The Counts of Gruyère

A passage from the book. The edge of a green plain around which rise the first steps of the immense amphitheatre of the Alps, a little castled city enthroned on a solitary hill watches since a thousand years the eternal and surpassing spectacle. Around its feet a river runs, a silver girdle bending northward between pastures green, while eastward over the towering azure heights the sunrise waves its flags of rose and gold. In the dim hours of twilight or by a cloudy moonlight, the city pitched amid the drifting aerial heights seems built itself of air and cloud, evanescent and unreal. By the fair light of noonday, sharp and clear upon its eminence, it is like a Dürer drawing, massed lines of crenelated bastions, sharp-pointed belfreys and towered gateways completing a mediæval vignette ideal in composition.