IN the chequer-boards of most men's lives, the squares they can allot to the joys of mountain travel are coincident with summer seasons. Thus most of us cannot know the snow mountains all the year round, but only in their warm-weather garb. It may be claimed that then they are at their best, but such claims, in the case of Nature, are untenable. Nature is never or always at her best. One star may differ from another star in glory, but not in beauty; for beauty is in the eye that beholds, rather than in the thing that is beheld. A particular effect in nature may be more attractive than another to a particular man, but that is not really a measure of the beauty of the effect, but of the capacity of the man. None of us can discover all beauty; none of us can always behold beauty in everything; but all of us together can find beauty everywhere and always in what Nature makes. He that can oftenest discover beauty, and is most continuously conscious of it, is most richly endowed and most to be envied. How often do we hear people say that in their opinion Niagara, or the view from the Gorner Grat, or Mont Blanc, or some other great sight, is disappointing, that it failed to come up to their expectations, that its reputation is ill-deserved, and so forth. Such persons seem to imagine that their opinions are worth something, and that they, or any one, has a say in the matter; whereas the fact is, that the sights of nature may measure men, but that individual men cannot measure them. If a man thinks little of Niagara, that opinion measures him, but not Niagara. All sights of nature are beautiful. All great natural phenomena are greatly beautiful. That is a fundamental fact. Our business is not to question it, but to see the beauty if and when we can.

The great mountains therefore are not beautiful at one time, or more beautiful at one time than another. They are beautiful always, and all the year round. They may be more comfortable to live or scramble amongst at some seasons, but he that can render his sense of beauty independent of his sense of comfort may be able to grow equally conscious of mountain beauty at all seasons. It is the opportunity that most of us lack, not the power. The fact that the high Alps are beautiful in winter also was not popularly realised till recently. A few men had faith that such would be the case, and they went to see. They brought back lively accounts of the wonders and glories they had beheld, and so incited others to follow in their steps.

The classical first account in English of the high Alps in winter was A. W. Moore's paper in the fourth volume of the Alpine Journal, describing a visit to Grindelwald in December 1866, and the passage of the Strahleck and Finsteraarjoch by full mid-winter moonlight. Mid-winter moonlight is doubtless one of the great glories that the summer traveller misses. So bright was it "that the faintest pencil memoranda were legible with ease." The landscape beneath it is not the monochrome picture most of us associate with moonlight. It is rich with subdued colour, most beautiful to see. The full winter moon in the Alps bears to the summer moon, for brightness, the same relation that the equatorial sun does to the sun of our temperate regions. High planted near the zenith, the winter moon floods mountain and valley with a white light that turns snow to silver and hangs a curtain of velvet on every rock-face.

Who that has been to St. Moritz or Davos in winter does not come home with a new conception of what the clearness of the atmosphere can be? The summer air is like poor glass beside the crystal transparency of winter. Perhaps the effect is to bring distances nearer and thus decrease apparent scale—an effect which the whitening of the foundations of the hills tends to increase; but in return, by what delicacy of detail, what crispness of form, what glitter and brilliancy we are repaid. In course of time we learn to read scale truthfully anew.

Another winter glory is the snow drapery of the lower slopes and glaciers below the snow-line. All minor asperities of surface are smoothed away. Flowing lines take the place of broken ones, and large surfaces most delicately modelled predominate. In summer you must climb to the high snow-fields to behold the delicate modelling of which snow is capable on a large scale, but in winter such sights are all around you. To watch the play of sunshine upon them from dawn to dusk, and the even more fascinating appearance they assume under brilliant moonlight, is joy enough for the hungriest eye.

Then there are the frozen cascades by every roadside, glittering clustered columns of ice fit for fairies' palaces. One beholds them at almost every turn, for the veriest trickle of water, so it be persistent, suffices to build them up. Nor must we forget to catalogue amongst the greater glories of Alpine winter the snow-laden forests. One day the trees will be burdened down by loads of snow. Another, every sprig and pine-needle will be frosted over by the most delicate incrustation of tiny ice-crystals—a natural lacework of surpassing fascination. When the early sun first shines upon such a scene, which night has prepared to be a revelation to the day, so magnificent a vision is provided that even the dullest perceive something of its beauty, and for a moment forget the trifles of their life.

