A Tour Through The Pyrenees

ccording to its own pleasure; then when you reach your goal all must be overturned; that spoils your disposition; the mind keeps its bent, and the beauty it has fancied prejudices that which it sees; it fails to understand this, because it is already taken up with another. I suffered a most grievous disenchantment when I saw the sea for the first time: it was a morning in autumn; flecks of purplish cloud dappled the sky; a gentle breeze co

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een multitudes of rocks. All along the promenade Eynard, f

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jets that cross each other and mingle their flakes of foam; then under an arcade of rocks and stones, it eddies in deep

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r the turf and gives life to it, and its rolling pearls sparkle as they glide along the leaves. Our northern fields afford no notion of

the white veil of a woman. I have often since seen this strange garb of the mountains, especially towards evening; the bluish atmosphere enclosed in the gorges becomes visible; it grows thick, it imprisons the light and makes it palpable. The eye delights in penetrating into the fair network of gold that envelopes the ridges, sensitiv

gigantic notch in the perpendicular mountain. The brook that runs through i

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rched chaos the only life is that of the water, which glides, murmuring, beneath the stones. At the bottom of the ravine the mountain abruptly lifts its vertical wall to the height of two hundred feet; the water drops in long white threads along this polished wall, and turns

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s emerald eyes wear the treacherous look of a naiad who would charm the passer-by only to drown him; then, wanton that it is, leaps blindly between the rocks, turns its bed topsy-turvy, rises aloft in a tempest of foam, dashes itself impotently and furiously into spray against the bowlder that has vanquished it. Three steps further on, it subsides and goes frisking capriciously alongside the bank in changing eddies, braided with bands of light and shade, twisting voluptuously like an adder. When the rock of its bed is broad and smo

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lue expanses. Fiery and joyful youth, useless and full of poetry; to-morrow that troubled wave wi

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ofound steep-edged hollow, where the torrent rolls along swallowed up in the caverns it has scooped out, obstructed by the trunks of the trees that it uproots. Overhead, lordly oaks meet in arcades; the shrubs steep their roots far below in the turbulent stream. N

three or four cows, perhaps, are there, busily cropping the herbage. Other gorges at the sides of the road and in t

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ce! nothing that recalls man; the landscape is just what it has been these six thousand years: the grass grows useless and free as on the first day; no birds among the branches; only now and then may be heard the far-off cry of a soaring hawk. Here and there the face of a huge, projecting rock patches with a dark shade the uniform plane of the trees: it is a virgin wilderness in its severe beauty

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mountain, encased between two walls of rounded stones all purple with poppies and wild mallows. Its fall has been turned to account in driving rows of saws incessantly back a

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y ways that lead to the hamlets scattered over the slopes. The houses there lean their backs against the mountain, shelved one above another, so as to look down upon the valley. At noon the people are all absent. Every door is closed; three or four old women, who alone are left in the village, are spreading grain upon the level rock which forms the street or esplanade. What more singular than this long, natural flag-stone, carpeted with gilded heads of grain. The dark and narrow church ordinarily rises from a terraced yard, enclosed by a low wall; the bell-tower is white and square, with a slated spi

en sleeping and dreaming, which steeps the soul in animal life and stifles thought under the dull impressions of the senses. You stretch yourself out, and are content with merely living; you feel not the passage of the hours, but are happy in the present moment, without a thought for past or future; you gaze upon the slender sprigs of moss, the grayish spikes of the grasses, the long ribands of the shining herbs; you follow the course of an insect striving to get over a thicket of turf, and clambering up and down in the labyrinth of its stalks. Why not confess that you have become a child again and are amused with the least of sights? What is the country but a means of returning to our earliest youth, of finding again that f

end of the forest that covers the first slope lay some enormous trees, half rotten, and already whitened with moss. Some mummies of pine trees were left standing; but their pyramids of branches showed a shattered side. Old oaks split open as hig

nty. He is dry, nervous, always well and alert, his legs forever in motion, his head fermenting with some idea which has just sprung up in his brain and which during two days will appear to him the finest in the world. He is always under way and a hundred paces ahead of others, seeking truth with rash boldness, even to loving danger, finding pleasure in contradicting and being contradicted, and

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you will," said he, "but that is better than your doctored wine: at least, it is better for my stomach." Besides, he finds himself comfortable under his system, and maintains that tastes such as his grow with age, that, in short, the most sensible of senses, the most capable of new and various pleasures is the brain. He confesses that he is dainty in respect of ideas, slightly selfish, and that he looks upon the world merely as a spectato

ople go up a mountain in ord

hills, the villages are spots, the rivers are lines drawn by a pen. The objects are all lost in one grayish tint; the contrast of lights and shades is blotted out; everything is diminished; you make out a multitude of imperce

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point of sight. But no; the beauty is all ciphered mathematically; it is calculated that an elevation of a thousand feet makes it a thousand times more beautiful. The operation is admirable, a

ghbor says that this is fine, the book thinks so too; I have paid to come up, I ought to be charmed; accordingly I am. I was one day on a mountain with a family to whom the guide pointed out an indistinct bluish line, saying, 'There is Toulouse!' The father, with sparkling eyes, repeated to the son,

nt is an err

y they overwhelm you; you cannot take them in, you see only one side of them, you cannot appreciate their height nor their size. One thousand feet and ten thousand

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our mind comprehends them, because our body dominates them. Go to Saint-Sauveur, to Bareges; you will see that those monstrous masses have as expressiv

man of his doctor. What have you

ock, those scattered patches of yellowish moss, resemble rags; I like to have a person either naked or clothed, and do not like your tatterdemalion. The very forms are wanting in grandeur, the valleys are neither abrupt nor smiling.

advice

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one else. She is not a god, but an artist whose genius inspir

to what it says yonder, it destroys itself, and the spectator is in the presence of nothing but a mass of senseless objects. What though these obj

a parched and melancholy plain, may be

nd under its red curtains. What could be more common! But all these good people have an air of peaceful contentment; the babies are warm and easy in the over-wide breeches, glossy antiques transmitted from generation to generation. There must have been habits of security and abundance, for a scattered household to lie pellmell on the ground in this fashion; this comfort must have lasted from father to son, for the furniture to have assumed that sombre

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e poor but thickset turf, sunburnt and beaten by the wind, forms a carpet firmly sewn with tenacious threads; the half-dried mosses, the knotty heaths strike their stubborn roots down between the clefts of the rock; the stunted firs creep along, twisting their horizontal trunks. An aromatic and penetrating odor, concentrated and drawn forth by the heat, comes from all these mountain plants. You feel that they are engaged in an eternal struggle against a bar

row I will test your reasoning in the gor

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