When sun and storm contend together--when the
thick clouds are broken up and pierced by arrows of golden
daylight--there will be startling rearrangements and
transfigurations of the mountain summits. A sun-dazzling spire of
alp hangs suspended in mid-sky among awful glooms and blackness; or
perhaps the edge of some great mountain shoulder will be designed
in living gold, and appear for the duration of a glance bright like
a constellation, and alone 'in the unapparent.' You may think you
know the figure of these hills; but when they are thus revealed,
they belong no longer to the things of earth--meteors we should
rather call them, appearances of sun and air that endure but for a
moment and return no more. Other variations are more lasting, as
when, for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some
windless hours, and the thin, spiry, mountain pine trees stand each
stock-still and loaded with a shining burthen. You may drive
through a forest so disguised, the tongue-tied torrent struggling
silently in the cleft of the ravine, and all still except the
jingle of the sleigh bells, and you shall fancy yourself in some
untrodden northern territory--Lapland, Labrador, or Alaska.
Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning; totter down
stairs in a state of somnambulism; take the simulacrum of a meal by
the glimmer of one lamp in the deserted coffee-room; and find
yourself by seven o'clock outside in a belated moonlight and a
freezing chill.
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