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Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, First Series

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Title: Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, First Series

Author: John Addington Symonds

Editor: Horatio Robert Forbes Brown


        
Release date: February 8, 2005 [eBook #14972]
                Most recently updated: December 19, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE, FIRST SERIES ***




Produced by Ted Garvin, Leonard Johnson and the PG Online Distributed
Proofreading Team











  SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE





  BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

  AUTHOR OF "RENAISSANCE IN ITALY", "STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS," ETC





  FIRST SERIES




  NEW EDITION

  LONDON
  JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
  1914




PREFATORY NOTE


In preparing this new edition of the late J.A. Symonds's three volumes
of travels, 'Sketches in Italy and Greece,' 'Sketches and Studies
in Italy,' and 'Italian Byways,' nothing has been changed except the
order of the Essays. For the convenience of travellers a topographical
arrangement has been adopted. This implied a new title to cover the
contents of all three volumes, and 'Sketches and Studies in Italy
and Greece' has been chosen as departing least from the author's own
phraseology.

HORATIO F. BROWN.
Venice: _June_ 1898.







  CONTENTS


  THE LOVE OF THE ALPS

  WINTER NIGHTS AT DAVOS

  BACCHUS IN GRAUBÜNDEN

  OLD TOWNS OF PROVENCE

  THE CORNICE

  AJACCIO

  MONTE GENEROSO

  LOMBARD VIGNETTES

  COMO AND IL MEDEGHINO

  BERGAMO AND BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI

  CREMA AND THE CRUCIFIX

  CHERUBINO AT THE SCALA THEATRE

  A VENETIAN MEDLEY

  THE GONDOLIER'S WEDDING

  A CINQUE CENTO BRUTUS

  TWO DRAMATISTS OF THE LAST CENTURY






  SKETCHES AND STUDIES

  IN

  ITALY AND GREECE






_THE LOVE OF THE ALPS_[1]


Of all the joys in life, none is greater than the joy of arriving on
the outskirts of Switzerland at the end of a long dusty day's journey
from Paris. The true epicure in refined pleasures will never travel
to Basle by night. He courts the heat of the sun and the monotony
of French plains,--their sluggish streams and never-ending poplar
trees--for the sake of the evening coolness and the gradual approach
to the great Alps, which await him at the close of the day. It is
about Mulhausen that he begins to feel a change in the landscape.
The fields broaden into rolling downs, watered by clear and running
streams; the green Swiss thistle grows by riverside and cowshed; pines
begin to tuft the slopes of gently rising hills; and now the sun has
set, the stars come out, first Hesper, then the troop of lesser lights;
and he feels--yes, indeed, there is now no mistake--the well-known,
well-loved magical fresh air, that never fails to blow from snowy
mountains and meadows watered by perennial streams. The last hour is
one of exquisite enjoyment, and when he reaches Basle, he scarcely
sleeps all night for hearing the swift Rhine beneath the balconies,
and knowing that the moon is shining on its waters, through the town,
beneath the bridges, between pasture-lands and copses, up the still
mountain-girdled valleys to the ice-caves where the water springs.
There is nothing in all experience of travelling like this. We may
greet the Mediterranean at Marseilles with enthusiasm; on entering
Rome by the Porta del Popolo, we may reflect with pride that we
have reached the goal of our pilgrimage, and are at last among
world-shaking memories. But neither Rome nor the Riviera wins our
hearts like Switzerland. We do not lie awake in London thinking of
them; we do not long so intensely, as the year comes round, to revisit
them. Our affection is less a passion than that which we cherish for
Switzerland.

Why, then, is this? What, after all, is the love of the Alps, and when
and where did it begin? It is easier to ask these questions than to
answer them. The classic nations hated mountains. Greek and Roman
poets talk of them with disgust and dread. Nothing could have been
more depressing to a courtier of Augustus than residence at Aosta,
even though he found his theatres and triumphal arches there. Wherever
classical feeling has predominated, this has been the case. Cellini's
Memoirs, written in the height of pagan Renaissance, well express
the aversion which a Florentine or Roman felt for the inhospitable
wildernesses of Switzerland.[2] Dryden, in his dedication to 'The
Indian Emperor,' says, 'High objects, it is true, attract the sight;
but it looks up with pain on craggy rocks and barren mountains, and
continues not intent on any object which is wanting in shades and
green to entertain it.' Addison and Gray had no better epithets than
'rugged,' 'horrid,' and the like for Alpine landscape. The classic
spirit was adverse to enthusiasm for mere nature. Humanity was too
prominent, and city life absorbed all interests,--not to speak of what
perhaps is the weightiest reason--that solitude, indifferent
accommodation, and imperfect means of travelling, rendered mountainous
countries peculiarly disagreeable. It is impossible to enjoy art or
nature while suffering from fatigue and cold, dreading the attacks of
robbers, and wondering whether you will find food and shelter at the
end of your day's journey. Nor was it different in the Middle Ages.
Then individuals had either no leisure from war or strife with the
elements, or else they devoted themselves to the salvation of their
souls. But when the ideas of the Middle Ages had decayed, when
improved arts of life had freed men from servile subjection to daily
needs, when the bondage of religious tyranny had been thrown off and
political liberty allowed the full development of tastes and
instincts, when, moreover, the classical traditions had lost their
power, and courts and coteries became too narrow for the activity of
man,--then suddenly it was discovered that Nature in herself possessed
transcendent charms. It may seem absurd to class them all together;
yet there is no doubt that the French Revolution, the criticism of the
Bible, Pantheistic forms of religious feeling, landscape-painting,
Alpine travelling, and the poetry of Nature, are all signs of the same
movement--of a new Renaissance. Limitations of every sort have been
shaken off during the last century; all forms have been destroyed, all
questions asked. The classical spirit loved to arrange, model,
preserve traditions, obey laws. We are intolerant of everything that
is not simple, unbiassed by prescription, liberal as the wind, and
natural as the mountain crags. We go to feed this spirit of freedom
among the Alps. What the virgin forests of America are to the
Americans, the Alps are to us. What there is in these huge blocks and
walls of granite crowned with ice that fascinates us, it is hard to
analyse. Why, seeing that we find them so attractive, they should have
repelled our ancestors of the fourth generation and all the world
before them, is another mystery. We cannot explain what rapport there
is between our human souls and these inequalities in the surface of
the earth which we call Alps. Tennyson speaks of

  Some vague emotion of delight
  In gazing up an Alpine height,

and its vagueness eludes definition. The interest which physical
science has created for natural objects has something to do with it.
Curiosity and the charm of novelty increase this interest. No towns,
no cultivated tracts of Europe however beautiful, form such a contrast
to our London life as Switzerland. Then there is the health and joy
that comes from exercise in open air; the senses freshened by good
sleep; the blood quickened by a lighter and rarer atmosphere. Our
modes of life, the breaking down of class privileges, the extension of
education, which contribute to make the individual greater and society
less, render the solitude of mountains refreshing. Facilities of
travelling and improved accommodation leave us free to enjoy the
natural beauty which we seek. Our minds, too, are prepared to
sympathise with the inanimate world; we have learned to look on the
universe as a whole, and ourselves as a part of it, related by close
ties of friendship to all its other members Shelley's, Wordsworth's,
Goethe's poetry has taught us this; we are all more or less
Pantheists, worshippers of 'God in Nature,' convinced of the
omnipresence of the informing mind.

Thus, when we admire the Alps, we are after all but children of
the century. We follow its inspiration blindly; and while we think
ourselves spontaneous in our ecstasy, perform the part for which we
have been trained from childhood by the atmosphere in which we live.
It is this very unconsciousness and universality of the impulse we
obey which makes it hard to analyse. Contemporary history is difficult
to write; to define the spirit of the age in which we live is still
more difficult; to account for 'impressions which owe all their force
to their identity with themselves' is most difficult of all. We must
be content to feel, and not to analyse.

Rousseau has the credit of having invented the love of Nature. Perhaps
he first expressed, in literature, the pleasures of open life among
the mountains, of walking tours, of the '_école buissonnière_,'
away from courts, and schools, and cities, which it is the fashion now
to love. His bourgeois birth and tastes, his peculiar religious
and social views, his intense self-engrossment,--all favoured the
development of Nature-worship. But Rousseau was not alone, nor yet
creative, in this instance. He was but one of the earliest to seize
and express a new idea of growing humanity. For those who seem to be
the most original in their inauguration of periods are only such
as have been favourably placed by birth and education to imbibe the
floating creeds of the whole race. They resemble the first cases of an
epidemic, which become the centres of infection and propagate disease.
At the time of Rousseau's greatness the French people were initiative.
In politics, in literature, in fashions, and in philosophy, they had
for some time led the taste of Europe. But the sentiment which first
received a clear and powerful expression in the works of Rousseau,
soon declared itself in the arts and literature of other nations.
Goethe, Wordsworth, and the earlier landscape-painters, proved that
Germany and England were not far behind the French. In England this
love of Nature for its own sake is indigenous, and has at all times
been peculiarly characteristic of our genius. Therefore it is not
surprising that our life and literature and art have been foremost
in developing the sentiment of which we are speaking. Our poets,
painters, and prose writers gave the tone to European thought in this
respect. Our travellers in search of the adventurous and picturesque,
our Alpine Club, have made of Switzerland an English playground.

The greatest period in our history was but a foreshadowing of this.
To return to Nature-worship was but to reassume the habits of the
Elizabethan age, altered indeed by all the changes of religion,
politics, society, and science which the last three centuries have
wrought, yet still, in its original love of free open life among the
fields and woods, and on the sea, the same. Now the French national
genius is classical. It reverts to the age of Louis XIV., and
Rousseauism in their literature is as true an innovation and
parenthesis as Pope-and-Drydenism was in ours. As in the age of the
Reformation, so in this, the German element of the modern character
predominates. During the two centuries from which we have emerged, the
Latin element had the upper hand. Our love of the Alps is a Gothic, a
Teutonic, instinct; sympathetic with all that is vague, infinite, and
insubordinate to rules, at war with all that is defined and systematic
in our genius. This we may perceive in individuals as well as in the
broader aspects of arts and literatures. The classically minded man,
the reader of Latin poets, the lover of brilliant conversation,
the frequenter of clubs and drawing-rooms, nice in his personal
requirements, scrupulous in his choice of words, averse to unnecessary
physical exertion, preferring town to country life, _cannot_
deeply feel the charm of the Alps. Such a man will dislike German art,
and however much he may strive to be Catholic in his tastes, will find
as he grows older that his liking for Gothic architecture and modern
painting diminish almost to aversion before an increasing admiration
for Greek peristyles and the Medicean Venus. If in respect of
speculation all men are either Platonists or Aristotelians, in respect
of taste all men are either Greek or German.

At present the German, the indefinite, the natural, commands; the
Greek, the finite, the cultivated, is in abeyance. We who talk so
much about the feeling of the Alps, are creatures, not creators of our
_cultus_,--a strange reflection, proving how much greater man is
than men, the common reason of the age in which we live than our own
reasons, its constituents and subjects.

Perhaps it is our modern tendency to 'individualism' which makes the
Alps so much to us. Society is there reduced to a vanishing point--no
claims are made on human sympathies--there is no need to toil in
yoke-service with our fellows. We may be alone, dream our own
dreams, and sound the depths of personality without the reproach of
selfishness, without a restless wish to join in action or money-making
or the pursuit of fame. To habitual residents among the Alps this
absence of social duties and advantages may be barbarising, even
brutalising. But to men wearied with too much civilisation,
and deafened by the noise of great cities, it is beyond measure
refreshing. Then, again, among the mountains history finds no place.
The Alps have no past nor present nor future. The human beings who
live upon their sides are at odds with nature, clinging on for bare
existence to the soil, sheltering themselves beneath protecting rocks
from avalanches, damming up destructive streams, all but annihilated
every spring. Man, who is paramount in the plain, is nothing here. His
arts and sciences, and dynasties, and modes of life, and mighty works,
and conquests and decays, demand our whole attention in Italy or
Egypt. But here the mountains, immemorially the same, which were,
which are, and which are to be, present a theatre on which the soul
breathes freely and feels herself alone. Around her on all sides is
God, and Nature, who is here the face of God and not the slave of man.
The spirit of the world hath here not yet grown old. She is as young
as on the first day; and the Alps are a symbol of the self-creating,
self-sufficing, self-enjoying universe which lives for its own ends.
For why do the slopes gleam with flowers, and the hillsides deck
themselves with grass, and the inaccessible ledges of black rock bear
their tufts of crimson primroses and flaunting tiger-lilies? Why,
morning after morning, does the red dawn flush the pinnacles of Monte
Rosa above cloud and mist unheeded? Why does the torrent shout, the
avalanche reply in thunder to the music of the sun, the trees and
rocks and meadows cry their 'Holy, Holy, Holy'? Surely not for us.
We are an accident here, and even the few men whose eyes are fixed
habitually upon these things are dead to them--the peasants do not
even know the names of their own flowers, and sigh with envy when you
tell them of the plains of Lincolnshire or Russian steppes.

But indeed there is something awful in the Alpine elevation above
human things. We do not love Switzerland merely because we associate
its thought with recollections of holidays and joyfulness. Some of
the most solemn moments of life are spent high up above among the
mountains, on the barren tops of rocky passes, where the soul has
seemed to hear in solitude a low controlling voice. It is almost
necessary for the development of our deepest affections that some sad
and sombre moments should be interchanged with hours of merriment and
elasticity. It is this variety in the woof of daily life which endears
our home to us; and perhaps none have fully loved the Alps who have
not spent some days of meditation, or it may be of sorrow, among their
solitudes. Splendid scenery, like music, has the power to make 'of
grief itself a fiery chariot for mounting above the sources of grief,'
to ennoble and refine our passions, and to teach us that our lives
are merely moments in the years of the eternal Being. There are many,
perhaps, who, within sight of some great scene among the Alps, upon
the height of the Stelvio or the slopes of Mürren, or at night in
the valley of Courmayeur, have felt themselves raised above cares
and doubts and miseries by the mere recognition of unchangeable
magnificence; have found a deep peace in the sense of their own
nothingness. It is not granted to us everyday to stand upon these
pinnacles of rest and faith above the world. But having once stood
there, how can we forget the station? How can we fail, amid the
tumult of our common cares, to feel at times the hush of that far-off
tranquillity? When our life is most commonplace, when we are ill or
weary in city streets, we can remember the clouds upon the mountains
we have seen, the sound of innumerable waterfalls, and the scent of
countless flowers. A photograph of Bisson's or of Braun's, the name of
some well-known valley, the picture of some Alpine plant, rouses the
sacred hunger in our souls, and stirs again the faith in beauty and
in rest beyond ourselves which no man can take from us. We owe a
deep debt of gratitude to everything which enables us to rise above
depressing and enslaving circumstances, which brings us nearer in some
way or other to what is eternal in the universe, and which makes us
know that, whether we live or die, suffer or enjoy, life and gladness
are still strong in the world. On this account, the proper attitude
of the soul among the Alps is one of silence. It is almost impossible
without a kind of impiety to frame in words the feelings they inspire.
Yet there are some sayings, hallowed by long usage, which throng
the mind through a whole summer's day, and seem in harmony with its
emotions--some portions of the Psalms or lines of greatest poets,
inarticulate hymns of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, waifs and strays not
always apposite, but linked by strong and subtle chains of feeling
with the grandeur of the mountains. This reverential feeling for
the Alps is connected with the Pantheistic form of our religious
sentiments to which I have before alluded. It is a trite remark, that
even devout men of the present generation prefer temples _not_
made with hands to churches, and worship God in the fields more
contentedly than in their pews. What Mr. Ruskin calls 'the instinctive
sense of the divine presence not formed into distinct belief' lies at
the root of our profound veneration for the nobler aspects of mountain
scenery. This instinctive sense has been very variously expressed by
Goethe in Faust's celebrated confession of faith, by Shelley in the
stanzas of 'Adonais,' which begin 'He is made one with nature,' by
Wordsworth in the lines on Tintern Abbey, and lately by Mr. Roden Noel
in his noble poems of Pantheism. It is more or less strongly felt by
all who have recognised the indubitable fact that religious belief is
undergoing a sure process of change from the dogmatic distinctness of
the past to some at present dimly descried creed of the future. Such
periods of transition are of necessity full of discomfort, doubt, and
anxiety, vague, variable, and unsatisfying. The men in whose spirits
the fermentation of the change is felt, who have abandoned their
old moorings, and have not yet reached the haven for which they are
steering, cannot but be indistinct and undecided in their faith. The
universe of which they form a part becomes important to them in its
infinite immensity. The principles of beauty, goodness, order and law,
no longer connected in their minds with definite articles of faith,
find symbols in the outer world. They are glad to fly at certain
moments from mankind and its oppressive problems, for which religion
no longer provides a satisfactory solution, to Nature, where they
vaguely localise the spirit that broods over us controlling all our
being. To such men Goethe's hymn is a form of faith, and born of such
a mood are the following far humbler verses:--

  At Mürren let the morning lead thee out
  To walk upon the cold and cloven hills,
  To hear the congregated mountains shout
  Their pæan of a thousand foaming rills.
  Raimented with intolerable light
  The snow-peaks stand above thee, row on row
  Arising, each a seraph in his might;
  An organ each of varied stop doth blow.
  Heaven's azure dome trembles through all her spheres,
  Feeling that music vibrate; and the sun
  Raises his tenor as he upward steers,
  And all the glory-coated mists that run
  Below him in the valley, hear his voice,
  And cry unto the dewy fields, Rejoice!

