As beautiful as Dian’s face: 

Pride of the land that gave me birth!

All that thy waves reflect I love,

Where heaven itself, brought down to earth,

Looks fairer than above.

“Safe on thy banks again I stray;

The trance of poesy is o’er,

And I am here at dawn of day,

Gazing on mountains as before,

Where all the strange mutations wrought,

Were magic feats of my own mind;

For, in that fairy land of thought,

Whate’er I seek, I find.”

CHAPTER II.  FOOT-TRAVELLING.

Tell me, my soul, why art thou restless?  Why dost thou look forward to the future with such strong desire?  The present is thine,—­and the past;—­and the future shall be!  O that thou didst look forward to the great hereafter with half the longing wherewith thou longest for an earthly future,—­which a few days at most will bring thee! to the meeting of the dead, as to the meeting of the absent!  Thou glorious spirit-land!  O, that I could behold thee as thou art,—­the region of life, and light, and love, and the dwelling-place of those beloved ones, whose being has flowed onward like a silver-clear stream into the solemn-sounding main, into the ocean of Eternity.

Such were the thoughts that passed through thesoul of Flemming, as he lay in utter solitude and silence on the rounded summit of one of the mountains of the Furca Pass, and gazed, with tears in his eyes, and ardent longing in his heart, up into the blue-swimming heaven overhead, and at the glaciers and snowy mountain-peaks around him.  Highest and whitest of all, stood the peak of the Jungfrau, which seemed near him, though it rose afar off from the bosom of the Lauterbrunner Thal.  There it stood, holy and high and pure, the bride of heaven, all veiled and clothed in white, and lifted the thoughts of the beholder heavenward.  O, he little thought then, as he gazed at it with longing and delight, how soon a form was to arise in his own soul, as holy, and high, and pure as this, and like this point heavenward.

Thus lay the traveller on the mountain summit, reposing his weary limbs on the short, brown grass, which more resembled moss than grass.  He had sent his guide forward, that he might be alone.  His soul within him was wild with a fierce and painful delight.  The mountain air excited him; the mountain solitudes enticed, yet maddened him.  Every peak, every sharp, jagged iceberg, seemed to pierce him.  The silence was awful and sublime.  It was like that in the soul of a dying man, when he hears no more the sounds of earth.  He seemed to be laying aside his earthly garments.  The heavens were near unto him; but between him and heaven every evil deed he had done arose gigantic, like those mountain-peaks, and breathed an icy breath upon him.  O, let not the soul that suffers, dare to look Nature in the face, where she sits majestically aloft in the solitude of the mountains; for her face is hard and stern, and looks not in compassion upon her weak and erring child.  It is the countenance of an accusing archangel, who summons us to judgment.  In the valley she wears the countenance of a Virgin Mother, looking at us with tearful eyes, and a face of pity and love!