Note 121 — Scene II.—The Mountain of the Jungfrau.—Time, Morning.—Manfred alone upon the cliffs.

[The germs of this and of several other passages in Manfred may be found, as Lord Byron stated, in the Journal of his Swiss tour, which he transmitted to his sister. "Sept. 19, 1816.—Arrived at a lake in the very nipple of the bosom of the Mountain; left our quadrupeds with a Shepherd, and ascended further; came to some snow in patches, upon which my forehead's perspiration fell like rain, making the same dints as in a sieve; the chill of the wind and the snow turned me giddy, but I scrambled on and upwards. Hobhouse went to the highest pinnacle. ... The whole of the Mountain superb. A Shepherd on a very steep and high cliff playing upon his pipe; very different from Arcadia, (where I saw the pastors with a long Musquet instead of a Crook, and pistols in their Girdles).... The music of the Cows' bells (for their wealth, like the Patriarchs', is cattle) in the pastures, (which reach to a height far above any mountains in Britain), and the Shepherds' shouting to us from crag to crag, and playing on their reeds where the steeps appeared almost inaccessible, with the surrounding scenery, realized all that I have ever heard or imagined of a pastoral existence:—much more so than Greece or Asia Minor, for there we are a little too much of the sabre and musquet order; and if there is a Crook in one hand, you are sure to see a gun in the other:—but this was pure and unmixed—solitary, savage, and patriarchal.... As we went, they played the 'Ranz des Vaches' and other airs, by way of farewell. I have lately repeopled my mind with Nature" (Letters, 1899, in. 354, 355).]