There is a profound sympathy between music and fine scenery: they both
affect us in the same way, stirring strong but undefined emotions,
which express themselves in 'idle tears,' or evoking thoughts 'which
lie,' as Wordsworth says, 'too deep for tears,' beyond the reach
of any words. How little we know what multitudes of mingling
reminiscences, held in solution by the mind, and colouring its fancy
with the iridescence of variable hues, go to make up the sentiments
which music or which mountains stir! It is the very vagueness,
changefulness, and dreamlike indistinctness of these feelings which
cause their charm; they harmonise with the haziness of our beliefs and
seem to make our very doubts melodious. For this reason it is obvious
that unrestrained indulgence in the pleasures of music or of scenery
may tend to destroy habits of clear thinking, sentimentalise the mind,
and render it more apt to entertain embryonic fancies than to bring
ideas to definite perfection.

If hours of thoughtfulness and seclusion are necessary to the
development of a true love for the Alps, it is no less essential to a
right understanding of their beauty that we should pass some wet and
gloomy days among the mountains. The unclouded sunsets and sunrises
which often follow one another in September in the Alps, have
something terrible. They produce a satiety of splendour, and oppress
the mind with a sense of perpetuity. I remember spending such a season
in one of the Oberland valleys, high up above the pine-trees, in
a little châlet. Morning after morning I awoke to see the sunbeams
glittering on the Eiger and the Jungfrau; noon after noon the
snow-fields blazed beneath a steady fire; evening after evening they
shone like beacons in the red light of the setting sun. Then peak by
peak they lost the glow; the soul passed from them, and they stood
pale yet weirdly garish against the darkened sky. The stars came out,
the moon shone, but not a cloud sailed over the untroubled heavens.
Thus day after day for several weeks there was no change, till I was
seized with an overpowering horror of unbroken calm. I left the valley
for a time; and when I returned to it in wind and rain, I found that
the partial veiling of the mountain heights restored the charm which
I had lost and made me feel once more at home. The landscape takes a
graver tone beneath the mist that hides the higher peaks, and
comes drifting, creeping, feeling, through the pines upon their
slopes--white, silent, blinding vapour-wreaths around the sable
spires. Sometimes the cloud descends and blots out everything. Again
it lifts a little, showing cottages and distant Alps beneath its
skirts. Then it sweeps over the whole valley like a veil, just broken
here and there above a lonely châlet or a thread of distant dangling
torrent foam. Sounds, too, beneath the mist are more strange. The
torrent seems to have a hoarser voice and grinds the stones more
passionately against its boulders. The cry of shepherds through the
fog suggests the loneliness and danger of the hills. The bleating
of penned sheep or goats, and the tinkling of the cowbells, are
mysteriously distant and yet distinct in the dull dead air. Then,
again, how immeasurably high above our heads appear the domes and
peaks of snow revealed through chasms in the drifting cloud; how
desolate the glaciers and the avalanches in gleams of light that
struggle through the mist! There is a leaden glare peculiar to clouds,
which makes the snow and ice more lurid. Not far from the house where
I am writing, the avalanche that swept away the bridge last winter is
lying now, dripping away, dank and dirty, like a rotting whale. I can
see it from my window, green beech-boughs nodding over it, forlorn
larches bending their tattered branches by its side, splinters of
broken pine protruding from its muddy caves, the boulders on its
flank, and the hoarse hungry torrent tossing up its tongues to lick
the ragged edge of snow. Close by, the meadows, spangled with yellow
flowers and red and blue, look even more brilliant than if the sun
were shining on them. Every cup and blade of grass is drinking. But
the scene changes; the mist has turned into rain-clouds, and the
steady rain drips down, incessant, blotting out the view. Then, too,
what a joy it is if the clouds break towards evening with a north
wind, and a rainbow in the valley gives promise of a bright to-morrow!
We look up to the cliffs above our heads, and see that they have just
been powdered with the snow that is a sign of better weather.

Such rainy days ought to be spent in places like Seelisberg and
Mürren, at the edge of precipices, in front of mountains, or above a
lake. The cloud-masses crawl and tumble about the valleys like a brood
of dragons; now creeping along the ledges of the rock with sinuous
self-adjustment to its turns and twists; now launching out into
the deep, repelled by battling winds, or driven onward in a coil of
twisted and contorted serpent curls. In the midst of summer these wet
seasons often end in a heavy fall of snow. You wake some morning to
see the meadows which last night were gay with July flowers huddled
up in snow a foot in depth. But fair weather does not tarry long to
reappear. You put on your thickest boots and sally forth to find the
great cups of the gentians full of snow, and to watch the rising of
the cloud-wreaths under the hot sun. Bad dreams or sickly thoughts,
dissipated by returning daylight or a friend's face, do not fly away
more rapidly and pleasantly than those swift glory-coated mists that
lose themselves we know not where in the blue depths of the sky.

In contrast with these rainy days nothing can be more perfect than
clear moonlight nights. There is a terrace upon the roof of the inn at
Courmayeur where one may spend hours in the silent watches, when all
the world has gone to sleep beneath. The Mont Chétif and the Mont
de la Saxe form a gigantic portal not unworthy of the pile that lies
beyond. For Mont Blanc resembles a vast cathedral; its countless
spires are scattered over a mass like that of the Duomo at Milan,
rising into one tower at the end. By night the glaciers glitter in the
steady moon; domes, pinnacles, and buttresses stand clear of clouds.
Needles of every height and most fantastic shapes rise from the
central ridge, some solitary, like sharp arrows shot against the sky,
some clustering into sheaves. On every horn of snow and bank of grassy
hill stars sparkle, rising, setting, rolling round through the long
silent night. Moonlight simplifies and softens the landscape. Colours
become scarcely distinguishable, and forms, deprived of half their
detail, gain in majesty and size. The mountains seem greater far by
night than day--higher heights and deeper depths, more snowy pyramids,
more beetling crags, softer meadows, and darker pines. The whole
valley is hushed, but for the torrent and the chirping grasshopper and
the striking of the village clocks. The black tower and the houses of
Courmayeur in the foreground gleam beneath the moon until she reaches
the edge of the Cramont, and then sinks quietly away, once more
to reappear among the pines, then finally to leave the valley dark
beneath the shadow of the mountain's bulk. Meanwhile the heights of
snow still glitter in the steady light: they, too, will soon be dark,
until the dawn breaks, tinging them with rose.

But it is not fair to dwell exclusively upon the more sombre aspect of
Swiss beauty when there are so many lively scenes of which to speak.
The sunlight and the freshness and the flowers of Alpine meadows form
more than half the charm of Switzerland. The other day we walked to a
pasture called the Col de Checruit, high up the valley of Courmayeur,
where the spring was still in its first freshness. Gradually we
climbed, by dusty roads and through hot fields where the grass had
just been mown, beneath the fierce light of the morning sun. Not a
breath of air was stirring, and the heavy pines hung overhead upon
their crags, as if to fence the gorge from every wandering breeze.
There is nothing more oppressive than these scorching sides of narrow
rifts, shut in by woods and precipices. But suddenly the valley
broadened, the pines and larches disappeared, and we found ourselves
upon a wide green semicircle of the softest meadows. Little rills of
water went rushing through them, rippling over pebbles, rustling under
dock leaves, and eddying against their wooden barriers. Far and wide
'you scarce could see the grass for flowers,' while on every side
the tinkling of cow-bells, and the voices of shepherds calling to one
another from the Alps, or singing at their work, were borne across the
fields. As we climbed we came into still fresher pastures, where the
snow had scarcely melted. There the goats and cattle were collected,
and the shepherds sat among them, fondling the kids and calling them
by name. When they called, the creatures came, expecting salt and
bread. It was pretty to see them lying near their masters, playing and
butting at them with their horns, or bleating for the sweet rye-bread.
The women knitted stockings, laughing among themselves, and singing
all the while. As soon as we reached them, they gathered round to
talk. An old herdsman, who was clearly the patriarch of this Arcadia,
asked us many questions in a slow deliberate voice. We told him who
we were, and tried to interest him in the cattle-plague, which he
appeared to regard as an evil very unreal and far away--like the
murrain upon Pharaoh's herds which one reads about in Exodus. But
he was courteous and polite, doing the honours of his pasture with
simplicity and ease. He took us to his châlet and gave us bowls of
pure cold milk. It was a funny little wooden house, clean and dark.
The sky peeped through its tiles, and if shepherds were not in the
habit of sleeping soundly all night long, they might count the setting
and rising stars without lifting their heads from the pillow. He told
us how far pleasanter they found the summer season than the long cold
winter which they have to spend in gloomy houses in Courmayeur. This,
indeed, is the true pastoral life which poets have described--a happy
summer holiday among the flowers, well occupied with simple cares, and
harassed by 'no enemy but winter and rough weather.'

Very much of the charm of Switzerland belongs to simple things--to
greetings from the herdsmen, the 'Guten Morgen,' and 'Guten Abend,'
that are invariably given and taken upon mountain paths; to the tame
creatures, with their large dark eyes, who raise their heads one
moment from the pasture while you pass; and to the plants that grow
beneath your feet. The latter end of May is the time when spring
begins in the high Alps. Wherever sunlight smiles away a patch of
snow, the brown turf soon becomes green velvet, and the velvet stars
itself with red and white and gold and blue. You almost see the grass
and lilies grow. First come pale crocuses and lilac soldanellas. These
break the last dissolving clods of snow, and stand upon an island,
with the cold wall they have thawed all round them. It is the fate
of these poor flowers to spring and flourish on the very skirts
of retreating winter; they soon wither--the frilled chalice of the
soldanella shrivels up and the crocus fades away before the grass
has grown; the sun, which is bringing all the other plants to life,
scorches their tender petals. Often when summer has fairly come,
you still may see their pearly cups and lilac bells by the side of
avalanches, between the chill snow and the fiery sun, blooming and
fading hour by hour. They have as it were but a Pisgah view of the
promised land, of the spring which they are foremost to proclaim. Next
come the clumsy gentians and yellow anemones, covered with soft
down like fledgling birds. These are among the earliest and hardiest
blossoms that embroider the high meadows with a diaper of blue and
gold. About the same time primroses and auriculas begin to tuft the
dripping rocks, while frail white fleur-de-lis, like flakes of
snow forgotten by the sun, and golden-balled ranunculuses join with
forget-me-nots and cranesbill in a never-ending dance upon the grassy
floor. Happy, too, is he who finds the lilies-of-the-valley clustering
about the chestnut boles upon the Colma, or in the beechwood by
the stream at Macugnaga, mixed with garnet-coloured columbines and
fragrant white narcissus, which the people of the villages call
'Angiolini.' There, too, is Solomon's seal, with waxen bells and
leaves expanded like the wings of hovering butterflies. But these
lists of flowers are tiresome and cold; it would be better to draw
the portrait of one which is particularly fascinating. I think that
botanists have called it _Saxifraga cotyledon_; yet, in spite
of its long name, it is beautiful and poetic. London-pride is the
commonest of all the saxifrages; but the one of which I speak is as
different from London-pride as a Plantagenet upon his throne from that
last Plantagenet who died obscure and penniless some years ago. It is
a great majestic flower, which plumes the granite rocks of Monte Rosa
in the spring. At other times of the year you see a little tuft of
fleshy leaves set like a cushion on cold ledges and dark places of
dripping cliffs. You take it for a stonecrop--one of those weeds
doomed to obscurity, and safe from being picked because they are so
uninviting--and you pass it by incuriously. But about June it puts
forth its power, and from the cushion of pale leaves there springs a
strong pink stem, which rises upward for a while, and then curves
down and breaks into a shower of snow-white blossoms. Far away the
splendour gleams, hanging like a plume of ostrich-feathers from the
roof of rock, waving to the wind, or stooping down to touch the water
of the mountain stream that dashes it with dew. The snow at evening,
glowing with a sunset flush, is not more rosy-pure than this cascade
of pendent blossoms. It loves to be alone--inaccessible ledges, chasms
where winds combat, or moist caverns overarched near thundering falls,
are the places that it seeks. I will not compare it to a spirit of the
mountains or to a proud lonely soul, for such comparisons desecrate
the simplicity of nature, and no simile can add a glory to the flower.
It seems to have a conscious life of its own, so large and glorious
it is, so sensitive to every breath of air, so nobly placed upon its
bending stem, so royal in its solitude. I first saw it years ago on
the Simplon, feathering the drizzling crags above Isella. Then we
found it near Baveno, in a crack of sombre cliff beneath the mines.
The other day we cut an armful opposite Varallo, by the Sesia, and
then felt like murderers; it was so sad to hold in our hands the
triumph of those many patient months, the full expansive life of
the flower, the splendour visible from valleys and hillsides, the
defenceless creature which had done its best to make the gloomy places
of the Alps most beautiful.

After passing many weeks among the high Alps it is a pleasure to
descend into the plains. The sunset, and sunrise, and the stars of
Lombardy, its level horizons and vague misty distances, are a source
of absolute relief after the narrow skies and embarrassed prospects of
a mountain valley. Nor are the Alps themselves ever more imposing than
when seen from Milan or the church-tower of Chivasso or the terrace
of Novara, with a foreground of Italian cornfields and old city towers
and rice-ground, golden-green beneath a Lombard sun. Half veiled
by clouds, the mountains rise like visionary fortress walls of a
celestial city--unapproachable, beyond the range of mortal feet.
But those who know by old experience what friendly châlets, and cool
meadows, and clear streams are hidden in their folds and valleys,
send forth fond thoughts and messages, like carrier-pigeons, from the
marble parapets of Milan, crying, 'Before another sun has set, I too
shall rest beneath the shadow of their pines!' It is in truth not more
than a day's journey from Milan to the brink of snow at Macugnaga. But
very sad it is to _leave_ the Alps, to stand upon the terraces
of Berne and waft ineffectual farewells. The unsympathising Aar
rushes beneath; and the snow-peaks, whom we love like friends, abide
untroubled by the coming and the going of the world. The clouds drift
over them--the sunset warms them with a fiery kiss. Night comes, and
we are hurried far away to wake beside the Seine, remembering, with a
pang of jealous passion, that the flowers on Alpine meadows are still
blooming, and the rivulets still flowing with a ceaseless song, while
Paris shops are all we see, and all we hear is the dull clatter of a
Paris crowd.


_THE ALPS IN WINTER_


The gradual approach of winter is very lovely in the high Alps. The
valley of Davos, where I am writing, more than five thousand feet
above the sea, is not beautiful, as Alpine valleys go, though it has
scenery both picturesque and grand within easy reach. But when summer
is passing into autumn, even the bare slopes of the least romantic
glen are glorified. Golden lights and crimson are cast over the
grey-green world by the fading of innumerable plants. Then the larches
begin to put on sallow tints that deepen into orange, burning against
the solid blue sky like amber. The frosts are severe at night, and the
meadow grass turns dry and wan. The last lilac crocuses die upon the
fields. Icicles, hanging from watercourse or mill-wheel, glitter in
the noonday sunlight. The wind blows keenly from the north, and now
the snow begins to fall and thaw and freeze, and fall and thaw again.
The seasons are confused; wonderful days of flawless purity are
intermingled with storm and gloom. At last the time comes when a great
snowfall has to be expected. There is hard frost in the early morning,
and at nine o'clock the thermometer stands at 2°. The sky is clear,
but it clouds rapidly with films of cirrus and of stratus in the south
and west. Soon it is covered over with grey vapour in a level sheet,
all the hill-tops standing hard against the steely heavens. The cold
wind from the west freezes the moustache to one's pipe-stem. By noon
the air is thick with a coagulated mist; the temperature meanwhile has
risen, and a little snow falls at intervals. The valleys are filled
with a curious opaque blue, from which the peaks rise, phantom-like
and pallid, into the grey air, scarcely distinguishable from their
background. The pine-forests on the mountain-sides are of darkest
indigo. There is an indescribable stillness and a sense of incubation.
The wind has fallen. Later on, the snow-flakes flutter silently and
sparely through the lifeless air. The most distant landscape is quite
blotted out. After sunset the clouds have settled down upon the hills,
and the snow comes in thick, impenetrable fleeces. At night our hair
crackles and sparkles when we brush it. Next morning there is a foot
and a half of finely powdered snow, and still the snow is falling.
Strangely loom the châlets through the semi-solid whiteness. Yet the
air is now dry and singularly soothing. The pines are heavy with their
wadded coverings; now and again one shakes himself in silence, and his
burden falls in a white cloud, to leave a black-green patch upon the
hillside, whitening again as the imperturbable fall continues. The
stakes by the roadside are almost buried. No sound is audible. Nothing
is seen but the snow-plough, a long raft of planks with a heavy stone
at its stem and a sharp prow, drawn by four strong horses, and driven
by a young man erect upon the stem.

