[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.")
Sus,—Scores of correspondents will be writing to you to say that in the lines-
" He finds on misty mountain ground • His own vast shadow glory-crown'd "- Tennyson had in his eye what was called the Spectre of the Brocken in the Hartz Mountains, but there will not be many who will recollect how much had been made of this phe- nomenon at about the time when " In Memoriam " was written. It had.been brought into notice by a popular account in some book of travels or in some magazine, and at Cambridge it long served for an illustration in lectures on elementary optics, so that it was then, perhaps, more in people's minds than it is now. When I was in the Hartz Mountains (1849) I felt oound to sleep at the Chalet Inn on the Brocken for the chance of seeing the Spectre. I was disappointed, but six years later I saw it on Crummock Mount, near Keswick, and will describe what I saw. It is simply your own shadow thrown on a bank of mist. But there are points of interest which are indicated in the latter of the lines quoted above, as we shall see. I was staying near Keswick in 1855, and went with a party up Crummock, rather late on a bright September afternoon: This Brocken Spectre had come into our talk that morning. Crummock is a flat-topped
hill, and its eastern side is a steep scar ; we were just going to descend, having the sun behind us, when a wall of
mist rose before us out of the valley, and one of the party said: "These are just the conditions for the Spectra" ; and then we saw the shadow of a rock thrown on the mist. We went to the rock, and on reaching it we saw four silhouettes of ourselves mocking our motions ; three of these were plain black shadows, but one—that of the beholder's self—had round the head a luminosity, bounded by a rainbow rim. All the shadows were a little magnified (" vast ") owing to the ' penumbra " ; the breadth of this depends on the distance of the mist from the beholder; it was very sensible in this instance. Of course we all caught the charmingly obvious moral of the observer seeing the glory round nobody's head but his own. The luminosity and prismatic halo were caused in the same way as the rainbow,—viz., by the internal reflection of the sun's rays in drops of water in the mist. When we
came down from the mountain we told the people where we lodged what we had seen, and they recollected that two children had once come down from Crummock greatly frightened, saying that the Lord bad appeared to them with a halo round His head, just as it was in the picture-book. The words "His own" and "vast" and "HglzoryNE-cyro:rit'd4"Efin:l their full significance in the light of the fact. —I am, sir, &e.
The Master's Lodge, Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
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