Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

are changed, and idiocy appears. What venomous principle diffused in these running waters has led to such rapid and profound disorders in the physical organization, and consequently in the mind? None at all. The presence of a little magnesia or the absence of a little iodine suffices to produce this effect. And this frightful degeneracy of the human species from the same causes manifests itself throughout mountainous countries, in the Pyrenees and in the Alps, in the Hartz and in the

MONKS ACCORDING TO ROMANCE.

Jura, in the valleys of Thibet, in the Ural chain, in the Andes, and the Cordilleras.

characteristic of the Valaisian women is their singular hat. It is worn by the poor as well as the rich, only that of the rich is ornamented with a crest of a rich, wide, gold-colored ribbon, and the brim of it is formed by a multitude of black ribbons placed side by side upon the edge; a superfluity of ornament, the idea of which would scarcely enter the head of a Parisian milliner. These fine Valaisian hats are quite expensive; but one of them lasts a long time, for they are only worn on Sundays

and occasional fete

days.

If you scale the Alps, whose glaciers separate Switzerland from the kingdom of Sardinia, you will also find, in the southern valley of Aosta, the goiter and idiocy as much as in the northern valley already described. At the village of Aosta these things are infinitely worse. On a summer Sunday, if you pass through the streets at an hour when the inhabitants come and seat themselves before the door to enjoy the air, you will be much affected at the sight of the numerous idiots.

[graphic]

A single road easily accessible, the route so celebrated under the name of the Great St. Bernard, is the means of communication between these two valleys, so rich in beautiful and picturesque scenes, and so mournful by the degradation of a part of the human race. At the culminating point of the passage, eight thousand one hundred and fifty feet above the level of the sea, is situated the hospice of the Great St. Bernard, in the midst of a desolate solitude where all vegetation is dead, where the snow-and some winters it falls to the depth of forty feet-does not disappear from the ground except during a very small portion Next to the goiter the most general of the year. For several months in each

The canton of Valais, in Switzerland, is one of those countries where there is a predilection to the goiter and idiocy. The latter, in its excess, is happily the exception, but the goiter, more or less developed, is general among the women, and it is almost as much of a deformity as the neck of a swan would be in carrying the head of a Valaisian woman.

year mules and horses are continually employed in transporting from the valleys below the provision, wood, and other necessaries for the use of the hospice. The establishment of this precious retreat at the very point furthest removed from habitations on either side, and where the snow-storms would be the most dangerous for the traveler exhausted by fatigue and by cold, is a beneficence that cannot be too highly appreciated, but which has been wronged by false ideas induced by declamatory exaggerations. Chateaubriand, in his "Genius of Christianity," paints a young traveler lost at night in the snow. "A dog barks, he comes near, he finds him, he howls for joy; a recluse follows him. It is not enough to expose his own life a thousand times to save men; even animals must needs be made instrumental in these sublime deeds, which they embrace, so to speak, with all the ardent charity of their masters."

The imagination permits itself to be deceived by the use of false images. Many tourists, in approaching the convent, expect to find in the pale and austere countenances of the monks, traces of their devotion to a long martyrdom; but without referring to Chateaubriand, there is nothing, so far as can be discerned, in the physiognomy even of the dogs which appears as the glorious outshining of a ministering angel.

Some ladies in the company in which I arrived one evening at the hospice during a violent storm, were surprised at not seeing some one of these valuable and hospitable animals come out to meet us, carrying about his neck a basket filled with provisions, wrapped up in a snow white cloth, and a flagon of Madeira or some other reviving draught. Painters, who fib as well as poets, ut pictura poesis, have often represented such scenes. The truth is, there is nothing in it; and if by some great chance a dog of St. Bernard is the bearer of a little basket of provisions, I would strongly caution any sentimental traveler to be very careful and not touch it on penalty of being devoured at once. It is rather an unpleasant encounter to meet with one of these dogs prowling about at some distance from the buildings. The dogs of St. Bernard are watch-dogs, and in the silence of these

[graphic]

THE MONK AS HE REALLY IS.

solitudes they can distinguish the approach of travelers at a great distance. As to their manners, they are the same as all watch-dogs, not very gratifying to the visitor.

On entering the convent you will find, not recluses nor monks with a sorrowful and mystic air, but regular canons of the order of St. Augustine, well favored, receiving the traveler with affability, reading the journals, and being quite conversant with what is going on in the world. At the dinner hour, which is about six o'clock during the pleasant season, you might be quite certain of finding a very agreeable company met in the dining hall at St. Bernard. One of the monks does the honor of the table. The repast is always found good by travelers to whom the journey and the keen air have given an appetite, but as for the rest, the most rigorous sumptuary law could find nothing there to be retrenched. The repast concluded,

[graphic][merged small]

you walk into the parlor, and then yield yourselves up to the pleasures of conversation, or, thanks to the piano, a present from a grateful tourist, you can there listen to worldly music. In a word, you may there find at this height all the trite themes of common life, and the hospice of St. Bernard is no nearer heaven than the bottom of the valley.

While guests are received above, there are stated times in which hospitality is extended in the vast halls of the ground floor to a crowd of the peasantry coming both from Piedmont and Valois to attend mass in the convent. One year, on the 24th of August, I arrived at the hospice in the midst of such a crowd; it amounted to about three or four hundred persons. They were furnished with a repast consisting of bread and boiled vegetables, served to them on trenchers and moistened with good clear water; but lodging was

not furnished. The sixty or eighty beds of the hospice would hardly suffice such a crowd. Therefore, the most of the Piedmontese and Valoisians return early to their respective valleys. Occasionally a few young couples may be seen loitering behind in close conversation or admiring the extended prospects. Not far from the hospice, at a place still called the Plain of Jupiter, there was formerly a temple raised to this god. Could there have been one here also to Juno Lucina, and could it be by following the faint light of an ancient tradition that these young people take the trouble to climb eight thousand feet above the level of the sea to chat away the evening by starlight? But I am recalling memories of things already distant.

