Writing postcards is a chore - and a gift if it's done properly. Travel writing, done well, reads like a very long postcard. Here's an extract from a letter, written to her mother, by a Victorian traveller in the Alps. She is describing the view down the mountain just as an alpine storm is passing. It is one of my favourite quotations from those Victorians who knew how to write - and in the absence of digital technology, captured in words, images which elude even the best photographs .
Imagine yourself midway between heaven and earth, the sharp point of rock on which we stood hardly seeming more of earth than if we had been in a balloon, the whole space around, above, and below filled with wild, weird, spectral clouds, driving and whirling in incessant change and with tremendous rapidity; horizon none, but every part of where horizon should be, crowded with unimaginable shapes of unimgined colours, with rifts of every shade of blue, from indigo to pearl, and burning with every tint of fire, from gold to intensest red; shafts of keen light shot down into the abysses of purple, thousands of feet below, enormous surging masses of grey hurled up from beneath, and changing in an instant to glorified brightness of fire as they seemed on the point of swallowing up the shining masses above them; then, all in an instant, a wild grey shroud flung over us, as swiftly passing and leaving us in a blaze of sunshine; then a bursting open of the very heavens, and a vision of what might be celestial heights, pure and still and shining, high above it all; then an instantaneous cleft in another wild cloud, and a revelation of a perfect paradise of golden and rosy slopes and summits; then, quick gleams of white peaks through veilings and unveilings of flying semi-transparent clouds; then, as quickly as the eye could follow, a rim of dazzling light running round the edges of a black castle of cloud, and flaming windows suddenly pierced in it; oh mother dear, I might go on for sheets, for it was never twice the same, nor any single minute the same, in any direction........
The writer was Frances Ridley Havergal, a contemporary of another Christian poet who likewise revelled in nature as the theatre of God's glory:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;....
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