So we live through two days and nights, and on the third a north wind
blows. The snow-clouds break and hang upon the hills in scattered
fleeces; glimpses of blue sky shine through, and sunlight glints along
the heavy masses. The blues of the shadows are everywhere intense. As
the clouds disperse, they form in moulded domes, tawny like sunburned
marble in the distant south lands. Every châlet is a miracle of
fantastic curves, built by the heavy hanging snow. Snow lies mounded
on the roads and fields, writhed into loveliest wreaths, or outspread
in the softest undulations. All the irregularities of the hills are
softened into swelling billows like the mouldings of Titanic statuary.

It happened once or twice last winter that such a clearing after
snowfall took place at full moon. Then the moon rose in a swirl of
fleecy vapour--clouds above, beneath, and all around. The sky was
blue as steel, and infinitely deep with mist-entangled stars. The horn
above which she first appears stood carved of solid black, and through
the valley's length from end to end yawned chasms and clefts of liquid
darkness. As the moon rose, the clouds were conquered, and massed into
rolling waves upon the ridges of the hills. The spaces of open sky
grew still more blue. At last the silver light came flooding over all,
and here and there the fresh snow glistened on the crags. There is
movement, palpitation, life of light through earth and sky. To walk
out on such a night, when the perturbation of storm is over and the
heavens are free, is one of the greatest pleasures offered by this
winter life. It is so light that you can read the smallest print with
ease. The upper sky looks quite black, shading by violet and sapphire
into turquoise upon the horizon. There is the colour of ivory upon
the nearest snow-fields, and the distant peaks sparkle like silver,
crystals glitter in all directions on the surface of the snow, white,
yellow, and pale blue. The stars are exceedingly keen, but only a few
can shine in the intensity of moonlight. The air is perfectly still,
and though icicles may be hanging from beard and moustache to the furs
beneath one's chin, there is no sensation of extreme cold.

During the earlier frosts of the season, after the first snows have
fallen, but when there is still plenty of moisture in the ground,
the loveliest fern-fronds of pure rime may be found in myriads on the
meadows. They are fashioned like perfect vegetable structures, opening
fan-shaped upon crystal stems, and catching the sunbeams with the
brilliancy of diamonds. Taken at certain angles, they decompose light
into iridescent colours, appearing now like emeralds, rubies, or
topazes, and now like Labrador spar, blending all hues in a wondrous
sheen. When the lake freezes for the first time, its surface is of
course quite black, and so transparent that it is easy to see the
fishes swimming in the deep beneath; but here and there, where rime
has fallen, there sparkle these fantastic flowers and ferns and mosses
made of purest frost. Nothing, indeed, can be more fascinating than
the new world revealed by frost. In shaded places of the valley you
may walk through larches and leafless alder thickets by silent farms,
all silvered over with hoar spangles--fairy forests, where the flowers
and foliage are rime. The streams are flowing half-frozen over rocks
sheeted with opaque green ice. Here it is strange to watch the swirl
of water freeing itself from these frost-shackles, and to see it
eddying beneath the overhanging eaves of frailest crystal-frosted
snow. All is so silent, still, and weird in this white world, that one
marvels when the spirit of winter will appear, or what shrill voices
in the air will make his unimaginable magic audible. Nothing happens,
however, to disturb the charm, save when a sunbeam cuts the chain of
diamonds on an alder bough, and down they drift in a thin cloud of
dust. It may be also that the air is full of floating crystals,
like tiniest most restless fire-flies rising and falling and passing
crosswise in the sun-illumined shade of tree or mountain-side.

It is not easy to describe these beauties of the winter-world; and yet
one word must be said about the sunsets. Let us walk out, therefore,
towards the lake at four o'clock in mid-December. The thermometer is
standing at 3°, and there is neither breath of wind nor cloud. Venus
is just visible in rose and sapphire, and the thin young moon is
beside her. To east and south the snowy ranges burn with yellow fire,
deepening to orange and crimson hues, which die away and leave a
greenish pallor. At last, the higher snows alone are livid with a last
faint tinge of light, and all beneath is quite white. But the tide
of glory turns. While the west grows momently more pale, the eastern
heavens flush with afterglow, suffuse their spaces with pink and
violet. Daffodil and tenderest emerald intermingle; and these colours
spread until the west again has rose and primrose and sapphire
wonderfully blent, and from the burning skies a light is cast upon the
valley--a phantom light, less real, more like the hues of molten
gems, than were the stationary flames of sunset. Venus and the moon
meanwhile are silvery clear. Then the whole illumination fades like
magic.

All the charms of which I have been writing are combined in a
sledge-drive. With an arrowy gliding motion one passes through the
snow-world as through a dream. In the sunlight the snow surface
sparkles with its myriad stars of crystals. In the shadow it ceases
to glitter, and assumes a blueness scarcely less blue than the sky.
So the journey is like sailing through alternate tracts of light
irradiate heavens, and interstellar spaces of the clearest and most
flawless ether. The air is like the keen air of the highest glaciers.
As we go, the bells keep up a drowsy tinkling at the horse's head.
The whole landscape is transfigured--lifted high up out of
commonplaceness. The little hills are Monte Rosas and Mont Blancs.
Scale is annihilated, and nothing tells but form. There is hardly
any colour except the blue of sky and shadow. Everything is traced in
vanishing tints, passing from the almost amber of the distant sunlight
through glowing white into pale greys and brighter blues and deep
ethereal azure. The pines stand in black platoons upon the hillsides,
with a tinge of red or orange on their sable. Some carry masses of
snow. Others have shaken their plumes free. The châlets are like fairy
houses or toys, waist-deep in stores of winter fuel. With their mellow
tones of madder and umber on the weather-beaten woodwork relieved
against the white, with fantastic icicles and folds of snow depending
from their eaves, or curled like coverlids from roof and window-sill,
they are far more picturesque than in the summer. Colour, wherever it
is found, whether in these cottages or in a block of serpentine by
the roadside, or in the golden bulrush blades by the lake shore, takes
more than double value. It is shed upon the landscape like a spiritual
and transparent veil. Most beautiful of all are the sweeping lines of
pure untroubled snow, fold over fold of undulating softness, billowing
along the skirts of the peaked hills. There is no conveying the
charm of immaterial, aërial, lucid beauty, the feeling of purity and
aloofness from sordid things, conveyed by the fine touch on all our
senses of light, colour, form, and air, and motion, and rare tinkling
sound. The magic is like a spirit mood of Shelley's lyric verse. And,
what is perhaps most wonderful, this delicate delight may be enjoyed
without fear in the coldest weather. It does not matter how low the
temperature may be, if the sun is shining, the air dry, and the wind
asleep.

Leaving the horse-sledges on the verge of some high hill-road, and
trusting oneself to the little hand-sledge which the people of the
Grisons use, and which the English have christened by the Canadian
term 'toboggan,' the excitement becomes far greater. The hand-sledge
is about three feet long, fifteen inches wide, and half a foot above
the ground, on runners shod with iron. Seated firmly at the back,
and guiding with the feet in front, the rider skims down precipitous
slopes and round perilous corners with a rapidity that beats a horse's
pace. Winding through sombre pine-forests, where the torrent roars
fitfully among caverns of barbed ice, and the glistening mountains
tower above in their glory of sun-smitten snow, darting round the
frozen ledges at the turnings of the road, silently gliding at a speed
that seems incredible, it is so smooth, he traverses two or three
miles without fatigue, carried onward by the mere momentum of his
weight. It is a strange and great joy. The toboggan, under these
conditions, might be compared to an enchanted boat shooting the rapids
of a river; and what adds to its fascination is the entire loneliness
in which the rider passes through those weird and ever-shifting scenes
of winter radiance. Sometimes, when the snow is drifting up the pass,
and the world is blank behind, before, and all around, it seems like
plunging into chaos. The muffled pines loom fantastically through
the drift as we rush past them, and the wind, ever and anon, detaches
great masses of snow in clouds from their bent branches. Or again at
night, when the moon is shining, and the sky is full of flaming
stars, and the snow, frozen to the hardness of marble, sparkles with
innumerable crystals, a new sense of strangeness and of joy is given
to the solitude, the swiftness, and the silence of the exercise.
No other circumstances invest the poetry of rapid motion with more
fascination. Shelley, who so loved the fancy of a boat inspired with
its own instinct of life, would have delighted in the game, and would
probably have pursued it recklessly. At the same time, as practised
on a humbler scale nearer home, in company, and on a run selected for
convenience rather than for picturesqueness, tobogganing is a very
Bohemian amusement. No one who indulges in it can count on avoiding
hard blows and violent upsets, nor will his efforts to maintain his
equilibrium at the dangerous corners be invariably graceful.

Nothing, it might be imagined, could be more monotonous than an Alpine
valley covered up with snow. And yet to one who has passed many months
in that seclusion Nature herself presents no monotony; for the changes
constantly wrought by light and cloud and alternations of weather
on this landscape are infinitely various. The very simplicity of the
conditions seems to assist the supreme artist. One day is wonderful
because of its unsullied purity; not a cloud visible, and the pines
clothed in velvet of rich green beneath a faultless canopy of light.
The next presents a fretwork of fine film, wrought by the south wind
over the whole sky, iridescent with delicate rainbow tints within the
influences of the sun, and ever-changing shape. On another, when the
turbulent Föhn is blowing, streamers of snow may be seen flying from
the higher ridges against a pallid background of slaty cloud, while
the gaunt ribs of the hills glisten below with fitful gleams of lurid
light. At sunrise, one morning, stealthy and mysterious vapours clothe
the mountains from their basement to the waist, while the peaks are
glistening serenely in clear daylight. Another opens with silently
falling snow. A third is rosy through the length and breadth of the
dawn-smitten valley. It is, however, impossible to catalogue the
indescribable variety of those beauties, which those who love nature
may enjoy by simply waiting on the changes of the winter in a single
station of the Alps.

       *       *       *       *       *




_WINTER NIGHTS AT DAVOS_


I

Light, marvellously soft yet penetrating, everywhere diffused,
everywhere reflected without radiance, poured from the moon high above
our heads in a sky tinted through all shades and modulations of blue,
from turquoise on the horizon to opaque sapphire at the zenith--_dolce
color_. (It is difficult to use the word _colour_ for this scene
without suggesting an exaggeration. The blue is almost indefinable,
yet felt. But if possible, the total effect of the night landscape
should be rendered by careful exclusion of tints from the
word-palette. The art of the etcher is more needed than that of the
painter.) Heaven overhead is set with stars, shooting intensely,
smouldering with dull red in Aldeboran, sparkling diamond-like in
Sirius, changing from orange to crimson and green in the swart fire of
yonder double star. On the snow this moonlight falls tenderly, not in
hard white light and strong black shadow, but in tones of cream and
ivory, rounding the curves of drift. The mountain peaks alone glisten
as though they were built of silver burnished by an agate. Far away
they rise diminished in stature by the all-pervading dimness of bright
light, that erases the distinctions of daytime. On the path before our
feet lie crystals of many hues, the splinters of a thousand gems. In
the wood there are caverns of darkness, alternating with spaces of
star-twinkled sky, or windows opened between russet stems and solid
branches for the moony sheen. The green of the pines is felt, although
invisible, so soft in substance that it seems less like velvet than
some materialised depth of dark green shadow.

II

Snow falling noiseless and unseen. One only knows that it is falling
by the blinking of our eyes as the flakes settle on their lids and
melt. The cottage windows shine red, and moving lanterns of belated
wayfarers define the void around them. Yet the night is far from dark.
The forests and the mountain-bulk beyond the valley loom softly large
and just distinguishable through a pearly haze. The path is purest
trackless whiteness, almost dazzling though it has no light. This was
what Dante felt when he reached the lunar sphere:

  Parova a me, che nube ne coprisse
  Lucida, spessa, solida e pulita.

Walking silent, with insensible footfall, slowly, for the snow is deep
above our ankles, we wonder what the world would be like if this were
all. Could the human race be acclimatised to this monotony (we say)
perhaps emotion would be rarer, yet more poignant, suspended brooding
on itself, and wakening by flashes to a quintessential mood. Then
fancy changes, and the thought occurs that even so must be a planet,
not yet wholly made, nor called to take her place among the sisterhood
of light and song.

III

Sunset was fading out upon the Rhætikon and still reflected from the
Seehorn on the lake, when we entered the gorge of the Fluela--dense
pines on either hand, a mounting drift of snow in front, and faint
peaks, paling from rose to saffron, far above, beyond. There was
no sound but a tinkling stream and the continual jingle of our
sledge-bells. We drove at a foot's pace, our horse finding his own
path. When we left the forest, the light had all gone except for some
almost imperceptible touches of primrose on the eastern horns. It was
a moonless night, but the sky was alive with stars, and now and then
one fell. The last house in the valley was soon passed, and we entered
those bleak gorges where the wind, fine, noiseless, penetrating like
an edge of steel, poured slantwise on us from the north. As we rose,
the stars to west seemed far beneath us, and the Great Bear sprawled
upon the ridges of the lower hills outspread. We kept slowly moving
onward, upward, into what seemed like a thin impalpable mist, but
was immeasurable tracts of snow. The last cembras were left behind,
immovable upon dark granite boulders on our right. We entered a
formless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from which there rose dim
mountain-flanks that lost themselves in air. Up, ever up, and
still below us westward sank the stars. We were now 7500 feet above
sea-level, and the December night was rigid with intensity of frost.
The cold, and movement, and solemnity of space, drowsed every sense.

IV

The memory of things seen and done in moonlight is like the memory of
dreams. It is as a dream that I recall the night of our tobogganing to
Klosters, though it was full enough of active energy. The moon was in
her second quarter, slightly filmed with very high thin clouds, that
disappeared as night advanced, leaving the sky and stars in all their
lustre. A sharp frost, sinking to three degrees above zero Fahrenheit,
with a fine pure wind, such wind as here they call 'the mountain
breath.' We drove to Wolfgang in a two-horse sledge, four of us
inside, and our two Christians on the box. Up there, where the Alps of
Death descend to join the Lakehorn Alps, above the Wolfswalk, there
is a world of whiteness--frozen ridges, engraved like cameos of aërial
onyx upon the dark, star-tremulous sky; sculptured buttresses of snow,
enclosing hollows filled with diaphanous shadow, and sweeping aloft
into the upland fields of pure clear drift. Then came the swift
descent, the plunge into the pines, moon-silvered on their frosted
tops. The battalions of spruce that climb those hills defined the
dazzling snow from which they sprang, like the black tufts upon an
ermine robe. At the proper moment we left our sledge, and the big
Christian took his reins in hand to follow us. Furs and greatcoats
were abandoned. Each stood forth tightly accoutred, with short coat,
and clinging cap, and gaitered legs for the toboggan. Off we started
in line, with but brief interval between, at first slowly, then
glidingly, and when the impetus was gained, with darting, bounding,
almost savage swiftness--sweeping round corners, cutting the hard
snow-path with keen runners, avoiding the deep ruts, trusting to
chance, taking advantage of smooth places, till the rush and swing and
downward swoop became mechanical. Space was devoured. Into the massy
shadows of the forest, where the pines joined overhead, we pierced
without a sound, and felt far more than saw the great rocks with their
icicles; and out again, emerging into moonlight, met the valley spread
beneath our feet, the mighty peaks of the Silvretta and the vast blue
sky. On, on, hurrying, delaying not, the woods and hills rushed by.
Crystals upon the snow-banks glittered to the stars. Our souls would
fain have stayed to drink these marvels of the moon-world, but our
limbs refused. The magic of movement was upon us, and eight minutes
swallowed the varying impressions of two musical miles. The village
lights drew near and nearer, then the sombre village huts, and soon
the speed grew less, and soon we glided to our rest into the sleeping
village street.

