The Sun.
London, England, 1861-11-07 00:00:00

SUNDAY IN THE ALPINE SOLITUDE

Sunday in mountain villages has something very
elevating and solemn. It is as if all nature kept holiday.
Tho earns wondrous acoustic walls which give back the
tone of the Alp horn with such magic:modulation, repeat
also the sound of bells in the Alpine villages with indr
scribable beauty. The sound seems to lose its metalif I
tone and takes a deeper, warmer fulness, ouch as

peculiar to crystal bells of glass. To hear the church
bell ring from a rather lofty point above an
Alpine town, on a clear summer morning, as
the calling and answering bells send their
notes far and wide over valley and gorge, and the
whole landscape round listens in blissful peace to the tones;
belongs to the best enjoyments which the mountain world
can give to the receiving spirit. The congregations in their
country dress stream up out of every corner, from the dark
ravines, and down from the brown timber chalets, over the
spring green meadows. Such is Sunday—it is a real feast, and
more impressive than in towns; and when church is over,
those who have lately lost a dear member of their family
wander to the graves and adorn them with freshly plucked
Alpine roses, or deck,the simple black cross with a wreath
of immortelles, rosemary, and cloves. •
The goat boys show no lGeOssATthno°4lt, courage, ante, and and skill when one of their beasts has lost itself, or
verjuekt, t. e., sprung on to a rocky ledge, from which it
can neither get forward or backward, for wherever they are
enticed by a spot of green, the goats and sheep scramble,
see more strips of grass below them, and spring from ledge
to ledge, often a fathom in depth, till they cannot get any
further. Then the boy who looks after them has to release
the imprisoned animal. Our illustration shows such a
moment. That is the tough, unyielding nature of a genuine
goat-boy. Beast and boy look as if they had been cast in
one piece. The eagles are hovering above, attracted by the
anxious cry of the goat, which, if the boy had not released
it, they would have driven with their wings over the cliffs,
and have preyed upon. If they were to come near the boy
would let himself be crushed in the abyss before he would
nloottgmo
atkhee
tghoeato.bsA htincatea,rge
stiff-necked
small
.necked slandotqiun his back
ithiswould
hold.
THE PERILS OF THE WILD HAY-CUTTERS.

Yes it is, indeed, a wretched life, a toilsome day's work,
full of deprivations, fighting against wind and weather,
always with one foot on the border between life and death.
For only those slopes of grass in the mountains which are
almost inaccessible become places for wild hay, generally
high above the forest region, that is, at a height of 6,000
feet and upwards; inasmuch as, from their steep inclina-
tion, they can be approached nei' her by goats nor sheep,
much loss by heavy cattle, or perhaps it may be quite im-
paacticable to approach them with a herd. Here, where at
the utmost the spring of the sure-footed chamois may find
hold enough, man ventures to come in his fight for sub-
sistence; here he finds winter fodder for the beasts which
supports kin' and his family; and, as the Bible prophesies
the hard lot of the wo,kman, in the sweat thy brow
shalt thou eat bread, we might add, in the case of the wild
hay cutter, as reward for your toil and contempt of death,
thou shalt drink milk, for there are places for wild hay
where the audacious venturer cannot take his crampons off
the whole day, because he has to drive them into the ground
at every step.

THE BUILIA.L IN THE ALPS.
And when the small quiet life of Alpine soliturie has
passed, when the body is given back to the earth whence it
came, a very peculiar impression is made upon us by the
last solemn duty. Down in tho country where all the
neighbours live close together, and have grouped their
houses round the village church, there (if we do not attend
to special country customs) burial is almost everywhere
alike. It is different in the Alps, where, an hear from the
common resting-place, the citizen of this world enters eter-
nity. The way which he went every Sunday to church
while alive his corpse has now to go in its narrow house
of boards for the last time. It is hard to carry him so far
down. Thon if it is summer the son places his father's or
mother's coffin on a small narrow car, harnesses whatever
he has in his stable, a horse or a cow, in front of it, and so
bears the earthly remains to the valley. Wherever tho
mournful procession comes the people run out, pray aloud,
" Our Father," or join the procession; and if winter has
cast his mantle of snow over mountain and valley, the
sleigh has to do its last service for the dead The coffin is
firmly tied on, a strong, powerful man, with two Alpen
stocks under his arms, places himself in front, guides it with
his feat, and starts down with de corpse in rapid flight to
the valley.

Love, the Greatest Enchantment: the Sorcei ies
of Sin: The Devotion of the Cross. From the
Spanish of Calderon. By Denis Florence Mic-
earthy. With Introduction, Notes, and the
Spsnish Text. Longman.

This accomplished Irish poet claims the distinc-
tion of having been the first who presented to the
English public a complete version of any of the
plays of the great Spanish dramatist. It is now
some years since he published two volumes of
translations, which met with a favourable reception.
In rendering those plays into our tongue, however,
Mr. I\l‘Carthy did not attempt to represeit in Eng-
lish verse the peculiarities of the Spanish metre•
In preparing the volume before us greater leisure
and increased confidence have induced him to imi-
tate closely the rhythm of the Spanish text, not-
withstanding the great difficulties which such an
undertaking presents to the English writer. As
the peculiarity of the asonance, which is its distinc-
tive feature, may not be known to many readers,
we subjoin the following passage from the pre-
face :

