Lakes are seen gleaming in all sorts of places,—­round, or oval, or square, like very mirrors; others narrow and sinuous, drawn close around the peaks like silver zones, the highest reflecting only rocks, snow, and the sky.  But neither these nor the glaciers, nor the bits of brown meadow and moorland that occur here and there, are large enough to make any marked impression upon the mighty wilderness of mountains.  The eye, rejoicing in its freedom, roves about the vast expanse, yet returns again and again to the fountain peaks.  Perhaps some one of the multitude excites special attention, some gigantic castle with turret and battlement, or some Gothic cathedral more abundantly spired than Milan’s.  But, generally, when looking for the first time from an all-embracing standpoint like this, the inexperienced observer is oppressed by the incomprehensible grandeur, variety, and abundance of the mountains rising shoulder to shoulder beyond the reach of vision; and it is only after they have been studied one by one, long and lovingly, that their far-reaching harmonies become manifest.  Then, penetrate the wilderness where you may, the main telling features, to which all the surrounding topography is subordinate, are quickly perceived, and the most complicated clusters of peaks stand revealed harmoniously correlated and fashioned like works of art—­eloquent monuments of the ancient ice-rivers that brought them into relief from the general mass of the range.  The canons, too, some of them a mile deep, mazing wildly through the mighty host of mountains, however lawless and ungovernable at first sight they appear, are at length recognized as the necessary effects of causes which followed each other in harmonious sequence—­Nature’s poems carved on tables of stone—­the simplest and most emphatic of her glacial compositions.

Could we have been here to observe during the glacial period, we should have overlooked a wrinkled ocean of ice as continuous as that now covering the landscapes of Greenland; filling every valley and canon with only the tops of the fountain peaks rising darkly above the rock-encumbered ice-waves like islets in a stormy sea—­those islets the only hints of the glorious landscapes now smiling in the sun.  Standing here in the deep, brooding silence all the wilderness seems motionless, as if the work of creation were done.  But in the midst of this outer steadfastness we know there is incessant motion and change.  Ever and anon, avalanches are falling from yonder peaks.  These cliff-bound glaciers, seemingly wedged and immovable, are flowing like water and grinding the rocks beneath them.  The lakes are lapping their granite shores and wearing them away, and every one of these rills and young rivers is fretting the air into music, and carrying the mountains to the plains.  Here are the roots of all the life of the valleys, and here more simply than elsewhere is the eternal flux of nature manifested.  Ice changing to water, lakes to meadows, and mountains to plains.  And while we thus contemplate Nature’s methods of landscape creation, and, reading the records she has carved on the rocks, reconstruct, however imperfectly, the landscapes of the past, we also learn that as these we now behold have succeeded those of the pre-glacial age, so they in turn are withering and vanishing to be succeeded by others yet unborn.