V

It was just past midnight. The moon had fallen to the western horns.
Orion's belt lay bar-like on the opening of the pass, and Sirius shot
flame on the Seehorn. A more crystalline night, more full of fulgent
stars, was never seen, stars everywhere, but mostly scattered in large
sparkles on the snow. Big Christian went in front, tugging toboggans
by their strings, as Gulliver, in some old woodcut, drew the fleets
of Lilliput. Through the brown wood-châlets of Selfrangr, up to the
undulating meadows, where the snow slept pure and crisp, he led us.
There we sat awhile and drank the clear air, cooled to zero, but
innocent and mild as mother Nature's milk. Then in an instant, down,
down through the hamlet, with its châlets, stables, pumps, and logs,
the slumbrous hamlet, where one dog barked, and darkness dwelt upon
the path of ice, down with the tempest of a dreadful speed, that
shot each rider upward in the air, and made the frame of the toboggan
tremble--down over hillocks of hard frozen snow, dashing and bounding,
to the river and the bridge. No bones were broken, though the race was
thrice renewed, and men were spilt upon the roadside by some furious
plunge. This amusement has the charm of peril and the unforeseen. In
no wise else can colder, keener air be drunken at such furious speed.
The joy, too, of the engine-driver and the steeplechaser is upon us.
Alas, that it should be so short! If only roads were better made for
the purpose, there would be no end to it; for the toboggan cannot lose
his wind. But the good thing fails at last, and from the silence of
the moon we pass into the silence of the fields of sleep.

VI

The new stable is a huge wooden building, with raftered lofts to stow
the hay, and stalls for many cows and horses. It stands snugly in an
angle of the pine-wood, bordering upon the great horse-meadow. Here
at night the air is warm and tepid with the breath of kine. Returning
from my forest walk, I spy one window yellow in the moonlight with a
lamp. I lift the latch. The hound knows me, and does not bark. I enter
the stable, where six horses are munching their last meal. Upon the
corn-bin sits a knecht. We light our pipes and talk. He tells me of
the valley of Arosa (a hawk's flight westward over yonder hills), how
deep in grass its summer lawns, how crystal-clear its stream, how blue
its little lakes, how pure, without a taint of mist, 'too beautiful to
paint,' its sky in winter! This knecht is an Ardüser, and the valley
of Arosa lifts itself to heaven above his Langwies home. It is his
duty now to harness a sleigh for some night-work. We shake hands and
part--I to sleep, he for the snow.

VII

The lake has frozen late this year, and there are places in it where
the ice is not yet firm. Little snow has fallen since it froze--about
three inches at the deepest, driven by winds and wrinkled like the
ribbed sea-sand. Here and there the ice-floor is quite black and
clear, reflecting stars, and dark as heaven's own depths. Elsewhere it
is of a suspicious whiteness, blurred in surface, with jagged cracks
and chasms, treacherously mended by the hand of frost. Moving slowly,
the snow cries beneath our feet, and the big crystals tinkle. These
are shaped like fern-fronds, growing fan-wise from a point, and set
at various angles, so that the moonlight takes them with capricious
touch. They flash, and are quenched, and flash again, light darting to
light along the level surface, while the sailing planets and the stars
look down complacent at this mimicry of heaven. Everything above,
around, beneath, is very beautiful--the slumbrous woods, the snowy
fells, and the far distance painted in faint blue upon the tender
background of the sky. Everything is placid and beautiful; and yet the
place is terrible. For, as we walk, the lake groans, with throttled
sobs, and sudden cracklings of its joints, and sighs that shiver,
undulating from afar, and pass beneath our feet, and die away in
distance when they reach the shore. And now and then an upper crust
of ice gives way; and will the gulfs then drag us down? We are in
the very centre of the lake. There is no use in thinking or in taking
heed. Enjoy the moment, then, and march. Enjoy the contrast between
this circumambient serenity and sweetness, and the dreadful sense of
insecurity beneath. Is not, indeed, our whole life of this nature?
A passage over perilous deeps, roofed by infinity and sempiternal
things, surrounded too with evanescent forms, that like these
crystals, trodden underfoot, or melted by the Föhn-wind into dew,
flash, in some lucky moment, with a light that mimics stars! But to
allegorise and sermonise is out of place here. It is but the expedient
of those who cannot etch sensation by the burin of their art of words.

VIII

It is ten o'clock upon Sylvester Abend, or New Year's Eve. Herr Buol
sits with his wife at the head of his long table. His family and
serving folk are round him. There is his mother, with little Ursula,
his child, upon her knee. The old lady is the mother of four comely
daughters and nine stalwart sons, the eldest of whom is now a grizzled
man. Besides our host, four of the brothers are here to-night; the
handsome melancholy Georg, who is so gentle in his speech; Simeon,
with his diplomatic face; Florian, the student of medicine; and
my friend, colossal-breasted Christian. Palmy came a little later,
worried with many cares, but happy to his heart's core. No optimist
was ever more convinced of his philosophy than Palmy. After them,
below the salt, were ranged the knechts and porters, the marmiton
from the kitchen, and innumerable maids. The board was tesselated with
plates of birnen-brod and eier-brod, küchli and cheese and butter; and
Georg stirred grampampuli in a mighty metal bowl. For the uninitiated,
it may be needful to explain these Davos delicacies. Birnen-brod
is what the Scotch would call a 'bun,' or massive cake, composed of
sliced pears, almonds, spices, and a little flour. Eier-brod is a
saffron-coloured sweet bread, made with eggs; and küchli is a kind
of pastry, crisp and flimsy, fashioned into various devices of cross,
star, and scroll. Grampampuli is simply brandy burnt with sugar, the
most unsophisticated punch I ever drank from tumblers. The frugal
people of Davos, who live on bread and cheese and dried meat all the
year, indulge themselves but once with these unwonted dainties in the
winter.

The occasion was cheerful, and yet a little solemn. The scene was
feudal. For these Buols are the scions of a warrior race:

  A race illustrious for heroic deeds;
  Humbled, but not degraded.

During the six centuries through which they have lived nobles in
Davos, they have sent forth scores of fighting men to foreign lands,
ambassadors to France and Venice and the Milanese, governors to
Chiavenna and Bregaglia and the much-contested Valtelline. Members of
their house are Counts of Buol-Schauenstein in Austria, Freiherrs of
Muhlingen and Berenberg in the now German Empire. They keep the patent
of nobility conferred on them by Henri IV. Their ancient coat--parted
per pale azure and argent, with a dame of the fourteenth century
bearing in her hand a rose, all counterchanged--is carved in wood and
monumental marble on the churches and old houses hereabouts. And from
immemorial antiquity the Buol of Davos has sat thus on Sylvester Abend
with family and folk around him, summoned from alp and snowy field to
drink grampampuli and break the birnen-brod.

These rites performed, the men and maids began to sing--brown arms
lounging on the table, and red hands folded in white aprons--serious
at first in hymn-like cadences, then breaking into wilder measures
with a jodel at the close. There is a measured solemnity in the
performance, which strikes the stranger as somewhat comic. But the
singing was good; the voices strong and clear in tone, no hesitation
and no shirking of the melody. It was clear that the singers enjoyed
the music for its own sake, with half-shut eyes, as they take dancing,
solidly, with deep-drawn breath, sustained and indefatigable. But
eleven struck; and the two Christians, my old friend, and Palmy, said
we should be late for church. They had promised to take me with them
to see bell-ringing in the tower. All the young men of the village
meet, and draw lots in the Stube of the Rathhaus. One party tolls the
old year out; the other rings the new year in. He who comes last is
sconced three litres of Veltliner for the company. This jovial fine
was ours to pay to-night.

When we came into the air, we found a bitter frost; the whole sky
clouded over; a north wind whirling snow from alp and forest through
the murky gloom. The benches and broad walnut tables of the Bathhaus
were crowded with men, in shaggy homespun of brown and grey frieze.
Its low wooden roof and walls enclosed an atmosphere of smoke, denser
than the external snow-drift. But our welcome was hearty, and we found
a score of friends. Titanic Fopp, whose limbs are Michelangelesque in
length; spectacled Morosani; the little tailor Kramer, with a French
horn on his knees; the puckered forehead of the Baumeister; the
Troll-shaped postman; peasants and woodmen, known on far excursions
upon pass and upland valley. Not one but carried on his face the
memory of winter strife with avalanche and snow-drift, of horses
struggling through Fluela whirlwinds, and wine-casks tugged across
Bernina, and haystacks guided down precipitous gullies at thundering
speed 'twixt pine and pine, and larches felled in distant glens beside
the frozen watercourses. Here we were, all met together for one hour
from our several homes and occupations, to welcome in the year with
clinked glasses and cries of _Prosit Neujahr!_

The tolling bells above us stopped. Our turn had come. Out into the
snowy air we tumbled, beneath the row of wolves' heads that adorn the
pent-house roof. A few steps brought us to the still God's acre,
where the snow lay deep and cold upon high-mounded graves of many
generations. We crossed it silently, bent our heads to the low Gothic
arch, and stood within the tower. It was thick darkness there. But
far above, the bells began again to clash and jangle confusedly, with
volleys of demonic joy. Successive flights of ladders, each ending in
a giddy platform hung across the gloom, climb to the height of some
hundred and fifty feet; and all their rungs were crusted with frozen
snow, deposited by trampling boots. For up and down these stairs,
ascending and descending, moved other than angels--the friezejacketed
Bürschen, Grisons bears, rejoicing in their exercise, exhilarated with
the tingling noise of beaten metal. We reached the first room safely,
guided by firm-footed Christian, whose one candle just defined the
rough walls and the slippery steps. There we found a band of boys,
pulling ropes that set the bells in motion. But our destination
was not reached. One more aërial ladder, perpendicular in darkness,
brought us swiftly to the home of sound. It is a small square chamber,
where the bells are hung, filled with the interlacement of enormous
beams, and pierced to north and south by open windows, from whose
parapets I saw the village and the valley spread beneath. The fierce
wind hurried through it, charged with snow, and its narrow space was
thronged with men. Men on the platform, men on the window-sills,
men grappling the bells with iron arms, men brushing by to reach the
stairs, crossing, recrossing, shouldering their mates, drinking
red wine from gigantic beakers, exploding crackers, firing squibs,
shouting and yelling in corybantic chorus. They yelled and shouted,
one could see it by their open mouths and glittering eyes; but not
a sound from human lungs could reach our ears. The overwhelming
incessant thunder of the bells drowned all. It thrilled the tympanum,
ran through the marrow of the spine, vibrated in the inmost entrails.
Yet the brain was only steadied and excited by this sea of brazen
noise. After a few moments I knew the place and felt at home in it.
Then I enjoyed a spectacle which sculptors might have envied. For they
ring the bells in Davos after this fashion:--The lads below set them
going with ropes. The men above climb in pairs on ladders to the beams
from which they are suspended. Two mighty pine-trees, roughly squared
and built into the walls, extend from side to side across the belfry.
Another from which the bells hang, connects these massive trunks
at right angles. Just where the central beam is wedged into the
two parallel supports, the ladders reach them from each side of the
belfry, so that, bending from the higher rung of the ladder, and
leaning over, stayed upon the lateral beam, each pair of men can keep
one bell in movement with their hands. Each comrade plants one leg
upon the ladder, and sets the other knee firmly athwart the horizontal
pine. Then round each other's waist they twine left arm and right. The
two have thus become one man. Right arm and left are free to grasp the
bell's horns, sprouting at its crest beneath the beam. With a grave
rhythmic motion, bending sideward in a close embrace, swaying and
returning to their centre from the well-knit loins, they drive the
force of each strong muscle into the vexed bell. The impact is earnest
at first, but soon it becomes frantic. The men take something from
each other of exalted enthusiasm. This efflux of their combined
energies inspires them and exasperates the mighty resonance of metal
which they rule. They are lost in a trance of what approximates to
dervish passion--so thrilling is the surge of sound, so potent are the
rhythms they obey. Men come and tug them by the heels. One grasps
the starting thews upon their calves. Another is impatient for their
place. But they strain still, locked together, and forgetful of the
world. At length they have enough: then slowly, clingingly unclasp,
turn round with gazing eyes, and are resumed, sedately, into the
diurnal round of common life. Another pair is in their room upon the
beam.

The Englishman who saw these things stood looking up, enveloped in his
ulster with the grey cowl thrust upon his forehead, like a monk. One
candle cast a grotesque shadow of him on the plastered wall. And when
his chance came, though he was but a weakling, he too climbed and for
some moments hugged the beam, and felt the madness of the swinging
bell. Descending, he wondered long and strangely whether he
ascribed too much of feeling to the men he watched. But no, that was
impossible. There are emotions deeply seated in the joy of exercise,
when the body is brought into play, and masses move in concert, of
which the subject is but half conscious. Music and dance, and the
delirium of battle or the chase, act thus upon spontaneous natures.
The mystery of rhythm and associated energy and blood tingling
in sympathy is here. It lies at the root of man's most tyrannous
instinctive impulses.

It was past one when we reached home, and now a meditative man might
well have gone to bed. But no one thinks of sleeping on Sylvester
Abend. So there followed bowls of punch in one friend's room, where
English, French, and Germans blent together in convivial Babel; and
flasks of old Montagner in another. Palmy, at this period, wore an
archdeacon's hat, and smoked a churchwarden's pipe; and neither were
his own, nor did he derive anything ecclesiastical or Anglican from
the association. Late in the morning we must sally forth, they said,
and roam the town. For it is the custom here on New Year's night to
greet acquaintances, and ask for hospitality, and no one may
deny these self-invited guests. We turned out again into the grey
snow-swept gloom, a curious Comus--not at all like Greeks, for we had
neither torches in our hands nor rose-wreaths to suspend upon a lady's
door-posts. And yet I could not refrain, at this supreme moment
of jollity, in the zero temperature, amid my Grisons friends, from
humming to myself verses from the Greek Anthology:--

  The die is cast! Nay, light the torch!
  I'll take the road! Up, courage, ho!
  Why linger pondering in the porch?
  Upon Love's revel we will go!

  Shake off those fumes of wine! Hang care
  And caution! What has Love to do
  With prudence? Let the torches flare!
  Quick, drown the doubts that hampered you!

  Cast weary wisdom to the wind!
  One thing, but one alone, I know:
  Love bent e'en Jove and made him blind
  Upon Love's revel we will go!

And then again:--

  I've drunk sheer madness! Not with wine,
  But old fantastic tales, I'll arm
  My heart in heedlessness divine,
  And dare the road, nor dream of harm!

  I'll join Love's rout! Let thunder break,
  Let lightning blast me by the way!
  Invulnerable Love shall shake
  His ægis o'er my head to-day.

This last epigram was not inappropriate to an invalid about to begin
the fifth act in a roystering night's adventure. And still once
more:--

  Cold blows the winter wind; 'tis Love,
  Whose sweet eyes swim with honeyed tears,
  That bears me to thy doors, my love,
  Tossed by the storm of hopes and fears.

  Cold blows the blast of aching Love;
  But be thou for my wandering sail,
  Adrift upon these waves of love,
  Safe harbour from the whistling gale!

However, upon this occasion, though we had winter-wind enough, and
cold enough, there was not much love in the business. My arm was
firmly clenched in Christian Buol's, and Christian Palmy came
behind, trolling out songs in Italian dialect, with still recurring
_canaille_ choruses, of which the facile rhymes seemed mostly
made on a prolonged _amu-u-u-r_. It is noticeable that Italian
ditties are specially designed for fellows shouting in the streets at
night. They seem in keeping there, and nowhere else that I could ever
see. And these Davosers took to them naturally when the time for Comus
came. It was between four and five in the morning, and nearly all the
houses in the place were dark. The tall church-tower and spire loomed
up above us in grey twilight. The tireless wind still swept thin
snow from fell and forest. But the frenzied bells had sunk into their
twelvemonth's slumber, which shall be broken only by decorous tollings
at less festive times. I wondered whether they were tingling still
with the heart-throbs and with the pressure of those many arms? Was
their old age warmed, as mine was, with that gust of life--the young
men who had clung to them like bees to lily-bells, and shaken all
their locked-up tone and shrillness into the wild winter air? Alas!
how many generations of the young have handled them; and they are
still there, frozen in their belfry; and the young grow middle-aged,
and old, and die at last; and the bells they grappled in their lust
of manhood toll them to their graves, on which the tireless wind will,
winter after winter, sprinkle snow from alps and forests which they
knew.