The peculiar feature of this translation is its rigid adhe-
rence to the metres of the original, and particularly to that
especial Spanish one, the asonanta vowel rhyme, of which
but a few scattered specimens exist in English, and these
rather as samples of what our language was incapable of
producing to any considerable extent, than of what it could
achieve. This metre is so very peculiar, and so opposed to
anything that has the semblance of rhyme in English, that
I have known several persons who were able to read in the
original a romance, and who, notwithstanding, never per-
ceived the delicate and most elaborate form of versification
they had been enjoying until their attention was drawn to
it. When once seen or heard, however, the discovery is
hailed with delight, and we look or listen for the ever recur-
ring similarity of cadence or construction, 'the manifold
wild chimes' of the Spanish asonance, with pleasure and
surprise. The numerous examples of it throughout this
volume will show the reader what it is more clearly perhaps
than any explanation, and yet some definition of it may not
be inappropriate in this place. "The Spanish asonance,"
says the late Lord Holland, " is a word which resembles
another in the vowel on which the last acoent falls, as well
as the vowel or vowels which follow it ; but every conso-
nant after the accented vowel must be different from that in
the corresp:nding syllable. Thus, hes and amor, orilla and
delira, alamo and paxaro, are all asonantes." This defini-
tion, though perhaps a little too limited for the boundless
variety and freedom of the asonance, may be considered
tolerably satisfactory. . . . In English, from the compa-
rative weakness of the vowel sounds, from the rare possi-
bility of combining them, and, what is still more, from
their perpetual variation in quantity, anything like produc-
ing the same effect as in the Spanish is impossible ; yet this
ghost of a rhyme, as Dean Trench calls it, is better than
none at all, and I have found that an inflexible determina-
tion to reproduce it at whatever trouble, even though with
imperfect success, enables the translator more closely to
render the meaning of the original, and saves him from the
danger of being tempted into diffuseness by the facilities of
expansion, which even the unrhymed trochaic, without the
asonaxte, too readily supplies.

It can easily be imagined that to render so peculiar
a metre into English verso has been no easy task;
but Mr. M'Carthy has done so with very great
success, and his example may encourage other
translators, by proving to them that a faithful ad-
herence to the original text is by no means incom-
patible with free and flowing English. He has
submitted himself to a severe test, and one that a
less faithful translator would have cause to dread
by printing the Spanish by the side of the English,
and thus any departure from the text of his author
could be easily detected. The dramas he has
selected are peculiar ones. The first and longest
in the volume—" Love, the Greatest Enchantment"
—refers to the ancient legend of Circe and Ulysses.
In the opening passages there is a striking resem-
blance to the first scene of The Tempest, which is,
the translator considers, quite accidental. If so, it
is certainly very singular. The second piece In
the volume is one of the autos, or religious mystical
plays, which are completely unknown be-
yond the circle of those familiar with the original.
" With the exception of the scenes introduced into
Dean Trench's analysis of The Great Theatre of the
World, not a single line of these remarkable dramas
has ever been previously presented in English
verse. Writers in reviews and magazines have oc-
casionally drawn attention to a few of the secular
dramas of Calderon ; but the Autos, the most won-
derful of all his productions, and the only ones
(with but two exceptions) which the great post
himself thought worthy of his revision, have been
passed over, I may say, in almost utter silence." In
this remarkable production the dramatis persona
are no longer men and women, but impersonations
of intangible things. Man indeed is prominent as
the hero, and so to speak the scene of the play, for
Sin, Flattery, and all the several senses exert their
influence upon him, resisted only by the warning
voice of the Understanding. This piece, the Sorceriea
of Sin, is also founded on the story of Ulysses and
Circe, and some of the opening passages are almost
precisely similar. The drama of the Devotion of
.the Cross has been truly termed by Dean Trench, a
wonderful and terrible tragedy. Its prominent
feature is one which revolts the reader, and a
gloomy horror reigns over it. "In English and.
French Literature, says the translator in speaking
"
of this play, " few writers have ever referred to
Calderon without praising the poetical power and
of this beautydrama, and condemning it as 'the
very sublime of Antinomianism.' Like many other
celebrated literary works, however, it has been more
frequently referred to than read, and many writers
have, either through carelessness or wilful hostility
needlessly misrepresented and exaggerated its do-
feets." Sismondi is one of these inaccurate critics,
and Boutewek falls into the mikske of calling it an
Auto, not understanding, says Mr. M'Carthy, the
marked difference betwoen a religious DRAMA and
an Auto. The Sorceries of Sin which we have
alluded to above, is properly an auto, which it will be
scan is entirely distinct in its character from a plair
representing hernan actions or agencies. Those who
%tish to familiarise thent,Tlves- with these acid other
peculiarities of tglt Spanish drama cannot do better
than follow Mr. M'Carth's guidance t
through this
cautiful and interesting volume.

posted
-with the
the East, g '
LARGE ARRIVALS OF EAST INDIA COTTON IN
LivEnrooL.—During the last few days there have been
same large arrivals of East India cotton in the Mersey, On
Langdale,
Tuesday there were no fever than five large ships
as having arrived from Bombay, having en board 25,4G1
bales of cotton. The names of the respective vessels, to-
gethers are,oo7
. bT:hiieet
shc ithe
ttyhneoufal Otago,b Agra,ero fwwbi
tiahtl
ii
le bales f,7
01 cottonbales
eeessa
;c; 1 ishipbro,uwhitht
„cid' 3,495 bales; and the Euroclydon,
Tha Langdale made the voyage home in 6,616 bales.
quantities of East India cotton now at sea,
93 days. The.
advices, are 135,691 bales, against 5, a, according to late
cor-
responding period last year, 3,812 bales for the