ALPINE SUNRISE.

Patea Mail, 4 January 1881, Page 4

ALPINE SUNRISE.

Who can describe sunrise among the Alps ? Here the ideal picture becomes only a satire upon the original; words are but the idle symbols for the thought. Just as the mightiest art critic in the world must utterly fail when attempting a description of the divine beauty of a Magdalene by Titian or a Madonna by Raphael, so under the influence of the rising sun, the grandest word-paintings of man do scanty justice to the delicate shades and roseate hues and magic tints of the Alpine peaks. Like a huge sparkling gem from the horizon the great shining ball came up, and the whole world was bathed in a flood of varicoloured light. From earth to sky and from sky to earth it streamed along, and the colors came back to the eye in a succession of magic pictures and forms. There were peaks rock-ribbed and scarred; peaks standing like huge Titians on the horizon; peaks with pinnacles and spires like the cathedral at Milan; peaks round and full like St Peter’s at Rome.

“ Look at the Jungfrau !” was an exclamation which burst simultaneously from a hundred mouths, and every eye was changed immediately to the spot. Fourteen thousand feet towards the clouds the gigantic peak arose, and a miniature sun seemed to shine from every point on her dazzling shroud of eternal snow. Brilliant and sparkling the opaline light sped along its side and crest, and the mountain, printed on the sky, seemed like some mighty altar in the temple of the Most High. Every point of the heavens and earth blazed forth with a beauty and a glare. Clouds burnished with purple and reflecting Gothic figures and forms ; moraines of rock and debris from above ; wind-swept icy crags half illumined by sunshine half darkened by shadow; avalanches delicately poised , ridges intersected and lapping ; fissures and crevasses ; glaciers and gorges and chasms ; light and shade and colour and perspective—all were there, and a myriad of other far grander beauties beside. We tarried a long time on the summit ; the bitter cold of the early morn gradually disappeared, the wind became calm, and the day among the Alps was now well begun. But at last the charm was slowly dispelled, the spectators one by one departed, the sun grew brighter and less gorgeous and ascended higher into the heavens. Then the gong of the hotel was sounded, in an hour the whistle of the locomotives had blown, and ere the day was half over, I was as again mingling with the crowd on the street of Lucerne.