If ever in the morning sunshine you get upon the forehead of the mountain, you are sure to have bad weather afterwards, but if in the evening it is clear, this is a good prophecy. Translating the common proverb of the people concerning it in the reverse order, "When Pilatus doffs his hat, Then the weather will be wet." But when he keeps his slouched cloud-beaver over his brows all day, you may expect fair weather for your excursions, the storm-spirit not being abroad, but brooding. CHAPTER LVI. ASCENT OF THE RIGHI.-EXTRAORDINARY GLORY OF THE VIEW. If you are favoured with a fine clear sunrise, then, of all excursions from Lucerne, that to the summit of the Righi is unrivalled in the world for its beauty. It is comparatively rare that travellers are so favoured, and the Guide-books warn you not to be disappointed, by quoting, as the more common fate, the sad Orphic ululation of some stricken poet, who came down ignorant of sunrise, but well acquainted with the rain. Seven weary up-hill leagues we sped, The setting sun to see; Sullen and grim he went to bed, Sullen and grim went we. Nine sleepless hours of night we passed The rising sun to see; Sullen and grim he rose again, Sullen and grim rose we." After hesitating some days, because of unpromising responses from the cloud-sybils, we at length resolved to try it, for the ascent is worth making, at all events. We chose the way across the Lake by the village of Weggis, which place we reached by a lovely sail in a small boat with two rowers, a thousand-fold pleasanter way, and more in keeping with the wild sequestered scenery, than a noisy crowded steamer. There SUNSET ON THE RIGHI. 293 are several other routes, as you may learn by the Guide books, but I shall mention only ours. Landing at Weggis, you immediately commence the ascent of the mountain, fatiguing to the uttermost on a warm afternoon, but filled with views all the way up, of Lake and snowy mount, and wild-wood scenery, beautiful enough to pay you abundantly, even if you saw nothing at the summit but the ground you tread upon. We made our ascent in the afternoon, so as to be upon the mountain by night, all ready for the morning's glorious spectacle; but it would have been far more comfortable to have come up one morning, and stayed till the next. The sunset was one of extraordinary splendour, as regards the clouds and their colouring in the golden West, and we enjoyed also a very extensive view, but not the view. We had set out from Lucerne with a burden of forebodings, almost every party that had made the ascent for weeks having returned with a load of disappointments; and though the evening was now fine, the next morning might be cloudy. It is an excursion for which you must have clear weather, or, as to the particular scene of glory for which you make it, which is the sunrise upon the vast range of mountains visible from the Righi, it is nothing. An ordinarily fine morning will not answer; you must have a clear sky the moment the sun rises into it. Though the whole heavens besides be fair, yet if there happen to be a stripe or bank of clouds lying along the eastern horizon, your sport is up, you lose the great spectacle. The fog, which sometimes breeds in fine weather, is still more destructive. You might as well be abed under your blanket. So it may easily be conceived that of the many thousands, who travel thither, very few obtain the object of their journey. Nevertheless, in other respects, as I have said, the mountain is well worth ascending. A clear sunset, together with the prospects bursting on you in your way up, are rewards to give a day for, and a hard journey. The brow of the mountain is as perpendicular as Arthur's Crag at Edinburgh, almost cresting over like the sea-surf, or a wave in mid-ocean. In the evening, walking along the edge of the precipice, the vast scene is of a deep and solemn beauty, though you are waiting for the dawn to reveal its several fea tures. The lights in so many villages far below, over so great an extent, produce a wild and magic picturesqueness. There at our left is Lucerne, here at our feet is Kussnacht, a few steps to the right and Arth is below you, with many glancing lights in the surrounding chalets. The evening church bells are ringing, and the sound comes undulating upward, so deep,. so musical! There is no moon, but the stars are out, and methinks they look much brighter, more startling, more earnest, than they do from the world below. How far we are above that world! How pure and still the air around us! Is the soul as much elevated towards the air of heaven? Ah, if by, climbing a mountain top we could become spiritually-minded, how easy would it be! But we have brought the self-same. mind and disposition up the Righi, that sailed with our bodies across the Lake, and there is the same moral atmosphere here as in the world below. There is no place lower than heaven that is above sin; and here we are at least a hundred people in all, and room enough for selfishness, were it only in elbowing for room. The summit where we are is called the Culm of the Righi, because it is the culminating or highest point, running up with a turf-covered slope, to the wave-like summit. A few steps down the