'There is a light,' cried Christian, 'up in Anna's window!' 'A light!
a light!' the Comus shouted. But how to get at the window, which is
pretty high above the ground, and out of reach of the most ardent
revellers? We search a neighbouring shed, extract a stable-ladder, and
in two seconds Palmy has climbed to the topmost rung, while Christian
and Georg hold it firm upon the snow beneath. Then begins a passage
from some comic opera of Mozart's or Cimarosa's--an escapade familiar
to Spanish or Italian students, which recalls the stage. It is an
episode from 'Don Giovanni,' translated to this dark-etched scene
of snowy hills, and Gothic tower, and mullioned windows deep embayed
beneath their eaves and icicles. _Deh vieni alla finestra!_ sings
Palmy-Leporello; the chorus answers: _Deh vieni! Perchè non vieni
ancora?_ pleads Leporello; the chorus shouts: _Perchè? Mio
amu-u-u-r_, sighs Leporello; and Echo cries, _amu-u-u-r!_ All
the wooing, be it noticed, is conducted in Italian. But the actors
murmur to each other in Davoser Deutsch, 'She won't come, Palmy! It is
far too late; she is gone to bed. Come down; you'll wake the village
with your caterwauling!' But Leporello waves his broad archdeacon's
hat, and resumes a flood of flexible Bregaglian. He has a shrewd
suspicion that the girl is peeping from behind the window curtain;
and tells us, bending down from the ladder, in a hoarse stage-whisper,
that we must have patience; 'these girls are kittle cattle, who take
long to draw: but if your lungs last out, they're sure to show.' And
Leporello is right. Faint heart ne'er won fair lady. From the summit
of his ladder, by his eloquent Italian tongue, he brings the shy bird
down at last. We hear the unbarring of the house door, and a comely
maiden, in her Sunday dress, welcomes us politely to her ground-floor
sitting-room. The Comus enters, in grave order, with set speeches,
handshakes, and inevitable _Prosits_! It is a large low chamber,
with a huge stone stove, wide benches fixed along the walls, and a
great oval table. We sit how and where we can. Red wine is produced,
and eier-brod and küchli. Fräulein Anna serves us sedately, holding
her own with decent self-respect against the inrush of the revellers.
She is quite alone; but are not her father and mother in bed above,
and within earshot? Besides, the Comus, even at this abnormal hour and
after an abnormal night, is well conducted. Things seem slipping into
a decorous wine-party, when Leporello readjusts the broad-brimmed
hat upon his head, and very cleverly acts a little love-scene for our
benefit. Fräulein Anna takes this as a delicate compliment, and the
thing is so prettily done in truth, that not the sternest taste could
be offended. Meanwhile another party of night-wanderers, attracted by
our mirth, break in. More _Prosits_ and clinked glasses follow;
and with a fair good-morning to our hostess, we retire.

It is too late to think of bed. 'The quincunx of heaven,' as Sir
Thomas Browne phrased it on a dissimilar occasion, 'runs low.... The
huntsmen are up in America; and not in America only, for the huntsmen,
if there are any this night in Graubünden, have long been out upon the
snow, and the stable-lads are dragging the sledges from their sheds
to carry down the mails to Landquart. We meet the porters from the
various hotels, bringing letter-bags and luggage to the post. It is
time to turn in and take a cup of black coffee against the rising sun.

IX

Some nights, even in Davos, are spent, even by an invalid, in bed.
A leaflet, therefore, of 'Sleep-chasings' may not inappropriately
be flung, as envoy to so many wanderings on foot and sledge upon the
winter snows.

The first is a confused medley of things familiar and things strange.
I have been dreaming of far-away old German towns, with gabled houses
deep in snow; dreaming of châlets in forgotten Alpine glens, where
wood-cutters come plunging into sleepy light from gloom, and sinking
down beside the stove to shake the drift from their rough shoulders;
dreaming of vast veils of icicles upon the gaunt black rocks in places
where no foot of man will pass, and where the snow is weaving eyebrows
over the ledges of grey whirlwind-beaten precipices; dreaming
of Venice, forlorn beneath the windy drip of rain, the gas lamps
flickering on the swimming piazzetta, the barche idle, the gondolier
wrapped in his thread-bare cloak, alone; dreaming of Apennines, with
world-old cities, brown, above the brown sea of dead chestnut boughs;
dreaming of stormy tides, and watchers aloft in lighthouses when day
is finished; dreaming of dead men and women and dead children in the
earth, far down beneath the snow-drifts, six feet deep. And then
I lift my face, awaking, from my pillow; the pallid moon is on the
valley, and the room is filled with spectral light.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is a hospice in an unfrequented
pass, between sad peaks, beside a little black lake, overdrifted with
soft snow. I pass into the house-room, gliding silently. An old man
and an old woman are nodding, bowed in deepest slumber, by the stove.
A young man plays the zither on a table. He lifts his head, still
modulating with his fingers on the strings. He looks right through me
with wide anxious eyes. He does not see me, but sees Italy, I know,
and some one wandering on a sandy shore.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is S. Stephen's Church in Wien.
Inside, the lamps are burning dimly in the choir. There is fog in the
aisles; but through the sleepy air and over the red candles flies a
wild soprano's voice, a boy's soul in its singing sent to heaven.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. From the mufflers in which his
father, the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him across
the heath, a little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights. He is half
asleep. His father scrapes the fiddle. The boy shortens his red belt,
kisses his fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among the
glasses on the table.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. I am on the parapet of a huge
circular tower, hollow like a well, and pierced with windows at
irregular intervals. The parapet is broad, and slabbed with red
Verona marble. Around me are athletic men, all naked, in the strangest
attitudes of studied rest, down-gazing, as I do, into the depths
below. There comes a confused murmur of voices, and the tower is
threaded and rethreaded with great cables. Up these there climb to us
a crowd of young men, clinging to the ropes and flinging their bodies
sideways on aërial trapezes. My heart trembles with keen joy and
terror. For nowhere else could plastic forms be seen more beautiful,
and nowhere else is peril more apparent. Leaning my chin upon the
utmost verge, I wait. I watch one youth, who smiles and soars to me;
and when his face is almost touching mine, he speaks, but what he says
I know not.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. The whole world rocks to its
foundations. The mountain summits that I know are shaken. They bow
their bristling crests. They are falling, falling on us, and the earth
is riven. I wake in terror, shouting: INSOLITIS TREMUERUNT MOTIBUS
ALPES! An earthquake, slight but real, has stirred the ever-wakeful
Vesta of the brain to this Virgilian quotation.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. Once more at night I sledge alone
upon the Klosters road. It is the point where the woods close over it
and moonlight may not pierce the boughs. There come shrill cries of
many voices from behind, and rushings that pass by and vanish. Then
on their sledges I behold the phantoms of the dead who died in Davos,
longing for their homes; and each flies past me, shrieking in the
still cold air; and phosphorescent like long meteors, the pageant
turns the windings of the road below and disappears.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is the top of some high
mountain, where the crags are cruelly tortured and cast in enormous
splinters on the ledges of cliffs grey with old-world ice. A ravine,
opening at my feet, plunges down immeasurably to a dim and distant
sea. Above me soars a precipice embossed with a gigantic ice-bound
shape. As I gaze thereon, I find the lineaments and limbs of a Titanic
man chained and nailed to the rock. His beard has grown for centuries,
and flowed this way and that, adown his breast and over to the stone
on either side; and the whole of him is covered with a greenish ice,
ancient beyond the memory of man. 'This is Prometheus,' I whisper to
myself, 'and I am alone on Caucasus.'

       *       *       *       *       *




BACCHUS IN GRAUBÜNDEN


I

Some years' residence in the Canton of the Grisons made me familiar
with all sorts of Valtelline wine; with masculine but rough _Inferno_,
generous _Forzato_, delicate _Sassella_, harsher _Montagner_, the
raspberry flavour of _Grumello_, the sharp invigorating twang of
_Villa_. The colour, ranging from garnet to almandine or ruby, told me
the age and quality of wine; and I could judge from the crust it forms
upon the bottle, whether it had been left long enough in wood to
ripen. I had furthermore arrived at the conclusion that the best
Valtelline can only be tasted in cellars of the Engadine or Davos,
where this vintage matures slowly in the mountain air, and takes a
flavour unknown at lower levels. In a word, it had amused my leisure
to make or think myself a connoisseur. My literary taste was tickled
by the praise bestowed in the Augustan age on Rhætic grapes by Virgil:

  Et quo te carmine dicam,
  Rhætica? nec cellis ideo contende Falernis.

I piqued myself on thinking that could the poet but have drank
one bottle at Samaden--where Stilicho, by the way, in his famous
recruiting expedition may perhaps have drank it--he would have been
less chary in his panegyric. For the point of inferiority on which he
seems to insist, namely, that Valtelline wine does not keep well
in cellar, is only proper to this vintage in Italian climate. Such
meditations led my fancy on the path of history. Is there truth,
then, in the dim tradition that this mountain land was colonised
by Etruscans? Is _Ras_ the root of Rhætia? The Etruscans were
accomplished wine-growers, we know. It was their Montepulciano which
drew the Gauls to Rome, if Livy can be trusted. Perhaps they first
planted the vine in Valtelline. Perhaps its superior culture in that
district may be due to ancient use surviving in a secluded Alpine
valley. One thing is certain, that the peasants of Sondrio and Tirano
understand viticulture better than the Italians of Lombardy.

Then my thoughts ran on to the period of modern history, when the
Grisons seized the Valtelline in lieu of war-pay from the Dukes of
Milan. For some three centuries they held it as a subject province.
From the Rathhaus at Davos or Chur they sent their nobles--Von
Salis and Buol, Planta and Sprecher von Bernegg--across the hills as
governors or podestàs to Poschiavo, Sondrio, Tirano, and Morbegno.
In those old days the Valtelline wines came duly every winter over
snow-deep passes to fill the cellars of the Signori Grigioni. That
quaint traveller Tom Coryat, in his so-called 'Crudities,' notes
the custom early in the seventeenth century. And as that custom
then obtained, it still subsists with little alteration. The
wine-carriers--Weinführer, as they are called--first scaled
the Bernina pass, halting then as now, perhaps at Poschiavo and
Pontresina. Afterwards, in order to reach Davos, the pass of the
Scaletta rose before them--a wilderness of untracked snow-drifts. The
country-folk still point to narrow, light hand-sledges, on which the
casks were charged before the last pitch of the pass. Some wine came,
no doubt, on pack-saddles. A meadow in front of the Dischma-Thal,
where the pass ends, still bears the name of the Ross-Weid, or
horse-pasture. It was here that the beasts of burden used for this
wine-service, rested after their long labours. In favourable weather
the whole journey from Tirano would have occupied at least four days,
with scanty halts at night.

The Valtelline slipped from the hands of the Grisons early in this
century. It is rumoured that one of the Von Salis family negotiated
matters with Napoleon more for his private benefit than for the
interests of the state. However this may have been, when the
Graubünden became a Swiss Canton, after four centuries of sovereign
independence, the whole Valtelline passed to Austria, and so
eventually to Italy. According to modern and just notions of
nationality, this was right. In their period of power, the Grisons
masters had treated their Italian dependencies with harshness. The
Valtelline is an Italian valley, connected with the rest of
the peninsula by ties of race and language. It is, moreover,
geographically linked to Italy by the great stream of the Adda, which
takes its rise upon the Stelvio, and after passing through the Lake of
Como, swells the volume of the Po.

But, though politically severed from the Valtelline, the Engadiners
and Davosers have not dropped their old habit of importing its best
produce. What they formerly levied as masters, they now acquire by
purchase. The Italian revenue derives a large profit from the frontier
dues paid at the gate between Tirano and Poschiavo on the Bernina
road. Much of the same wine enters Switzerland by another route,
travelling from Sondrio to Chiavenna and across the Splügen. But until
quite recently, the wine itself could scarcely be found outside the
Canton. It was indeed quoted upon Lombard wine-lists. Yet no one drank
it; and when I tasted it at Milan, I found it quite unrecognisable.
The fact seems to be that the Graubündeners alone know how to deal
with it; and, as I have hinted, the wine requires a mountain climate
for its full development.

II

The district where the wine of Valtellina is grown extends, roughly
speaking, from Tirano to Morbegno, a distance of some fifty-four
miles. The best sorts come from the middle of this region. High up
in the valley, soil and climate are alike less favourable. Low down
a coarser, earthier quality springs from fat land where the valley
broadens. The northern hillsides to a very considerable height above
the river are covered with vineyards. The southern slopes on the left
bank of the Adda, lying more in shade, yield but little. Inferno,
Grumello, and Perla di Sassella are the names of famous vineyards.
Sassella is the general name for a large tract. Buying an Inferno,
Grumello, or Perla di Sassella wine, it would be absurd to suppose
that one obtained it precisely from the eponymous estate. But as each
of these vineyards yields a marked quality of wine, which is taken
as standard-giving, the produce of the whole district may be broadly
classified as approaching more or less nearly to one of these accepted
types. The Inferno, Grumello, and Perla di Sassella of commerce are
therefore three sorts of good Valtelline, ticketed with famous names
to indicate certain differences of quality. Montagner, as the
name implies, is a somewhat lighter wine, grown higher up in the
hill-vineyards. And of this class there are many species, some
approximating to Sassella in delicacy of flavour, others approaching
the tart lightness of the Villa vintage. This last takes its title
from a village in the neighbourhood of Tirano, where a table-wine is
chiefly grown.

Forzato is the strongest, dearest, longest-lived of this whole family
of wines. It is manufactured chiefly at Tirano; and, as will be
understood from its name, does not profess to belong to any one of the
famous localities. Forzato or Sforzato, forced or enforced, is in fact
a wine which has undergone a more artificial process. In German the
people call it Strohwein, which also points to the method of its
preparation. The finest grapes are selected and dried in the sun
(hence the _Stroh_) for a period of eight or nine weeks. When
they have almost become raisins, they are pressed. The must is heavily
charged with sugar, and ferments powerfully. Wine thus made requires
several years to ripen. Sweet at first, it takes at last a very fine
quality and flavour, and is rough, almost acid, on the tongue. Its
colour too turns from a deep rich crimson to the tone of tawny port,
which indeed it much resembles.

Old Forzato, which has been long in cask, and then perhaps three years
in bottle, will fetch at least six francs, or may rise to even ten
francs a flask. The best Sassella rarely reaches more than five
francs. Good Montagner and Grumello can be had perhaps for four
francs; and Inferno of a special quality for six francs. Thus the
average price of old Valtelline wine may be taken as five francs a
bottle. These, I should observe, are hotel prices.

Valtelline wines bought in the wood vary, of course, according to
their age and year of vintage. I have found that from 2.50 fr. to 3.50
fr. per litre is a fair price for sorts fit to bottle. The new wine of
1881 sold in the following winter at prices varying from 1.05 fr. to
1.80 fr. per litre.

It is customary for the Graubünden wine-merchants to buy up the whole
produce of a vineyard from the peasants at the end of the vintage.
They go in person or depute their agents to inspect the wine, make
their bargains, and seal the cellars where the wine is stored. Then,
when the snow has fallen, their own horses with sleighs and trusted
servants go across the passes to bring it home. Generally they have
some local man of confidence at Tirano, the starting-point for the
homeward journey, who takes the casks up to that place and sees them
duly charged. Merchants of old standing maintain relations with the
same peasants, taking their wine regularly; so that from Lorenz Gredig
at Pontresina or Andreas Gredig at Davos Dörfli, from Fanconi at
Samaden, or from Giacomi at Chiavenna, special qualities of wine, the
produce of certain vineyards, are to be obtained. Up to the present
time this wine trade has been conducted with simplicity and honesty by
both the dealers and the growers. One chief merit of Valtelline wine
is that it is pure. How long so desirable a state of things will
survive the slow but steady development of an export business may be
questioned.

III

With so much practical and theoretical interest in the produce of
the Valtelline to stimulate my curiosity, I determined to visit the
district at the season when the wine was leaving it. It was the winter
of 1881-82, a winter of unparalleled beauty in the high Alps. Day
succeeded day without a cloud. Night followed night with steady
stars, gliding across clear mountain ranges and forests of dark pines
unstirred by wind. I could not hope for a more prosperous season; and
indeed I made such use of it, that between the months of January and
March I crossed six passes of the Alps in open sleighs--the Fluela
Bernina, Splügen, Julier, Maloja, and Albula--with less difficulty and
discomfort in mid-winter than the traveller may often find on them in
June.

At the end of January, my friend Christian and I left Davos long
before the sun was up, and ascended for four hours through the
interminable snow-drifts of the Fluela in a cold grey shadow. The
sun's light seemed to elude us. It ran along the ravine through which
we toiled; dipped down to touch the topmost pines above our heads;
rested in golden calm upon the Schiahorn at our back; capriciously
played here and there across the Weisshorn on our left, and made the
precipices of the Schwartzhorn glitter on our right. But athwart our
path it never fell until we reached the very summit of the pass.
Then we passed quietly into the full glory of the winter morning--a
tranquil flood of sunbeams, pouring through air of crystalline purity,
frozen and motionless. White peaks and dark brown rocks soared up,
cutting a sky of almost purple blueness. A stillness that might be
felt brooded over the whole world; but in that stillness there was
nothing sad, no suggestion of suspended vitality. It was the stillness
rather of untroubled health, of strength omnipotent but unexerted.