Times change the manners as well as the costumes. What has become of the easy toilet and short petticoat of the Brientz boat-women? Calicoes are superseding

the national costumes of the peasants in the environs of Paris. What has become of the custom of the young girls of Oberland of receiving, with the approval of their parents, the young men who were their suitors and offering them cherry wine.

We allude not to the glare of the volcano, the flash of the lightning, or the coruscations of the northern lights, but to brilliant appearances of a more recondite description-more remote, too, from terrestrial connections, most frequently and magnificently seen in tropical localities, sometimes visible over thousands of square miles of the earth's surface, and through a vast linear extent of celestial space, occurring both as isolated drops of

Some years since, if a young man of Oberland should say to a young woman, "Will you give me some cherry wine?" it meant," Will you consent to love me?" At the present time these usages are dis-light, and forming copious luminous showappearing day by day, if they have not already disappeared, under the influence of civilization. Customs are doubtless not worth any less on account of their recency, but it is doubtful, on the other hand, if they are any more valuable on that account.

[ocr errors]

CELESTIAL FIREWORKS.

ers. St. John might have had the phenomenon before him on its grandest scale when he indited the passage in which he refers to the opening of the sixth seal: "And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind."

It is very common, when the curtains of the night are drawn, and clouds are abis a brilliant and an imposing spec- sent from the star-decked sky, or only tacle, the flight of ten thousand rock-blot it in patches, for a line of light in the ets, from various parts of the city, as night concave to arrest the eye, as though a closes in upon the celebration of the ever- fiery arrow had been shot from an inmemorable fourth of July. Up they visible bow in space, or a star had fallen go, not one by one, or score after score, from its sphere into an extinguishing gulf. but in a monster burst-flaring, hissing, Hence the familar names of shooting and and vaulting, then curling and winding falling stars applied to such apparitions. aloft like so many fiery flying serpents, In certain situations—as when away from till they finally dissolve in a shower of the din of towns, on shipboard, in the still stars, most dazzling to the half million valley, or on the solitary moor-the appair of upturned eyes that follow their pearance is not a little impressive; and, course. Though admiration is excited, being not more striking than well known there is little surprise, except among the in all climes and countries, it has been juveniles. Much less is the mind of the consecrated in the records of inspiration multitude stirred with those feelings of as an image of the complete and rapid awe bordering on apprehension, which are overthrow of principalities and powers. usually roused when the impression to the "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lueye is so occult as to defy intelligence to cifer, son of the morning!" "I beheld apprehend its cause-a splendid but mys- Satan as lightning fall from heaven." terious apparition. The whole is of the Often as the sight has been witnessed, it earth, earthy. seldom fails to arrest attention, whether It is known to be of man's device, and contemplated by rustic ignorance or culof no difficult manipulation, while only tivated science, and to fix thought upon gorgeous or even visible within a very the inquiry, for the moment," What can it limited range. At a comparatively short be?" In the oldest literature we meet distance from the scene of action, the with allusions to these swift and evaneslofty seemed low, the beautiful was ob- cent luminosities. Homer compares the scure, and the imposing became insig- hasty flight of Minerva from the peaks of nificant. It dwindled down to the likeness Olympus, to break the truce between the of a few squibs, fired by some frolicsome Greeks and Trojans, to the rapidity of a urchins escaped from school, till, a little radiant overhead streamer. Virgil makes further off, the horizon showed nothing in it a kind of telegraph between Jupiter and the direction but the ordinary darkness of poor old Anchises; and mentions the phenight. Far otherwise is it with the fire-nomenon, when frequent, as a prognostic works which nature occasionally exhibits. of stormy weather:

66

[graphic][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

"And oft, before tempestuous winds arise, The seeming stars fall headlong from the skies, And, shooting through the darkness, gild the night With sweeping glories and long trains of light."

Modern observations show that these and other objects of the same class-the shooting stars, falling stars, fire-balls, and thunder-bolts of the vulgar-the meteors, meteorites, aërolites, bolides, eolides, and uranolites of the scientific-are to a moral certainty identical in their nature and origin, though differing in their exhibitions. The leading circumstances under which they appear may be thus stated:

1. Shooting stars, meteors, or whatever else we may call them, vary in their form, magnitude, and brightness. Some consist of phosphoric lines, apparently described by a point; and these are the most numerous class. In others, the globular shape is occasionally very conspicuous, answering to a ball of fire, usually followed by a train of intensely white light; but

this is sometimes tinged with various prismatic colors of great beauty. A third variety present no uniform aspect, remain stationary in the heavens, and are visible for a considerable time. Estimates of the diameters of the globular class give measurements of five hundred feet, one thousand feet, and two thousand six hundred feet. Some are not more conspicuous than small stars to the naked eye, while others are more resplendent than the brightest of the planets, and throw a very perceptible illumination upon the path of the traveler.

2. These luminous objects differ likewise in their height, velocity, and duration. A series of observations was carefully conducted by Brandes, with coadjutors at Breslau and the neighborhood, between April and October, 1823, when, out of a great number, ninety-eight were observed simultaneously at different stations. Of these, at the time of extinction, the computed altitudes were,

« VorigeDoorgaan »