 |
 |
 |
At Works, 6.220 [n/a] there is a sketch of Montanvert. Ruskin calls it ‘so well-known’ and says of it: ‘I have climbed much, and wandered much , in the heart of the high Alps, but I have never yet seen anything which equalled the view from the cabin of Montanvert, and the glacier.’
Compare Shelley’s letter of July 25th 1816 giving an account of Montanvert in Shelley & Shelley (1817):
We have returned from visiting the glacier of Montanvert, or as it is called, the sea of ice [i.e. ‘mer de glace’ - the form Ruskin uses], a scene in truth of dizzying wonder...The path that winds towards it along the side of a mountain, now clothed with pines, now intersected with snowy hollows, is wide and steep....On all sides precipitous mountains, the abodes of unrelenting frost, surround this vale: their sides are banked up with ice and snow, broken, heaped high and exhibiting terrific chasms. The summits are sharp and naked pinnacles, whose overhanging steepness will not even permit snow to rest upon them. Lines of dazzling ice occupy here and there perpendicular rifts, and shine through the driving vapours with inexpressible brilliance...
|
|
|
[Version 0.05: May 2008]