Akin to this glorification of the trees by frost are the glittering "snow-flowers," those charming little groups of crystals that form on the ground in suitable spots under the influence of wind-eddies and other vagaries of the air. They are as pretty as they are short-lived, and possess a quality of rareness that makes them additionally precious. If in winter we lose the blueness of the lakes and the greenness of the hills, are we not more than repaid? What in its way can be more fair than the absolute flatness and unspotted purity of a frozen lake-surface covered thickly by new-fallen snow? It is no joy to skaters and curlers indeed, but for those who have eyes and have taught themselves how to see with them, little time is left for the distractions of mere games. The snow-shoe is the true winter implement, and especially the Norwegian ski, which provides the most glorious exercise and makes accessible the most delightful spots. An occasional run down-hill is the by-reward of the skilful, but his main prize is the sights he is privileged to behold. He can enter the heart of forests or ascend large slopes without the toil of sinking into the soft snow, to whose presence they owe the quality of their winter charm. Ski, moreover, grant access with relative comfort to the higher regions, and enable them to be crossed in suitable places at a time when the crevasses of the glaciers are deeply buried or soundly bridged, and when the snowy world sweeps in larger and simpler surfaces away. Some climbers have found pleasure in attaining in winter the summits of high peaks, whence they have beheld great panoramas with a distinctness of distant vision that the summer climber seldom attains. They tell us that the white filling of the valleys and covering of the lower slopes tends to flatten the effect of a mountain scene beheld from above. Whatever the special charm of such expeditions, they cannot be made with frequency. Weather conditions are usually adverse. Short days are a hint to make short expeditions. Thus in winter Nature herself calls attention rather to her own details. She endows with unusual attraction what is near at hand. She sculptures her ornaments on a tiny scale and finishes them with a marvellous elaboration. The wise follow her mood and adapt their eyes to her intentions. The winter months are none too long for them. Indeed they are gone all too soon, and one day, lo! the spring is there and the winter votaries turn and flee.

I have only once spent a portion of the spring in an Alpine region. It is not a comfortable season, but it has its own beauties as great in their kind as those of summer and winter. Now the snow begins to melt, and all the hillsides trickle and run with water. The great silence of winter is past. Nature whispers with a thousand tiny voices, and sings aloud along the valleys and gorges. The hillsides emerge brown from their snowy blanket, but the fresh green soon shoots through and early flowers are swift to put forth. The sense of young life is felt among the mountains as in the plains, for the awakening of the vegetable world is everywhere the same. But the mountains possess spring-time splendours of their own, depending upon the dissolution of the snow. Spring is the great time for avalanches. They fall indeed all the year round, chiefly at high levels, but it is only in the spring that the great avalanches get adrift. Certain great spring avalanches come down with remarkable regularity in particular places, one every year. An avalanche falls at a recognised spot in the neighbourhood of almost every village, which dates from its advent the opening of the spring. Any one who has beheld the descent of one of these giants will not forget the experience, nor will it occur to him to compare such an avalanche with the relatively small ones that tumble among the highest nÉvÉ regions in the summer. These are the veriest snow-balls compared with those vast discharges.

A great spring avalanche is no sudden freak of Nature, but an inevitable occurrence, slowly engendered. The snow that piles up, flake by flake, during the winter months, on what in summer are the grass slopes below the snow-line, gradually becomes unstable as spring melting advances. The mass loses its cohesion, ceases to bind firmly together, and tends to flow downwards. The conformation of the ground decides how it shall fall. If the slopes upon which it lies are narrow, and lead straight to a suitable resting-ground, or if they are of gentle declivity, it may fall in small masses and early come to rest; for the distance to which it is projected depends upon the momentum of a fall, and the momentum depends upon the volume and the slope. But if the snow lies upon large concave slopes, or upon a cirque, then, when the discharge begins, all the snow within the cirque may flow together, and pouring down the bottom like a fluid, may form a great cataract; then tumbling over cliffs and rushing down hollows and through gorges, it will continue its descent till it reaches a valley bottom, flat enough to hold it. There it will pile up into a great cone or "fan," solidifying as it comes to rest, and strongly bridging over the valley torrent.

