Letters of Felix Mendelssohn

On the Faulhorn, August 15th.

  I am shivering with cold! Outside thick snow is falling, and the wind raging and blustering. We are eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and a long tract of snow to traverse, but here I am! Nothing can be seen; all day the weather has been dreadful. When I remember how fine it was yesterday, while I earnestly wish that it may be as fine to-morrow, it reminds me of life, for we are always hovering between the past and the future. Our excursion of yesterday seems as far past and remote, as if I knew it only from old memories, and had scarcely been present myself; for to-day when during five mortal hours we were struggling on, against rain and fog, sticking in the mud, and seeing nothing round us but grey vapours, I could scarcely realize that it ever was or ever will be again fine weather, or that I ever lay idly stretched on this wet marshy grass. Besides, everything here wears such a wintry aspect; heated stoves, thick snow, cloaks, freezing, shivering people. I am at this moment in the highest inn in Europe; and just as in St. Peter's, you look down on every church, and on the Simplon, upon every road, so from hence I look down on all other inns; but not morally, for this is little more than a few wooden planks. Never mind. I am now going to bed, and I will no longer watch my own breath. Good night! "Tom's a cold."