The snow, which long after it has fallen lies as pure and stainless as the raiment of angels, is the crowning glory of a Swiss winter. It has an intensity of whiteness which gives a new force to “whiter than snow.” St. Matthew describes the Lord’s transfiguration raiment as “white as the light,” but St. Mark as “exceeding white as snow.” This Alpine snow is light materialized, and snow etherealized--solidified light. With the snow nature transfigures all the landscape; at one sweep of her broad brush all the clumsy touches with which man has marred the beauty of the world are effaced, the hills are rounded to a riper beauty, the fields lie smooth and white and fair, an unwritten page waiting as for the bold outlines of some new design.[100] The mountain air appears to give additional brilliancy even to the rainbow, as it rests on the turbid blackness of the clouds; it looks so near, and every band of color so broad and distinct, filling the very air with the haze of its colors; seeing a rainbow following an Alpine thunder-storm, one can well conceive how, before it was known what produced the storm and the rainbow, the one was taken for the wrath and the other for the smile of God. “All things are good, as their Creator made them, but everything degenerates in the hands of man; improving, man makes a general confusion of elements, climates, and seasons; he defaces, he confounds everything, as if he delighted in nothing but monsters and deformity;” these are the first words of the “Æmilius,” and the key-note of the author’s philosophy. Conceding that man’s work does not deserve this unqualified condemnation, and is in many respects most admirable, one must regret to see the work of nature in Switzerland so ruthlessly spoiled and disfigured; to see the telegraph-pole and the factory chimney rear themselves against the horizon of every landscape; mountain fastnesses and remote valleys consecrated to the charms of nature alone, resounding with the whistle of the locomotive and the stroke of the hammer; the iconoclastic hand of material enterprise, divested of all sentiment, reaching out into every nook and corner where the Divine Artist has surpassed himself in his handiwork, to discover and develop new commercial opportunities. One now goes by steam in place of _diligence_, and the lovers of the characteristic may well regret that the _couleur locale_, so dear to strangers, is fast disappearing. No more the post-carriage takes you in its moving house, with the sound of jingling bells, the cracking of the driver’s whip, and the notes of the horn waking up the echoes of the woods. No longer the white oxen tug up the steep mountain; no longer the chat with the village gossips at each post-station; the mid-day halt, where one dives into castle, church, or old courtyard; the chaffering for some local trifle; the antique furniture of the salon; the early walk before the coach was ready,--it is all, all, almost gone. In things