An avalanche of this kind does not fall in a few moments, but may occupy hours in its discharge. I saw several of them falling, in the first days of May 1882, in the neighbourhood of the Simplon road. Near BÉrisal I crossed one which had recently come to rest, traversing the road. By its rugged white surface, broken into great protuberances, its solidity, and its general form, it resembled a small glacier. To climb on to it one had to cut steps, so steep were the sides. Higher up I crossed several more such fallen masses, through which gangs of workmen were cutting out the road. Towards the top of the pass the snow was tumbling in smaller masses. Over a hundred little avalanches crossed the road within a couple of hours. Then they stopped. On the Italian side similar conditions obtained, but it was not till I reached Isella that the greatest fall took place, or rather was taking place, for it had begun before I arrived, and it continued after I had passed. There, a narrow gorge, with vertical cliff-sides facing one another, debouches on the main valley. It leads upwards to a great cirque in the hills, a cirque that is a grass-covered alpine pasture in the summer. The avalanche was pouring out through this gorge and piling itself up upon the main valley-floor. How the mass of it was being renewed from behind I could not see. Doubtless all the hill-sides above were shedding their snow, and it was flowing down and crowding into and through the gorge with a continuous flow. As the pressure was relieved below by the outpouring of the avalanche on to the valley floor, more snow came down—snow mixed with slush, and semi-liquid under the great pressure that must have been developed. As the fan was built up, the snow, relieved of strain, hardened into ice-like consistency.

It is easy to describe the process that was going forward, but it is not easy to suggest to the reader the grandeur of effect that was produced. The volume of noise was terrific—a noise more massive and continuous than thunder, and no less deep-toned. A low grey cloud roofed in the view and cast over everything a solemn tone. The avalanche, pouring through the massive gateway of the hills and polishing its sides, came forth with an aspect of weight and resistless force that was extraordinarily impressive. Yet Nature did not seem to be acting violently, though her might was plain to see. She appeared to proceed with deliberation. One looked for an end of the snow-stream to come, but it flowed on and on, pulsating but not failing. The pressures that must be developed were easily conceived; correspondingly evident became the strength of the hills that could sustain them as if they had been but the stroking of a hand.

Later in the season the traveller often encounters, in deep-lying valleys, the black and shrunken remnants of these mighty avalanches, melted down by summer heats. Little idea can they give him of the splendour of their birth and the white curdled beauty of their surface when they first come to rest. In the nature of things they travel far and fall low, well into the tree-belt, and even down to the chestnut-level on the Italian side. It is a strange sight to see these vast, new-fallen masses lying in their accustomed beds, but surrounded by trees all freshly verdant with the gifts of spring. Yearly each one falls in the same place, falls harmlessly and duly expected. Its coming is welcomed. Its voice is the triumphant shout of the coming season of summer exuberance and fertility. Nature, newly awakened, cries aloud with a great and solemnly joyous cry, and the people dwelling around hear her and arise to their work upon the land. It is not well for a mountain-lover never to have beheld this characteristic awakening, for it is one of the great events of the mountains' year.

For the rest, spring in the Alps has many of the qualities of spring everywhere else, which need not detain us, for to say that is to say enough. Characteristically Alpine alone are the passing away of the snow and the phenomena that accompany it. After the avalanches have fallen, steady melting does the rest. Each warm day withdraws the winter blanket somewhat and reveals the earth to the sunshine. Convex slopes melt sooner than concave, steep slopes sooner than flats or gentle inclines. Thus the large uniform winter covering breaks up into islands and stripes of white. Gullies are defined against slopes, which previously were lost in them. The detailed anatomy of the hills is manifested more clearly from day to day.

It may be claimed that the effect produced is patchy, and so, judged by spring-time photographs, it appears indeed to be. Never, for photography, are mountains less suitable than in the spring; by some ill-luck the camera seizes upon and magnifies the patchiness of the receding snow. In actual vision the margin of the snow bears a less piebald aspect. Indeed patchiness is not the effect that the eye receives from it. The edge is at once perceived to be melting. The white garb is being withdrawn. That fact is apparent. If one watches the changes from day to day, they will be found most entertaining from the manifestations of form they yield. Moreover, the daily alteration of the colouring of the ground from which snow has recently melted is most remarkable. The transition is from brown to green. Hence the edge of the snow is margined with brown, and that in turn by green—a kind of iris effect which ascends the hillside as the snow withdraws.

Finally, spring is the time of spilling waters, of torrents brimful and overflowing, of voluminous cascades, of gurgling brooks everywhere—a time, too, when the waters are bright and crystalline, and when the valleys and lower slopes are as vocal with their song as the upper regions are with the deeper diapason of falling snow. If, amongst all these voices, the winds blow shrilly and the storms not infrequently rage, the effects produced, however uncomfortable they may be to the touch of the comfort-loving body, are essentially harmonious in a grand and glorious fashion.

