There are phases in nature which correspond to every phase of human thought and emotion; and this stern, cloudy scenery [in the Alps] answers to the melancholy fatalism of Greek tragedy, or the kindred mournfulness of the book of Job. * * * * * [Sidenote: Sublimity in nature.] Coming down I mentally compared Mont Blanc and Niagara, as one should compare two grand pictures in different styles of the same master. Both are of that class of things which mark eras in a mind’s history, and open a new door which no man can shut. Of the two, I think Niagara is the more impressive, perhaps because those aerial elements of foam and spray give that vague and dreamy indefiniteness of outline which seems essential in the sublime. For this reason, while Niagara is equally impressive in the distance, it does not lose on the nearest approach,—it is always mysterious, and therefore stimulating. Those varying spray-wreaths, rising like Ossian’s ghosts from its abyss; those shimmering rainbows, through whose veil you look; those dizzying falls of water that seem like clouds poured from the hollow of God’s hand; and that mystic undertone of sound that seems to pervade the whole being as the voice of the Almighty,—all these bewilder and enchant the discriminating and prosaic part of us, and bring us into that cloudy region of ecstasy where the soul comes nearest to Him whom no eye has seen or can see. I have sometimes asked myself if, in the countless ages of the future, the heirs of God shall ever be endowed by Him with a creative power, by which they shall bring into being things like these? In this infancy of his existence, man creates pictures, statues, cathedrals; but when he is made “ruler over many things,” will his Father intrust to him the building and adorning of worlds? the ruling of the glorious, dazzling forces of nature? * * * * * [Sidenote: Mountain brooks.] Everybody knows, even in our sober New England, that mountain brooks are a frisky, indiscreet set, rattling, chattering, and capering, in defiance of all law and order, tumbling over precipices and picking themselves up at the bottom, no whit wiser or more disposed to be tranquil than they were at the top; in fact, seeming to grow more mad and frolicsome with every leap. Well, that is just the way brooks do here in the Alps. * * * * * [Sidenote: Alpine air.] The whole air seemed to be surcharged with tints, ranging between the palest rose and the deepest violet—tints never without blue, and never without red, but varying in the degree of the two. It is this prismatic hue, diffused over every object, which gives one of the most noticeable characteristics of the Alpine landscape. * * * * * [Sidenote: Color-blending.]