The new stable is a huge wooden building, with raftered lofts to stow the hay, and stalls for many cows and horses.  It stands snugly in an angle of the pine-wood, bordering upon the great horse-meadow.  Here at night the air is warm and tepid with the breath of kine.  Returning from my forest walk, I spy one window yellow in the moonlight with a lamp.  I lift the latch.  The hound knows me, and does not bark.  I enter the stable, where six horses are munching their last meal.  Upon the corn-bin sits a knecht.  We light our pipes and talk.  He tells me of the valley of Arosa (a hawk’s flight westward over yonder hills), how deep in grass its summer lawns, how crystal-clear its stream, how blue its little lakes, how pure, without a taint of mist, ’too beautiful to paint,’ its sky in winter!  This knecht is an Ardueser, and the valley of Arosa lifts itself to heaven above his Langwies home.  It is his duty now to harness a sleigh for some night-work.  We shake hands and part—­I to sleep, he for the snow.

VII

The lake has frozen late this year, and there are places in it where the ice is not yet firm.  Little snow has fallen since it froze—­about three inches at the deepest, driven by winds and wrinkled like the ribbed sea-sand.  Here and there the ice-floor is quite black and clear, reflecting stars, and dark as heaven’s own depths.  Elsewhere it is of a suspicious whiteness, blurred in surface, with jagged cracks and chasms, treacherously mended by the hand of frost.  Moving slowly, the snow cries beneath our feet, and the big crystals tinkle.  These are shaped like fern-fronds, growing fan-wise from a point, and set at various angles, so that the moonlight takes them with capricious touch.  They flash, and are quenched, and flash again, light darting to light along the level surface, while the sailing planets and the stars look down complacent at this mimicry of heaven.  Everything above, around, beneath, is very beautiful—­the slumbrous woods, the snowy fells, and the far distance painted in faint blue upon the tender background of the sky.  Everything is placid and beautiful; and yet the place is terrible.  For, as we walk, the lake groans, with throttled sobs, and sudden cracklings of its joints, and sighs that shiver, undulating from afar, and pass beneath our feet, and die away in distance when they reach the shore.  And now and then an upper crust of ice gives way; and will the gulfs then drag us down?  We are in the very centre of the lake.  There is no use in thinking or in taking heed.  Enjoy the moment, then, and march.  Enjoy the contrast between this circumambient serenity and sweetness, and the dreadful sense of insecurity beneath.  Is not, indeed, our whole life of this nature?  A passage over perilous deeps, roofed by infinity and sempiternal things, surrounded too with evanescent forms, that like these crystals, trodden underfoot, or melted by the Foehn-wind into dew, flash, in some lucky moment, with a light that mimics stars!  But to allegorise and sermonise is out of place here.  It is but the expedient of those who cannot etch sensation by the burin of their art of words.