From spring to summer there is no step in Alpine regions. It is merely that as the year advances the level of spring rises. At the edge of the ever-retreating snow it is always spring. Even in August you have but to climb to find it, but it reigns then over a narrow belt and is not a land-encompassing mood. What turns spring into summer for the eye is not easy to indicate. Shall we be far wrong if we say that, in the first instance, it is the flowers? The little venturesome plants of spring, that blossom at the very edge of the withdrawing snow, themselves withdraw when they have smiled upon the world. They are followed by the bright carpet of early summer—the June carpet, which few mountaineers ever behold. It is lovely everywhere—loveliest perhaps in the Maritime Alps, or along the sunny Italian face of the Alpine wall. You must see it before the scythes get to work on the first hay crop, and even before the grass is full grown—a sheet of many colours—not, however, a mere chaos of all kinds of blossoms, but something far more orderly than that. For there is generally some predominant plant at a given spot, luxuriantly blossoming at a particular time, and all the rest do but serve to embroider it. Here indeed may be a sheet of one kind of blossom, there of another. It is as though some one had passed by and tossed fair Persian carpets down in different places, carpets of different design, but all in the same general style.

Even at this period greens are predominant, for the flowers are not to be discovered from a distance. And what greens they are—these shrill verdancies of early summer—the despair of artists, the joy of Nature's friends! Later on they will tone down to a more paintable key, but at first they transcend the powers of paint, having in them something almost of the shine of flame. Their coming is sudden. They descend upon the broad bosom of fertile valleys and the wide skirts of gentle slopes, as the daylight descends when the sun grows high. Yesterday all was brown; to-day the greens have come, exultant, exuberant, with the star-flowers spangled amongst them. Then indeed it is good to be alive. The voice has gone out to the valley—"Arise, shine, for thy light has come"—and the valley responds to the call.

With July the full summer is there, and the summer crowd at hand. The longest days are passing. The freshness is wearing off from the valleys. Now heat, dust, and flies drive men aloft. It is the reception period of the high peaks, when they differentiate themselves plainly from the region below, and alone retain the perfect purity of the winter world. In winter the great mountains stretch themselves visibly down to the valleys. Then Mont Blanc begins at Chamonix, the Matterhorn at Zermatt. But in summer the high peaks seem to be planted aloft on the green world. The Matterhorn is reduced to a pyramid standing on the Schwarzsee Alp. Thus in summer, though the actual peaks themselves look larger, they are more removed out of the way. You must mount afar before you come to their apparent foot. You thus acquire the sense of their belonging to a world of their own. In winter snow glories are at your door. In summer you must labour to behold them, and when beheld they are emphasised by contrast with the fertile world you have left. That is why (apart from all questions of comfort and safety) summer climbing is more impressive than winter. It presents more stages, more variety. In winter-time all is winter; but in summer it is summer in the valleys, spring on the alps, and winter above the snow-line; only autumn is not there.

Autumn, in fact, is the rarest of the seasons. Its effects are the most evanescent. That is one of its special charms—that, and the tender sadness that pertains to the passing away of things which have flourished and had their day in glory. October in the Alps is a season perhaps more generally delightful in these days than any other period of the year. Then the great summer crowd has gone, and there is room in the caravanserais and on the footpaths. The country-folks have leisure for a word with the wayfarer, and the painful sense of over-pressure is gone. In October the Alps are almost as they used to be in the sixties—a spacious region where a man may find himself alone, or almost alone, in the face of Nature. He cannot now, indeed, heal the scars that the crowd have furrowed upon the face of the earth, nor remove the ugly buildings and defacing embankments that have been raised to dam and form reservoirs or canals for the human flood, but with that exception he can possess the landscape in peace.

October, again, is sometimes a month of much fine weather and of skies marvellously clear. If the days are short, they are yet long enough for early risers. Evening and morning are brought within the limits of a normal man's possible activity, so that he may enjoy both the splendour of sunrise and sunset without transgressing the daily hours of healthy wakefulness. The October sun does not climb so far aloft as does the royal monarch of the midsummer sky. If the effulgence of day is thus rendered less overpowering, in return the shadows spread wider and retain a richer colouring in their depths. More modelling is visible upon the hillsides and the snow-fields in the bright hours; there are bluer noontide shadows and perhaps even a bluer sky also.

GRINDELWALD LOOKING TOWARDS THE WENGEN ALP

Winter snow on the slopes.