XI. L’HOTEL DU MONT BLANC 449

against the shadows; the tall pollards of oak set here and there in the soft banks, as if to show their smoothness by contrast, yet themselves beautiful, rugged, and covered with deep brown and bright silver moss. Here and there a chestnut-sharp, and soft, and starry;* and always the steep banks, one above another, melting † into terraces of pure velvet, gilded with corn; here and there a black-jet-black-crag of slate breaking into a frown above them, and mouldering away down into the gloomy torrent bed, fringed on its opposite edge, a grisly cliff, with delicate birch and pine, rising against the snow light of Mont Blanc. And opposite always the mighty Varens lost in the cloud its ineffable walls of crag.”¹

220. The next following entry is worth keeping, as a sketch of the undisturbed Catholicism among these hills since the days of St. Bernard of Annecy, and Mont Velan:-

“SALLENCHES, Sunday, 10th June (1849).-The waitress here, a daughter of the landlord, asked me to-day whether Protestants all said grace before meat, observing me to do so. On this we got into conversation, out of which I have elicited some points worth remembering; to wit, that some of the men only go

* I meant-the leaves themselves, sharp, the clustered nuts, soft, the arrangement of leaves, starry.

† “Melting”-seeming to flow into the levels like lava; not cut sharp down to them.

¹ [A preceding passage, written in Chamouni, was copied out among the MSS. for this chapter:-

“23rd July, 1854.-My farewell evening for this time. It is a soft starlight night, Mont Blanc lying just like a white vapour, with a film of cloud on it,-the whole heaven shaking with sheet lightning, and the stars quivering as if every flash shoots them like magnetic needles, and they could not get quiet again before the next one,-the light for the most part filling the heavens from side to side as with a liquid wave, but now and then flowing out in distinct flame from behind a fish-shaped cloud in the south-west, the snow seen by it indistinctly opposite, like answering flashes.”]

XXXV. 2 F

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