.. and how ever and anon, startling you with
its white flash, a jet of spray leaps hissing out of the fall, like a
rocket, bursting in the wind and driven away in dust, filling the air with
light; and how, through the curdling wreaths of the restless crushing
abyss below, the blue of the water, paled by the foam in its body, shows
purer than the sky through white rain-cloud; ... their dripping masses
lifted at intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by some stronger gush
from the cataract, and bowed again upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies
away."
But much as we may admire the majestic grandeur of a mighty river, either
in its eager rush or its calmer moments, there is something which
fascinates even more in the free life, the young energy, the sparkling
transparence, and merry music of smaller streams.
"The upper Swiss valleys," as the same great Seer says, "are sweet with
perpetual streamlets, that seem always to have chosen the steepest places
to come down, for the sake of the leaps, scattering their handfuls of
crystal this way and that, as the winds take them, with all the grace, but
with none of the formalism, of fountains .
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