slope stands the little inn, with a second rough lodging house below, though all accommodations are insufficient for the crowd of sleepers waiting for the sun. Half an hour's walk farther down, upon a lower summit, there is another inn, from which those who spend the night there do generally issue too late from their beds to arrive at the summit with the dawn, and so lose the finest part of the vision. We slept little and unquietly, and we rose while the stars were still bright, but beginning to pale a little in the East with the breaking light of day; and no man who has not been in the same situation can tell the delight with which we threw open the windows, and found a, clear fresh glorious morning. The sentinel of the dawn for the sleepers in the inn seized his long wooden horn, and blew a blast in doors and out to waken them, and then one after another emerged into the open air, and hastened to the top of the mountain to watch the movements of the sun. It was very SUNRISE ON THE RIGHI. 295 cold, and the travellers who had come away without cloaks had committed a most uncomfortable and nipping mistake, which they sometimes rectify by wrapping themselves in the blankets under which they have slept; a practice which has suggested the intimation, in form of a warning, to be found in every room, that those who carry off the bed coverings shall pay a tax of ten batz each. So in a very cold dawn you may see the mountains covered with shivering blanket spectres. It was the sixth of September, and the most perfectly beautiful morning that can be imagined. At a quarter past three the stars were reigning supreme in the heavens with just enough of the old moon left to make a trail of light in the shape of a little silver boat among them. But speedily the horizon began to redden over the eastern range of mountains, and then the dawn stole on in such a succession of deepening tints, that nothing but the hues of the preceding sunset could be more beautiful. But there is this great difference between the sunrise and sunset, that the hues of sunset are every moment deepening as you look upon them, until again they fade into the darkness, while those of the sunrise gradually fade into the light of day. It is difficult to say which process is most beautiful; for if you could make everything stand still around you, if you could stereotype or stay the process for an hour, you could not tell whether it were the morning dawn or the evening twilight. A few long, thin stripes of fleecy cloud lay motionless above the eastern horizon, like layers of silver lace, dipped first in crimson, then in gold, then in pink, then lined with an ermine of light, just as if the moon had been lengthened in soft furrows along the sky. This scene in the East attracts every eye at first, but it is not here that the glory of the view is to be looked for. This glory is in that part of the horizon on which the sun first falls, as he struggles up behind the mountains to flood the world with light. And the reason why it is so glorious is because, long before you call it sunrise in the East, he lights up in the West a range of colossal pyres, that look like blazing cressets kindled from the sky and fed with naptha. The object most conspicuous as the dawn broke, and indeed the most sublimely beautiful, was the vast enormous range of the snowy mountains of the Oberland, without spot or vail of cloud or mist to dim them, the Finsteraarhorn at the left and the Jungfrau and Silberhorn at the right, peak after peak and mass after mass, glittering with a cold wintry whiteness in the gray dawn. Almost the exact half of the circumference of the horizon commanded before and behind in our view, was filled with these peaks and masses of snow and ice, then lower down, the mountains of bare rock, and lower still the earth with mounts of verdure; and this section of the horizontal circumference, which is filled with the vast ranges of the Oberland Alps, being almost due West from the sun's first appearance, it is on their tops that the rising rays first strike. This was the scene for which we watched, and it seems as if nothing in nature can ever again be so beautiful. It was as if an angel had flown round the horizon of mountain ranges, and lighted up each of their white pyramidal points in succession, like a row of gigantic lamps burning with rosy fires. Just so the sun suddenly tipped the highest points and lines of the snowy outline, and then, descending lower on the body of the mountains, it was as if an invisible Omnipotent hand had taken them, and dipped the whole range in a glowing pink; the line between the cold snow untouched by the sunlight, and the warm roseate hue above, remaining perfectly distinct. This effect continued some minutes, becoming, up to a certain point, more and more beautiful. We were like children in a dark room, watching for the lighting up of some great transparency. Or, to use that image with which the Poet Danté endeavoured to describe the expectant gaze of Beatrice in Paradise, awaiting the splendours to be revealed, we might say, connecting some passages, and adapting the imagery, "E'en as the bird who midst the leafy bower Has in her nest sat darkling through the night, |