With what emotions of sublimity, softened by tenderness, did she meet
Valancourt in thought, at the customary hour of sun-set, when, wandering
among the Alps, she watched the glorious orb sink amid their summits,
his last tints die away on their snowy points, and a solemn obscurity
steal over the scene! And when the last gleam had faded, she turned
her eyes from the west with somewhat of the melancholy regret that is
experienced after the departure of a beloved friend; while these lonely
feelings were heightened by the spreading gloom, and by the low sounds,
heard only when darkness confines attention, which make the general
stillness more impressive--leaves shook by the air, the last sigh of the
breeze that lingers after sun-set, or the murmur of distant streams.
During the first days of this journey among the Alps, the scenery
exhibited a wonderful mixture of solitude and inhabitation, of
cultivation and barrenness. On the edge of tremendous precipices, and
within the hollow of the cliffs, below which the clouds often floated,
were seen villages, spires, and convent towers; while green pastures
and vineyards spread their hues at the feet of perpendicular rocks
of marble, or of granite, whose points, tufted with alpine shrubs, or
exhibiting only massy crags, rose above each other, till they terminated
in the snow-topt mountain, whence the torrent fell, that thundered along
the valley. The snow was not yet melted on the summit of Mount Cenis, over which
the travellers passed; but Emily, as she looked upon its clear lake and
extended plain, surrounded by broken cliffs, saw, in imagination, the
verdant beauty it would exhibit when the snows should be gone, and the
shepherds, leading up the midsummer flocks from Piedmont, to pasture on
its flowery summit, should add Arcadian figures to Arcadian landscape.
As she descended on the Italian side, the precipices became still more
tremendous, and the prospects still more wild and majestic, over which
the shifting lights threw all the pomp of colouring. Emily delighted to
observe the snowy tops of the mountains under the passing influence of
the day, blushing with morning, glowing with the brightness of noon, or
just tinted with the purple evening. The haunt of man could now only be
discovered by the simple hut of the shepherd and the hunter, or by the
rough pine bridge thrown across the torrent, to assist the latter in his
chase of the chamois over crags where, but for this vestige of man, it
would have been believed only the chamois or the wolf dared to venture.
As Emily gazed upon one of these perilous bridges, with the cataract
foaming beneath it, some images came to her mind, which she afterwards
combined in the following