With forethought, knowing the fastidious taste of these gentlemen in their search for a true princess, let us recite her personal charms--the glimpses of beauty and of cold unknown secrets which even her more humble wooer may find--her beauty, which is the reward, given to a mind tense and braced by the hard labour of unwonted muscles on slippery places. Imagine a prickly ridge of the horned and perforated tiles deemed suitable for roof-trees, gained by a climb up the body of a companion, laid flat along the sloping roof. All around are stone and brick ranges, peaks which more than their Alpine counterparts deserve to be called Clocher or Tour, showing in the darkness little of their dilettante symmetry of the artificial: the deep valleys between filled with their rivers of light, carrying their noisy freight along: cols in the near range vouchsafing their strange glimpses of the more distant: beneath, a wide and gloomy desert, with here and there lamp-posts for oases of our symbol of mountain-water.
Throughout, a jump in nearness to the stars, and a fellow-tingling unwarranted by a bare forty-feet approximation to them. By our own act we are cut off from men: the thickness of a single wall, if but it be the outer house-wall, dispossesses us of our humanity, and gives back our lost kinship with the stars.
Peak and col, valley, river, and pass--all are there: but the real, broad-sustaining Alps do not gape suddenly to a show of the imagined trolls of our story-books at work beneath, and full of unintelligible hatred against ourselves. While here, on our tile-summits and pipe-couloirs, we know the trolls for a reality, their life the very negation of the fount of our new spirit gained in the traverse from plastered side to plain of a wall; the rousing of their incomprehensible rage leading to pursuit and loss of our world.
Signs of their inhabitance are all around us: vents, traps for the feet, showing signs of the furnaces where they are ever at labour to fuse the dead message of the written page into living matter of a brain for the breathing hole of some typho of a senseless machine, whose groans are chained to the production of sweetest music in College organ-pipes; sudden lights flashed out by one of the trolls, to the displaying of a pair of legs spider-wise across the entrance to his lair, or the painted globe sphering the radiance shed upon the small-hourly labours of the troll of highest Matterhorn.