From the Hochspitz of the Fluela the track plunges at one bound into
the valley of the Inn, following a narrow cornice carved from the
smooth bank of snow, and hung, without break or barrier, a
thousand feet or more above the torrent. The summer road is lost in
snow-drifts. The galleries built as a protection from avalanches,
which sweep in rivers from those grim, bare fells above, are blocked
with snow. Their useless arches yawn, as we glide over or outside
them, by paths which instinct in our horse and driver traces. As a fly
may creep along a house-roof, slanting downwards we descend. One whisk
from the swinged tail of an avalanche would hurl us, like a fly, into
the ruin of the gaping gorge. But this season little snow has fallen
on the higher hills; and what still lies there, is hard frozen.
Therefore we have no fear, as we whirl fast and faster from the
snow-fields into the black forests of gnarled cembras and wind-wearied
pines. Then Süss is reached, where the Inn hurries its shallow waters
clogged with ice-floes through a sleepy hamlet. The stream is pure and
green; for the fountains of the glaciers are locked by winter frosts;
and only clear rills from perennial sources swell its tide. At Süss
we lost the sun, and toiled in garish gloom and silence, nipped by the
ever-deepening cold of evening, upwards for four hours to Samaden.

The next day was spent in visiting the winter colony at San Moritz,
where the Kulm Hotel, tenanted by some twenty guests, presented in its
vastness the appearance of a country-house. One of the prettiest spots
in the world is the ice-rink, fashioned by the skill of Herr Caspar
Badrutt on a high raised terrace, commanding the valley of the Inn and
the ponderous bulwarks of Bernina. The silhouettes of skaters, defined
against that landscape of pure white, passed to and fro beneath a
cloudless sky. Ladies sat and worked or read on seats upon the ice.
Not a breath of wind was astir, and warm beneficent sunlight flooded
the immeasurable air. Only, as the day declined, some iridescent films
overspread the west; and just above Maloja the apparition of a
mock sun--a well-defined circle of opaline light, broken at regular
intervals by four globes--seemed to portend a change of weather. This
forecast fortunately proved delusive. We drove back to Samaden across
the silent snow, enjoying those delicate tints of rose and violet and
saffron which shed enchantment for one hour over the white monotony of
Alpine winter.

At half-past eight next morning, the sun was rising from behind Pitz
Languard, as we crossed the Inn and drove through Pontresina in the
glorious light, with all its huge hotels quite empty and none but a
few country-folk abroad. Those who only know the Engadine in summer
have little conception of its beauty. Winter softens the hard details
of bare rock, and rounds the melancholy grassless mountain flanks,
suspending icicles to every ledge and spangling the curved surfaces
of snow with crystals. The landscape gains in purity, and, what sounds
unbelievable, in tenderness. Nor does it lose in grandeur. Looking
up the valley of the Morteratsch that morning, the glaciers were
distinguishable in hues of green and sapphire through their veil of
snow; and the highest peaks soared in a transparency of amethystine
light beneath a blue sky traced with filaments of windy cloud. Some
storm must have disturbed the atmosphere in Italy, for fan-shaped
mists frothed out around the sun, and curled themselves above the
mountains in fine feathery wreaths, melting imperceptibly into air,
until, when we had risen above the cembras, the sky was one deep solid
blue.

All that upland wilderness is lovelier now than in the summer; and on
the morning of which I write, the air itself was far more summery than
I have ever known it in the Engadine in August. We could scarcely
bear to place our hands upon the woodwork of the sleigh because of
the fierce sun's heat. And yet the atmosphere was crystalline with
windless frost. As though to increase the strangeness of these
contrasts, the pavement of beaten snow was stained with red drops
spilt from wine-casks which pass over it.

The chief feature of the Bernina--what makes it a dreary pass enough
in summer, but infinitely beautiful in winter--is its breadth;
illimitable undulations of snow-drifts; immensity of open sky;
unbroken lines of white, descending in smooth curves from glittering
ice-peaks.

A glacier hangs in air above the frozen lakes, with all its green-blue
ice-cliffs glistening in intensest light. Pitz Palu shoots aloft
like sculptured marble, delicately veined with soft aërial shadows of
translucent blue. At the summit of the pass all Italy seems to burst
upon the eyes in those steep serried ranges, with their craggy crests,
violet-hued in noonday sunshine, as though a bloom of plum or grape
had been shed over them, enamelling their jagged precipices.

The top of the Bernina is not always thus in winter. It has a bad
reputation for the fury of invading storms, when falling snow
hurtles together with snow scooped from the drifts in eddies, and the
weltering white sea shifts at the will of whirlwinds. The Hospice then
may be tenanted for days together by weather-bound wayfarers; and a
line drawn close beneath its roof shows how two years ago the whole
building was buried in one snow-shroud. This morning we lounged about
the door, while our horses rested and postillions and carters pledged
one another in cups of new Veltliner.

The road takes an awful and sudden dive downwards, quite irrespective
of the carefully engineered post-track. At this season the path is
badly broken into ruts and chasms by the wine traffic. In some places
it was indubitably perilous: a narrow ledge of mere ice skirting
thinly clad hard-frozen banks of snow, which fell precipitately
sideways for hundreds of sheer feet. We did not slip over this
parapet, though we were often within an inch of doing so. Had our
horse stumbled, it is not probable that I should have been writing
this.

When we came to the galleries which defend the road from avalanches,
we saw ahead of us a train of over forty sledges ascending, all
charged with Valtelline wine. Our postillions drew up at the inner
side of the gallery, between massive columns of the purest ice
dependent from the rough-hewn roof and walls of rock. A sort of open
_loggia_ on the farther side framed vignettes of the Valtelline
mountains in their hard cerulean shadows and keen sunlight. Between
us and the view defiled the wine-sledges; and as each went by, the
men made us drink out of their _trinketti_. These are oblong,
hexagonal wooden kegs, holding about fourteen litres, which the carter
fills with wine before he leaves the Valtelline, to cheer him on the
homeward journey. You raise it in both hands, and when the bung has
been removed, allow the liquor to flow stream-wise down your throat.
It was a most extraordinary Bacchic procession--a pomp which, though
undreamed of on the banks of the Ilissus, proclaimed the deity of
Dionysos in authentic fashion. Struggling horses, grappling at the
ice-bound floor with sharp-spiked shoes; huge, hoarse drivers, some
clad in sheepskins from Italian valleys, some brown as bears in rough
Graubünden homespun; casks, dropping their spilth of red wine on the
snow; greetings, embracings; patois of Bergamo, Romansch, and German
roaring around the low-browed vaults and tingling ice pillars;
pourings forth of libations of the new strong Valtelline on breasts
and beards;--the whole made up a scene of stalwart jollity and
manful labour such as I have nowhere else in such wild circumstances
witnessed. Many Davosers were there, the men of Andreas Gredig, Valär,
and so forth; and all of these, on greeting Christian, forced us to
drain a _Schluck_ from their unmanageable cruses. Then on they
went, crying, creaking, struggling, straining through the corridor,
which echoed deafeningly, the gleaming crystals of those hard Italian
mountains in their winter raiment building a background of still
beauty to the savage Bacchanalian riot of the team.

How little the visitors who drink Valtelline wine at S. Moritz or
Davos reflect by what strange ways it reaches them. A sledge can
scarcely be laden with more than one cask of 300 litres on the ascent;
and this cask, according to the state of the road, has many times to
be shifted from wheels to runners and back again before the journey
is accomplished. One carter will take charge of two horses, and
consequently of two sledges and two casks, driving them both by voice
and gesture rather than by rein. When they leave the Valtelline, the
carters endeavour, as far as possible, to take the pass in gangs, lest
bad weather or an accident upon the road should overtake them singly.
At night they hardly rest three hours, and rarely think of sleeping,
but spend the time in drinking and conversation. The horses are fed
and littered; but for them too the night-halt is little better than
a baiting-time. In fair weather the passage of the mountain is not
difficult, though tiring. But woe to men and beasts alike if they
encounter storms! Not a few perish in the passes; and it frequently
happens that their only chance is to unyoke the horses and leave the
sledges in a snow-wreath, seeking for themselves such shelter as
may possibly be gained, frost-bitten, after hours of battling with
impermeable drifts. The wine is frozen into one solid mass of rosy ice
before it reaches Pontresina. This does not hurt the young vintage,
but it is highly injurious to wine of some years' standing. The perils
of the journey are aggravated by the savage temper of the drivers.
Jealousies between the natives of rival districts spring up; and there
are men alive who have fought the whole way down from Fluela Hospice
to Davos Platz with knives and stones, hammers and hatchets, wooden
staves and splintered cart-wheels, staining the snow with blood, and
bringing broken pates, bruised limbs, and senseless comrades home to
their women to be tended.

Bacchus Alpinus shepherded his train away from us to northward, and we
passed forth into noonday from the gallery. It then seemed clear that
both conductor and postillion were sufficiently merry. The plunge they
took us down those frozen parapets, with shriek and _jauchzen_
and cracked whips, was more than ever dangerous. Yet we reached La
Rosa safely. This is a lovely solitary spot, beside a rushing stream,
among grey granite boulders grown with spruce and rhododendron: a
veritable rose of Sharon blooming in the desert. The wastes of the
Bernina stretch above, and round about are leaguered some of the most
forbidding sharp-toothed peaks I ever saw. Onwards, across the silent
snow, we glided in immitigable sunshine, through opening valleys and
pine-woods, past the robber-huts of Pisciadella, until at evenfall we
rested in the roadside inn at Poschiavo.

IV

The snow-path ended at Poschiavo; and when, as usual, we started on
our journey next day at sunrise, it was in a carriage upon wheels.
Yet even here we were in full midwinter. Beyond Le Prese the lake
presented one sheet of smooth black ice, reflecting every peak and
chasm of the mountains, and showing the rocks and water-weeds in the
clear green depths below. The glittering floor stretched away for
acres of untenanted expanse, with not a skater to explore those dark
mysterious coves, or strike across the slanting sunlight poured
from clefts in the impendent hills. Inshore the substance of the
ice sparkled here and there with iridescence like the plumelets of
a butterfly's wing under the microscope, wherever light happened to
catch the jagged or oblique flaws that veined its solid crystal.

From the lake the road descends suddenly for a considerable distance
through a narrow gorge, following a torrent which rushes among granite
boulders. Chestnut trees begin to replace the pines. The sunnier
terraces are planted with tobacco, and at a lower level vines appear
at intervals in patches. One comes at length to a great red gate
across the road, which separates Switzerland from Italy, and where the
export dues on wine are paid. The Italian custom-house is
romantically perched above the torrent. Two courteous and elegant
_finanzieri_, mere boys, were sitting wrapped in their military
cloaks and reading novels in the sun as we drove up. Though they made
some pretence of examining the luggage, they excused themselves with
sweet smiles and apologetic eyes--it was a disagreeable duty!

A short time brought us to the first village in the Valtelline,
where the road bifurcates northward to Bormio and the Stelvio pass,
southward to Sondrio and Lombardy. It is a little hamlet, known by
the name of La Madonna di Tirano, having grown up round a pilgrimage
church of great beauty, with tall Lombard bell-tower, pierced with
many tiers of pilastered windows, ending in a whimsical spire, and
dominating a fantastic cupola building of the earlier Renaissance.
Taken altogether, this is a charming bit of architecture,
picturesquely set beneath the granite snow-peaks of the Valtelline.
The church, they say, was raised at Madonna's own command to stay the
tide of heresy descending from the Engadine; and in the year 1620, the
bronze statue of S. Michael, which still spreads wide its wings above
the cupola, looked down upon the massacre of six hundred Protestants
and foreigners, commanded by the patriot Jacopo Robustelli.

From Madonna the road leads up the valley through a narrow avenue of
poplar-trees to the town of Tirano. We were now in the district where
Forzato is made, and every vineyard had a name and history. In Tirano
we betook ourself to the house of an old acquaintance of the Buol
family, Bernardo da Campo, or, as the Graubündeners call him, Bernard
Campbèll. We found him at dinner with his son and grandchildren in a
vast, dark, bare Italian chamber. It would be difficult to find a more
typical old Scotchman of the Lowlands than he looked, with his clean
close-shaven face, bright brown eyes, and snow-white hair escaping
from a broad-brimmed hat. He might have sat to a painter for some
Covenanter's portrait, except that there was nothing dour about him,
or for an illustration to Burns's 'Cotter's Saturday Night.' The air
of probity and canniness combined with a twinkle of dry humour was
completely Scotch; and when he tapped his snuff-box, telling stories
of old days, I could not refrain from asking him about his pedigree.
It should be said that there is a considerable family of Campèlls or
Campbèlls in the Graubünden, who are fabled to deduce their stock from
a Scotch Protestant of Zwingli's time; and this made it irresistible
to imagine that in our friend Bernardo I had chanced upon a notable
specimen of atavism. All he knew, however, was, that his first
ancestor had been a foreigner, who came across the mountains to Tirano
two centuries ago.[3]

This old gentleman is a considerable wine-dealer. He sent us with his
son, Giacomo, on a long journey underground through his cellars, where
we tasted several sorts of Valtelline, especially the new Forzato,
made a few weeks since, which singularly combines sweetness with
strength, and both with a slight effervescence. It is certainly the
sort of wine wherewith to tempt a Polyphemus, and not unapt to turn a
giant's head.

Leaving Tirano, and once more passing through the poplars by Madonna,
we descended the valley all along the vineyards of Villa and the vast
district of Sassella. Here and there, at wayside inns, we stopped to
drink a glass of some particular vintage; and everywhere it seemed as
though god Bacchus were at home. The whole valley on the right side of
the Adda is one gigantic vineyard, climbing the hills in tiers and
terraces, which justify its Italian epithet of _Teatro di Bacco_. The
rock is a greyish granite, assuming sullen brown and orange tints
where exposed to sun and weather. The vines are grown on stakes, not
trellised over trees or carried across boulders, as is the fashion at
Chiavenna or Terlan. Yet every advantage of the mountain is adroitly
used; nooks and crannies being specially preferred, where the sun's
rays are deflected from hanging cliffs. The soil seems deep, and is of
a dull yellow tone. When the vines end, brushwood takes up the growth,
which expires at last in crag and snow. Some alps and chalets, dimly
traced against the sky, are evidences that a pastoral life prevails
above the vineyards. Pan there stretches the pine-thyrsus down to
vine-garlanded Dionysos.

The Adda flows majestically among willows in the midst, and the valley
is nearly straight. The prettiest spot, perhaps, is at Tresenda or
S. Giacomo, where a pass from Edolo and Brescia descends from the
southern hills. But the Valtelline has no great claim to beauty of
scenery. Its chief town, Sondrio, where we supped and drank some
special wine called _il vino de' Signori Grigioni_, has been
modernised in dull Italian fashion.

V

The hotel at Sondrio, La Maddalena, was in carnival uproar of
masquers, topers, and musicians all night through. It was as much as
we could do to rouse the sleepy servants and get a cup of coffee
ere we started in the frozen dawn. 'Verfluchte Maddalena!' grumbled
Christian as he shouldered our portmanteaus and bore them in hot haste
to the post. Long experience only confirms the first impression, that,
of all cold, the cold of an Italian winter is most penetrating. As
we lumbered out of Sondrio in a heavy diligence, I could have fancied
myself back once again at Radicofani or among the Ciminian hills. The
frost was penetrating. Fur-coats would not keep it out; and we longed
to be once more in open sledges on Bernina rather than enclosed in
that cold coupé. Now we passed Grumello, the second largest of the
renowned vine districts; and always keeping the white mass of Monte di
Disgrazia in sight, rolled at last into Morbegno. Here the Valtelline
vintage properly ends, though much of the ordinary wine is probably
supplied from the inferior produce of these fields. It was past
noon when we reached Colico, and saw the Lake of Como glittering in
sunlight, dazzling cloaks of snow on all the mountains, which look as
dry and brown as dead beech-leaves at this season. Our Bacchic journey
had reached its close; and it boots not here to tell in detail how we
made our way across the Splügen, piercing its avalanches by low-arched
galleries scooped from the solid snow, and careering in our sledges
down perpendicular snow-fields, which no one who has crossed that
pass from the Italian side in winter will forget. We left the refuge
station at the top together with a train of wine-sledges, and passed
them in the midst of the wild descent. Looking back, I saw two of
their horses stumble in the plunge and roll headlong over. Unluckily
in one of these somersaults a man was injured. Flung ahead into the
snow by the first lurch, the sledge and wine-cask crossed him like a
garden-roller. Had his bed not been of snow, he must have been crushed
to death; and as it was, he presented a woeful appearance when he
afterwards arrived at Splügen.

