At any rate, I have seldom seen a more potent emanation of reflected composite light and color, of leafed and bladed and fruited green.

I made my way down a sloping lane to the road which adheres to the lake and thence by a path across a wooded field to the verge of the water. Here I wandered along the narrow strip of beach to a little sandy cove, and lay down with my head in the shade of a thicket of bushes. The pebbles lay unstirred at my feet; the water was sheeted with the noonday light; the opposite mountains were clothed with wonderful tones of atmospheric blue. I tried to study them, to distinguish them, to remember them; but I felt only that they were wonderful, and that they don’t belong to the province of words. The mountains at all hours have a way of trying to put off the observer with a certain faux air of simplicity: a single great curve for an outline, a dozen alternate planes of deeper or fainter blue for its contents. The persistent observer very soon learns, however, what to make of this brave simplicity—or rather, he very soon learns how hard it is to make anything positive of it, to resolve it into its thousand magical parts. It is an old story that the mountains are for ever changing, that they live and move in a series of shifting and melting and amazing “effects”; but I never so deeply felt its meaning as while I lay on that couch of unrolled pebbles and gazed at them across that shining-level which assures the freedom of the interval of air. The clouds were stationed in a windless volume just above the line of their summits. Above the empty lake was an empty field of sky. The result, of course, on the slopes of the hills was a series of exquisite operations in light—doubly fine and delicate from the stillness of the air. The general tone was immensely soft and luminous—so that, as I say, I might very well have been on the Lake of Como or on Lago Maggiore. A green island lay blooming in the middle of the lake—which was not the Isola Bella, but apparently a plain small thicket of firs. The oars of a little boat twinkled in the sun and wrinkled the waveless deep. I chased the great slow shadows on the mountains into little shadows, and the little shadows into shadows which still were great. I followed the even blue into violet and pink and amber. I disintegrated with a steady gaze the long pure sky-lines into linked miles of innumerable lonely spires. And then at last I rose to my feet feeling that I had learned chiefly to misreport these mountain wonders.

In the late afternoon, I went upon the lake lazily, with a red-necked, brawn-eyed young rustic as an oarsman. It was, of course, delicious. The closing day had drained the water of its early glare and dyed it with cool blue shadows. The hotel, from the lake, looked decidedly vulgar. The mountains, in the gross richness of their deepening blue, made at last an approach to a large massive simplicity. It is not till the sun departs, I think, that you see them in their essential masses. The aerial charm is gone, but they gain in formal grandeur. In the evening, at the hotel, there was the usual array of placid, sauntering tourists—the usual spectacle of high-heeled young ladies in those charming puffed and panniered overdresses of white muslin which are now so picturesquely worn. I confess, however, that to myself the most interesting feature of the evening was the band of musicians on the piazza. The New York papers had just come in, and I had been reading of the great deeds of Prussia and the confusion of France. I was filled with a sense of Prussian greatness. Strolling toward the place where the band was stationed, I beheld behind every trumpet a sturdy German face and heard in every note an uplifted German voice. My sense of German greatness was hugely magnified. Here, while their strong fellow-citizens were winning battles and making history in Alsace and Lorraine, they were making music in a distant land for a crowd of unmelodious strangers.