge beams in the ceiling enclosing mysterious islands of gloom, and remembers Macaulay's lonely cottage where

The oldest cask is opened,

And the largest lamp is lit.

The goodman is probably carving lopsided chamois instead of " trimming his helmet's plume;" but it may be said with literal truth that

The goodwife's shuttle merrily

Goes flashing through the loom, and the spinning-wheel has not yet become a thing of the past. Though more primitive in its arrangements, the village is in some ways more civilized than its British rival. A member of a school board might rejoice to see the energy with which the children are making up arrears of education interrupted by the summer labors. Olive branches are plentiful in these parts, and they seem to thrive amazingly in the winter. The game of sliding in miniature sleighs seems to be inexpressibly attractive for children of all ages, and may possi bly produce occasional truancy. But the sleighs also carry the children to school from the higher clusters of houses, and they are to be seen making daily pilgrimages long enough to imply a considerable tax upon their pedestrian powers. A little picture comes back to me as I write of a string of red-nosed urchins plodding vigorously up the deep tracks which lead