VI

Though not strictly connected with the subject of this paper, I shall
conclude these notes of winter wanderings in the high Alps with an
episode which illustrates their curious vicissitudes.

It was late in the month of March, and nearly all the mountain roads
were open for wheeled vehicles. A carriage and four horses came to
meet us at the termination of a railway journey in Bagalz. We spent
one day in visiting old houses of the Grisons aristocracy at Mayenfeld
and Zizers, rejoicing in the early sunshine, which had spread the
fields with spring flowers--primroses and oxlips, violets, anemones,
and bright blue squills. At Chur we slept, and early next morning
started for our homeward drive to Davos. Bad weather had declared
itself in the night. It blew violently, and the rain soon changed to
snow, frozen by a bitter north blast. Crossing the dreary heath of
Lenz was both magnificent and dreadful. By the time we reached Wiesen,
all the forests were laden with snow, the roads deep in snow-drifts,
the whole scene wintrier than it had been the winter through.

At Wiesen we should have stayed, for evening was fast setting in. But
in ordinary weather it is only a two hours drive from Wiesen to Davos.
Our coachman made no objections to resuming the journey, and our four
horses had but a light load to drag. So we telegraphed for supper to
be prepared, and started between five and six.

A deep gorge has to be traversed, where the torrent cleaves its way
between jaws of limestone precipices. The road is carried along ledges
and through tunnels in the rock. Avalanches, which sweep this passage
annually from the hills above, give it the name of Züge, or the
Snow-Paths. As we entered the gorge darkness fell, the horses dragged
more heavily, and it soon became evident that our Tyrolese driver was
hopelessly drunk. He nearly upset us twice by taking sharp turns in
the road, banged the carriage against telegraph posts and jutting
rocks, shaved the very verge of the torrent in places where there
was no parapet, and, what was worst of all, refused to leave his box
without a fight. The darkness by this time was all but total, and a
blinding snow-storm swept howling through the ravine. At length we
got the carriage to a dead-stop, and floundered out in deep wet
snow toward some wooden huts where miners in old days made their
habitation. The place, by a curious, perhaps unconscious irony, is
called Hoffnungsau, or the Meadow of Hope. Indeed, it is not ill
named; for many wanderers, escaping, as we did, from the dreadful
gorge of Avalanches on a stormy night, may have felt, as we now felt,
their hope reviving when they reached this shelter.

There was no light; nothing above, beneath, around, on any side, but
tearing tempest and snow whirled through the ravine. The horses
were taken out of the carriage; on their way to the stable, which
fortunately in these mountain regions will be always found beside the
poorest habitation, one of them fell back across a wall and nearly
broke his spine. Hoffnungsau is inhabited all through the year. In its
dismal dark kitchen we found a knot of workmen gathered together, and
heard there were two horses on the premises besides our own. It then
occurred to us that we might accomplish the rest of the journey with
such sledges as they bring the wood on from the hills in winter, if
coal-boxes or boxes of any sort could be provided. These should be
lashed to the sledges and filled with hay. We were only four persons;
my wife and a friend should go in one, myself and my little girl in
the other. No sooner thought of than put into practice. These original
conveyances were improvised, and after two hours' halt on the Meadow
of Hope, we all set forth again at half-past eight.

I have rarely felt anything more piercing than the grim cold of that
journey. We crawled at a foot's pace through changeful snow-drifts.
The road was obliterated, and it was my duty to keep a petroleum
stable-lamp swinging to illuminate the untracked wilderness. My little
girl was snugly nested in the hay, and sound asleep with a deep white
covering of snow above her. Meanwhile, the drift clave in frozen
masses to our faces, lashed by a wind so fierce and keen that it
was difficult to breathe it. My forehead-bone ached, as though with
neuralgia, from the mere mask of icy snow upon it, plastered on with
frost. Nothing could be seen but millions of white specks, whirled
at us in eddying concentric circles. Not far from the entrance to the
village we met our house-folk out with lanterns to look for us. It was
past eleven at night when at last we entered warm rooms and refreshed
ourselves for the tiring day with a jovial champagne supper. Horses,
carriage, and drunken driver reached home next morning.

       *       *       *       *       *




OLD TOWNS OF PROVENCE


Travellers journeying southward from Paris first meet with olive-trees
near Montdragon or Monsélimart--little towns, with old historic names,
upon the road to Orange. It is here that we begin to feel ourselves
within the land of Provence, where the Romans found a second Italy,
and where the autumn of their antique civilisation was followed,
almost without an intermediate winter of barbarism, by the light and
delicate springtime of romance. Orange itself is full of Rome. Indeed,
the ghost of the dead empire seems there to be more real and living
than the actual flesh and blood of modern time, as represented by
narrow dirty streets and mean churches. It is the shell of the huge
theatre, hollowed from the solid hill, and fronted with a wall that
seems made rather to protect a city than to form a sounding-board for
a stage, which first tells us that we have reached the old Arausio. Of
all theatres this is the most impressive, stupendous, indestructible,
the Colosseum hardly excepted; for in Rome herself we are prepared
for something gigantic, while in the insignificant Arausio--a sort
of antique Tewkesbury--to find such magnificence, durability, and
vastness, impresses one with a nightmare sense that the old lioness
of Empire can scarcely yet be dead. Standing before the colossal,
towering, amorphous precipice which formed the background of the
scena, we feel as if once more the 'heart-shaking sound of Consul
Romanus' might be heard; as if Roman knights and deputies, arisen from
the dead, with faces hard and stern as those of the warriors carved on
Trajan's frieze, might take their seats beneath us in the orchestra,
and, after proclamation made, the mortmain of imperial Rome be laid
upon the comforts, liberties, and little gracefulnesses of our modern
life. Nor is it unpleasant to be startled from such reverie by the
voice of the old guardian upon the stage beneath, sonorously devolving
the vacuous Alexandrines with which he once welcomed his ephemeral
French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance,
eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of
the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice--thanks to the
inimitable constructive art of the ancient architect, which, even
in the desolation of at least thirteen centuries, has not lost its
cunning-emerges from the pigmy throat, and fills the whole vast hollow
with its clear, if tiny, sound. Thank heaven, there is no danger of
Roman resurrection here! The illusion is completely broken, and we
turn to gather the first violets of February, and to wonder at the
quaint postures of a praying mantis on the grass grown tiers and
porches fringed with fern.

The sense of Roman greatness which is so oppressive in Orange and in
many other parts of Provence, is not felt at Avignon. Here we exchange
the ghost of Imperial for the phantom of Ecclesiastical Rome. The
fixed epithet of Avignon is Papal; and as the express train rushes
over its bleak and wind-tormented plain, the heavy dungeon-walls and
battlemented towers of its palace fortress seem to warn us off, and
bid us quickly leave the Babylon of exiled impious Antichrist. Avignon
presents the bleakest, barest, greyest scene upon a February morning,
when the incessant mistral is blowing, and far and near, upon desolate
hillside and sandy plain, the scanty trees are bent sideways, the
crumbling castle turrets shivering like bleached skeletons in the dry
ungenial air. Yet inside the town, all is not so dreary. The Papal
palace, with its terrible Glacière, its chapel painted by Simone
Memmi, its endless corridors and staircases, its torture-chamber,
funnel-shaped to drown and suffocate--so runs tradition--the shrieks
of wretches on the rack, is now a barrack, filled with lively little
French soldiers, whose politeness, though sorely taxed, is never
ruffled by the introduction of inquisitive visitors into their
dormitories, eating-places, and drill-grounds. And strange, indeed,
it is to see the lines of neat narrow barrack beds, between which the
red-legged little men are shaving, polishing their guns, or mending
their trousers, in those vaulted halls of popes and cardinals, those
vast presence-chambers and audience-galleries, where Urban entertained
S. Catherine, where Rienzi came, a prisoner, to be stared at. Pass by
the Glacière with a shudder, for it has still the reek of blood about
it; and do not long delay in the cheerless dungeon of Rienzi. Time and
regimental whitewash have swept these lurking-places of old crime very
bare; but the parable of the seven devils is true in more senses than
one, and the ghosts that return to haunt a deodorised, disinfected,
garnished sepulchre are almost more ghastly than those which have
never been disturbed from their old habitations.

Little by little the eye becomes accustomed to the bareness and
greyness of this Provençal landscape; and then we find that the
scenery round Avignon is eminently picturesque. The view from Les
Doms--which is a hill above the Pope's palace, the Acropolis, as it
were, of Avignon--embraces a wide stretch of undulating champaign,
bordered by low hills, and intersected by the flashing waters of the
majestic Rhone. Across the stream stands Villeneuve, like a castle
of romance, with its round stone towers fronting the gates and
battlemented walls of the Papal city. A bridge used to connect the two
towns, but it is now broken. The remaining fragment is of solid build,
resting on great buttresses, one of which rises fantastically above
the bridge into a little chapel. Such, one might fancy, was the
bridge which Ariosto's Rodomonte kept on horse against the Paladins of
Charlemagne, when angered by the loss of his love. Nor is it difficult
to imagine Bradamante spurring up the slope against him with her magic
lance in rest, and tilting him into the tawny waves beneath.

On a clear October morning, when the vineyards are taking their last
tints of gold and crimson, and the yellow foliage of the poplars by
the river mingles with the sober greys of olive-trees and willows,
every square inch of this landscape, glittering as it does with light
and with colour, the more beautiful for its subtlety and rarity, would
make a picture. Out of many such vignettes let us choose one. We are
on the shore close by the ruined bridge, the rolling muddy Rhone in
front; beyond it, by the towing-path, a tall strong cypress-tree rises
beside a little house, and next to it a crucifix twelve feet or more
in height, the Christ visible afar, stretched upon His red cross;
arundo donax is waving all around, and willows near; behind, far off,
soar the peaked hills, blue and pearled with clouds; past the cypress,
on the Rhone, comes floating a long raft, swift through the stream,
its rudder guided by a score of men: one standing erect upon the prow
bends forward to salute the cross; on flies the raft, the tall reeds
rustle, and the cypress sleeps.

For those who have time to spare in going to or from the south it
is worth while to spend a day or two in the most comfortable and
characteristic of old French inns, the Hôtel de l'Europe, at Avignon.
Should it rain, the museum of the town is worth a visit. It contains
Horace Vernet's not uncelebrated picture of Mazeppa, and another, less
famous, but perhaps more interesting, by swollen-cheeked David, the
'genius in convulsion,' as Carlyle has christened him. His canvas
is unfinished. Who knows what cry of the Convention made the painter
fling his palette down and leave the masterpiece he might have
spoiled? For in its way the picture is a masterpiece. There lies Jean
Barrad, drummer, aged fourteen, slain in La Vendée, a true patriot,
who, while his life-blood flowed away, pressed the tricolor cockade
to his heart, and murmured 'Liberty!' David has treated his subject
classically. The little drummer-boy, though French enough in feature
and in feeling, lies, Greek-like, naked on the sand--a very Hyacinth
of the Republic, La Vendée's Ilioneus. The tricolor cockade and the
sentiment of upturned patriotic eyes are the only indications of his
being a hero in his teens, a citizen who thought it sweet to die for
France.

In fine weather a visit to Vaucluse should by no means be omitted,
not so much, perhaps, for Petrarch's sake as for the interest of the
drive, and for the marvel of the fountain of the Sorgues. For some
time after leaving Avignon you jog along the level country between
avenues of plane-trees; then comes a hilly ridge, on which the olives,
mulberries, and vineyards join their colours and melt subtly into
distant purple. After crossing this we reach L'Isle, an island
village girdled by the gliding Sorgues, overshadowed with gigantic
plane-boughs, and echoing to the plash of water dripped from mossy
fern-tufted millwheels. Those who expect Petrarch's Sorgues to be
some trickling poet's rill emerging from a damp grotto, may well be
astounded at the rush and roar of this azure river so close upon
its fountain-head. It has a volume and an arrow-like rapidity that
communicate the feeling of exuberance and life. In passing, let it not
be forgotten that it was somewhere or other in this 'chiaro fondo di
Sorga,' as Carlyle describes, that Jourdain, the hangman-hero of the
Glacière, stuck fast upon his pony when flying from his foes, and had
his accursed life, by some diabolical providence, spared for future
butcheries. On we go across the austere plain, between fields of
madder, the red roots of the 'garance' lying in swathes along the
furrows. In front rise ash-grey hills of barren rock, here and there
crimsoned with the leaves of the dwarf sumach. A huge cliff stands up
and seems to bar all passage. Yet the river foams in torrents at our
side. Whence can it issue? What pass or cranny in that precipice is
cloven for its escape? These questions grow in interest as we enter
the narrow defile of limestone rocks which leads to the cliff-barrier,
and find ourselves among the figs and olives of Vaucluse. Here is the
village, the little church, the ugly column to Petrarch's memory,
the inn, with its caricatures of Laura, and its excellent trout, the
bridge and the many-flashing, eddying Sorgues, lashed by millwheels,
broken by weirs, divided in its course, channelled and dyked, yet
flowing irresistibly and undefiled. Blue, purple, greened by moss and
water-weeds, silvered by snow-white pebbles, on its pure smooth bed
the river runs like elemental diamond, so clear and fresh. The rocks
on either side are grey or yellow, terraced into oliveyards, with here
and there a cypress, fig, or mulberry tree. Soon the gardens cease,
and lentisk, rosemary, box, and ilex--shrubs of Provence--with here
and there a sumach out of reach, cling to the hard stone. And so at
last we are brought face to face with the sheer impassable precipice.
At its basement sleeps a pool, perfectly untroubled; a lakelet in
which the sheltering rocks and nestling wild figs are glassed as in a
mirror--a mirror of blue-black water, like amethyst or fluor-spar--so
pure, so still, that where it laps the pebbles you can scarcely say
where air begins and water ends. This, then, is Petrarch's 'grotto;'
this is the fountain of Vaucluse. Up from its deep reservoirs, from
the mysterious basements of the mountain, wells the silent stream;
pauseless and motionless it fills its urn, rises unruffled, glides
until the brink is reached, then overflows, and foams, and dashes
noisily, a cataract, among the boulders of the hills. Nothing at
Vaucluse is more impressive than the contrast between the tranquil
silence of the fountain and the roar of the released impetuous river.
Here we can realise the calm clear eyes of sculptured water-gods,
their brimming urns, their gushing streams, the magic of the
mountain-born and darkness-cradled flood. Or again, looking up at the
sheer steep cliff, 800 feet in height, and arching slightly roofwise,
so that no rain falls upon the cavern of the pool, we seem to see the
stroke of Neptune's trident, the hoof of Pegasus, the force of Moses'
rod, which cleft rocks and made water gush forth in the desert. There
is a strange fascination in the spot. As our eyes follow the white
pebble which cleaves the surface and falls visibly, until the veil
of azure is too thick for sight to pierce, we feel as if some glamour
were drawing us, like Hylas, to the hidden caves. At least, we long to
yield a prized and precious offering to the spring, to grace the nymph
of Vaucluse with a pearl of price as token of our reverence and love.

Meanwhile nothing has been said about Petrarch, who himself said much
about the spring, and complained against those very nymphs to whom we
have in wish, at least, been scattering jewels, that they broke his
banks and swallowed up his gardens every winter. At Vaucluse Petrarch
loved, and lived, and sang. He has made Vaucluse famous, and will
never be forgotten there. But for the present the fountain is even
more attractive than the memory of the poet.[4]

The change from Avignon to Nismes is very trying to the latter place;
for Nismes is not picturesquely or historically interesting. It is a
prosperous modern French town with two almost perfect Roman
monuments--Les Arènes and the Maison Carrée. The amphitheatre is a
complete oval, visible at one glance. Its smooth white stone, even
where it has not been restored, seems unimpaired by age; and Charles
Martel's conflagration, when he burned the Saracen hornet's nest
inside it, has only blackened the outer walls and arches venerably.
Utility and perfect adaptation of means to ends form the beauty of
Roman buildings. The science of construction and large intelligence
displayed in them, their strength, simplicity, solidity, and purpose,
are their glory. Perhaps there is only one modern edifice--Palladio's
Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza--which approaches the dignity and
loftiness of Roman architecture; and this it does because of its
absolute freedom from ornament, the vastness of its design, and the
durability of its material. The temple, called the Maison Carrée, at
Nismes, is also very perfect, and comprehended at one glance. Light,
graceful, airy, but rather thin and narrow, it reminds one of the
temple of Fortuna Virilis at Rome.

But if Nismes itself is not picturesque, its environs contain the
wonderful Pont du Gard. A two or three hours' drive leads through a
desolate country to the valley of the Cardon, where suddenly, at a
turn of the road, one comes upon the aqueduct. It is not within the
scope of words to describe the impression produced by those vast
arches, row above row, cutting the deep blue sky. The domed summer
clouds sailing across them are comprehended in the gigantic span of
their perfect semicircles, which seem rather to have been described
by Miltonic compasses of Deity than by merely human mathematics. Yet,
standing beneath one of the vaults and looking upward, you may read
Roman numerals in order from I. to X., which prove their human origin
well enough. Next to their strength, regularity, and magnitude, the
most astonishing point about this triple tier of arches, piled one
above the other to a height of 180 feet above a brawling stream
between two barren hills, is their lightness. The arches are not
thick; the causeway on the top is only just broad enough for three men
to walk abreast. So smooth and perpendicular are the supporting walls
that scarcely a shrub or tuft of grass has grown upon the aqueduct
in all these years. And yet the huge fabric is strengthened by no
buttress, has needed no repair. This lightness of structure, combined
with such prodigious durability, produces the strongest sense of
science and self-reliant power in the men who designed it. None but
Romans could have built such a monument, and have set it in such a
place--a wilderness of rock and rolling hill, scantily covered with
low brushwood, and browsed over by a few sheep--for such a purpose,
too, in order to supply Nemausus with pure water. The modern town does
pretty well without its water; but here subsists the civilisation
of eighteen centuries past intact: the human labour yet remains,
the measuring, contriving mind of man, shrinking from no obstacles,
spanning the air, and in one edifice combining gigantic strength and
perfect beauty. It is impossible not to echo Rousseau's words in such
a place, and to say with him: 'Le retentissement de mes pas dans ces
immenses voûtes me faisait croire entendre la forte voix de ceux
qui les avaient bâties. Je me perdais comme un insecte dans cette
immensité. Je sentais, tout en me faisant petit, je ne sais quoi
qui m'élevait l'âme; et je me disais en soupirant, Que ne suis-je né
Romain!'

There is nothing at Arles which produces the same deep and indelible
impression. Yet Arles is a far more interesting town than Nismes,
partly because of the Rhone delta which begins there, partly because
of its ruinous antiquity, and partly also because of the strong local
character of its population. The amphitheatre of Arles is vaster and
more sublime in its desolation than the tidy theatre at Nismes; the
crypts, and dens, and subterranean passages suggest all manner of
speculation as to the uses to which they may have been appropriated;
while the broken galleries outside, intricate and black and cavernous,
like Piranesi's etchings of the 'Carceri,' present the wildest
pictures of greatness in decay, fantastic dilapidation. The ruins of
the smaller theatre, again, with their picturesquely grouped fragments
and their standing columns, might be sketched for a frontispiece to
some dilettante work on classical antiquities. For the rest, perhaps
the Aliscamps, or ancient Roman burial-ground, is the most interesting
thing at Arles, not only because of Dante's celebrated lines in the
canto of 'Farinata:'--

  Si come ad Arli ove 'l Rodano stagna,
  Fanno i sepolcri tutto 'l loco varo;

but also because of the intrinsic picturesqueness of this avenue of
sepulchres beneath green trees upon a long soft grassy field.

But as at Avignon and Nismes, so also at Arles, one of the chief
attractions of the place lies at a distance, and requires a special
expedition. The road to Les Baux crosses a true Provençal desert where
one realises the phrase, 'Vieux comme les rochers de Provence,'--a
wilderness of grey stone, here and there worn into cart-tracks, and
tufted with rosemary, box, lavender, and lentisk. On the way it passes
the Abbaye de Mont Majeur, a ruin of gigantic size, embracing all
periods of architecture; where nothing seems to flourish now but
henbane and the wild cucumber, or to breathe but a mumble-toothed and
terrible old hag. The ruin stands above a desolate marsh, its vast
Italian buildings of Palladian splendour looking more forlorn in their
decay than the older and austerer mediæval towers, which rise up proud
and patient and defiantly erect beneath the curse of time. When at
length what used to be the castle town of Les Baux is reached, you
find a naked mountain of yellow sandstone, worn away by nature into
bastions and buttresses and coigns of vantage, sculptured by ancient
art into palaces and chapels, battlements and dungeons. Now art and
nature are confounded in one ruin. Blocks of masonry lie cheek by jowl
with masses of the rough-hewn rock; fallen cavern vaults are heaped
round fragments of fan-shaped spandrel and clustered column-shaft; the
doors and windows of old pleasure-rooms are hung with ivy and wild fig
for tapestry; winding staircases start midway upon the cliff, and lead
to vacancy. High overhead suspended in mid-air hang chambers--lady's
bower or poet's singing-room--now inaccessible, the haunt of hawks and
swallows. Within this rocky honeycomb--'cette ville en monolithe,'
as it has been aptly called, for it is literally scooped out of one
mountain block--live about two hundred poor people, foddering their
wretched goats at carved piscina and stately sideboards, erecting mud
beplastered hovels in the halls of feudal princes. Murray is wrong in
calling the place a mediæval town in its original state, for anything
more purely ruinous, more like a decayed old cheese, cannot possibly
be conceived. The living only inhabit the tombs of the dead. At
the end of the last century, when revolutionary effervescence was
beginning to ferment, the people of Arles swept all its feudality
away, defacing the very arms upon the town gate, and trampling the
palace towers to dust.

The castle looks out across a vast extent of plain over Arles, the
stagnant Rhone, the Camargue, and the salt pools of the lingering sea.
In old days it was the eyrie of an eagle race called Seigneurs of Les
Baux; and whether they took their title from the rock, or whether,
as genealogists would have it, they gave the name of Oriental
Balthazar--their reputed ancestor, one of the Magi--to the rock
itself, remains a mystery not greatly worth the solving.

Anyhow, here they lived and flourished, these feudal princes, bearing
for their ensign a silver comet of sixteen rays upon a field of
gules--themselves a comet race, baleful to the neighbouring lowlands,
blazing with lurid splendour over wide tracts of country, a burning,
raging, fiery-souled, swift-handed tribe, in whom a flame unquenchable
glowed from son to sire through twice five hundred years until, in
the sixteenth century, they were burned out, and nothing remained but
cinders--these broken ruins of their eyrie, and some outworn and dusty
titles. Very strange are the fate and history of these same titles:
King of Arles, for instance, savouring of troubadour and high romance;
Prince of Tarentum, smacking of old plays and Italian novels; Prince
of Orange, which the Nassaus, through the Châlons, seized in all its
emptiness long after the real principality had passed away, and came
therewith to sit on England's throne.

The Les Baux in their heyday were patterns of feudal nobility. They
warred incessantly with Counts of Provence, archbishops and burghers
of Arles, Queens of Naples, Kings of Aragon. Crusading, pillaging,
betraying, spending their substance on the sword, and buying it again
by deeds of valour or imperial acts of favour, tuning troubadour
harps, presiding at courts of love,--they filled a large page in the
history of Southern France. The Les Baux were very superstitious. In
the fulness of their prosperity they restricted the number of their
dependent towns, or _places baussenques_, to seventy-nine,
because these numbers in combination were thought to be of good omen
to their house. Beral des Baux, Seigneur of Marseilles, was one day
starting on a journey with his whole force to Avignon. He met an old
woman herb-gathering at daybreak, and said, 'Mother, hast thou seen
a crow or other bird?' 'Yea,' answered the crone, 'on the trunk of a
dead willow.' Beral counted upon his fingers the day of the year, and
turned bridle. With troubadours of name and note they had dealings,
but not always to their own advantage, as the following story
testifies. When the Baux and Berengers were struggling for the
countship of Provence, Raymond Berenger, by his wife's counsel, went,
attended by troubadours, to meet the Emperor Frederick at Milan.
There he sued for the investiture and ratification of Provence. His
troubadours sang and charmed Frederick; and the Emperor, for the joy
he had in them, wrote his celebrated lines beginning--

  Plas mi cavalier Francez.

And when Berenger made his request he met with no refusal. Hearing
thereof, the lords of Baux came down in wrath with a clangour of armed
men. But music had already gained the day; and where the Phoebus of
Provence had shone, the Æolus of storm-shaken Les Baux was powerless.
Again, when Blacas, a knight of Provence, died, the great Sordello
chanted one of his most fiery hymns, bidding the princes of
Christendom flock round and eat the heart of the dead lord. 'Let
Rambaude des Baux,' cries the bard, with a sarcasm that is clearly
meant, but at this distance almost unintelligible, 'take also a good
piece, for she is fair and good and truly virtuous; let her keep it
well who knows so well to husband her own weal.' But the poets were
not always adverse to the house of Baux. Fouquet, the beautiful and
gentle melodist whom Dante placed in paradise, served Adelaisie, wife
of Berald, with long service of unhappy love, and wrote upon her
death 'The Complaint of Berald des Baux for Adelaisie.' Guillaume de
Cabestan loved Berangère des Baux, and was so loved by her that she
gave him a philtre to drink, whereof he sickened and grew mad. Many
more troubadours are cited as having frequented the castle of Les
Baux, and among the members of the princely house were several poets.

Some of them were renowned for beauty. We hear of a Cécile, called
Passe Rose, because of her exceeding loveliness; also of an unhappy
François, who, after passing eighteen years in prison, yet won the
grace and love of Joan of Naples by his charms. But the real temper of
this fierce tribe was not shown among troubadours, or in the courts of
love and beauty. The stern and barren rock from which they sprang, and
the comet of their scutcheon, are the true symbols of their nature.
History records no end of their ravages and slaughters. It is a
tedious catalogue of blood--how one prince put to fire and sword the
whole town of Courthezon; how another was stabbed in prison by his
wife; how a third besieged the castle of his niece, and sought to
undermine her chamber, knowing her the while to be in childbed; how a
fourth was flayed alive outside the walls of Avignon. There is nothing
terrible, splendid, and savage, belonging to feudal history, of which
an example may not be found in the annals of Les Baux, as narrated by
their chronicler, Jules Canonge.

However abrupt may seem the transition from these memories of
the ancient nobles of Les Baux to mere matters of travel and
picturesqueness, it would be impossible to take leave of the old
towns of Provence without glancing at the cathedrals of S. Trophime
at Arles, and of S. Gilles--a village on the border of the dreary
flamingo-haunted Camargue. Both of these buildings have porches
splendidly encrusted with sculptures, half classical, half mediæval,
marking the transition from ancient to modern art. But that of S.
Gilles is by far the richer and more elaborate. The whole façade of
this church is one mass of intricate decoration; Norman arches
and carved lions, like those of Lombard architecture, mingling
fantastically with Greek scrolls of fruit and flowers, with elegant
Corinthian columns jutting out upon the church steps, and with the old
conventional wave-border that is called Etruscan in our modern jargon.
From the midst of florid fret and foliage lean mild faces of saints
and Madonnas. Symbols of evangelists with half-human, half-animal
eyes and wings, are interwoven with the leafy bowers of cupids. Grave
apostles stand erect beneath acanthus wreaths that ought to crisp the
forehead of a laughing Faun or Bacchus. And yet so full, exuberant,
and deftly chosen are these various elements, that there remains no
sense of incongruity or discord. The mediæval spirit had much trouble
to disentangle itself from classic reminiscences; and fortunately for
the picturesqueness of S. Gilles, it did not succeed. How strangely
different is the result of this transition in the south from those
severe and rigid forms which we call Romanesque in Germany and
Normandy and England!

       *       *       *       *       *




THE CORNICE


It was a dull afternoon in February when we left Nice, and drove
across the mountains to Mentone. Over hill and sea hung a thick mist.
Turbia's Roman tower stood up in cheerless solitude, wreathed round
with driving vapour, and the rocky nest of Esa seemed suspended in
a chaos between sea and sky. Sometimes the fog broke and showed us
Villafranca, lying green and flat in the deep blue below: sometimes a
distant view of higher peaks swam into sight from the shifting cloud.
But the whole scene was desolate. Was it for this that we had left our
English home, and travelled from London day and night? At length we
reached the edge of the cloud, and jingled down by Roccabruna and the
olive-groves, till one by one Mentone's villas came in sight, and at
last we found ourselves at the inn door. That night, and all next day
and the next night, we heard the hoarse sea beat and thunder on the
beach. The rain and wind kept driving from the south, but we consoled
ourselves with thinking that the orange-trees and every kind of flower
were drinking in the moisture and waiting to rejoice in sunlight which
would come.

It was a Sunday morning when we woke and found that the rain had gone,
the sun was shining brightly on the sea, and a clear north wind was
blowing cloud and mist away. Out upon the hills we went, not caring
much what path we took; for everything was beautiful, and hill
and vale were full of garden walks. Through lemon-groves,--pale,
golden-tender trees,--and olives, stretching their grey boughs against
the lonely cottage tiles, we climbed, until we reached the pines and
heath above. Then I knew the meaning of Theocritus for the first time.
We found a well, broad, deep, and clear, with green herbs growing at
the bottom, a runlet flowing from it down the rocky steps, maidenhair,
black adiantum, and blue violets, hanging from the brink and mirrored
in the water. This was just the well in _Hylas_. Theocritus
has been badly treated. They call him a court poet, dead to Nature,
artificial in his pictures. Yet I recognised this fountain by his
verse, just as if he had showed me the very spot. Violets grow
everywhere, of every shade, from black to lilac. Their stalks are
long, and the flowers 'nod' upon them, so that I see how the Greeks
could make them into chaplets--how Lycidas wore his crown of white
violets[5] lying by the fireside elbow-deep in withered asphodel,
watching the chestnuts in the embers, and softly drinking deep healths
to Ageanax far off upon the waves. It is impossible to go wrong in
these valleys. They are cultivated to the height of about five hundred
feet above the sea, in terraces laboriously built up with walls,
earthed and manured, and irrigated by means of tanks and aqueducts.
Above this level, where the virgin soil has not been yet reclaimed,
or where the winds of winter bring down freezing currents from the
mountains through a gap or gully of the lower hills, a tangled growth
of heaths and arbutus, and pines, and rosemarys, and myrtles, continue
the vegetation, till it finally ends in bare grey rocks and peaks some
thousand feet in height. Far above all signs of cultivation on these
arid peaks, you still may see villages and ruined castles, built
centuries ago for a protection from the Moorish pirates. To these
mountain fastnesses the people of the coast retreated when they
descried the sails of their foes on the horizon. In Mentone, not very
long ago, old men might be seen who in their youth were said to have
been taken captive by the Moors; and many Arabic words have found
their way into the patois of the people.

There is something strangely fascinating in the sight of these ruins
on the burning rocks, with their black sentinel cypresses, immensely
tall and far away. Long years and rain and sunlight have made these
castellated eyries one with their native stone. It is hard to trace
in their foundations where Nature's workmanship ends and where man's
begins. What strange sights the mountain villagers must see! The vast
blue plain of the unfurrowed deep, the fairy range of Corsica hung
midway between the sea and sky at dawn or sunset, the stars so close
above their heads, the deep dew-sprinkled valleys, the green pines! On
penetrating into one of these hill-fortresses, you find that it is
a whole village, with a church and castle and piazza, some few feet
square, huddled together on a narrow platform. We met one day three
magnates of Gorbio taking a morning stroll backwards and forwards,
up and down their tiny square. Vehemently gesticulating, loudly
chattering, they talked as though they had not seen each other for ten
years, and were but just unloading their budgets of accumulated news.
Yet these three men probably had lived, eaten, drunk, and talked
together from the cradle to that hour: so true it is that use
and custom quicken all our powers, especially of gossiping and
scandal-mongering. S. Agnese is the highest and most notable of all
these villages. The cold and heat upon its absolutely barren rock
must be alike intolerable. In appearance it is not unlike the Etruscan
towns of Central Italy; but there is something, of course, far more
imposing in the immense antiquity and the historical associations of
a Narni, a Fiesole, a Chiusi, or an Orvieto. Sea-life and rusticity
strike a different note from that of those Apennine-girdled seats of
dead civilisation, in which nations, arts, and religions have gone by
and left but few traces,--some wrecks of giant walls, some excavated
tombs, some shrines, where monks still sing and pray above the relics
of the founders of once world-shaking, now almost forgotten, orders.
Here at Mentone there is none of this; the idyllic is the true note,
and Theocritus is still alive.

We do not often scale these altitudes, but keep along the terraced
glades by the side of olive-shaded streams. The violets, instead of
peeping shyly from hedgerows, fall in ripples and cascades over mossy
walls among maidenhair and spleen-worts. They are very sweet, and the
sound of trickling water seems to mingle with their fragrance in a
most delicious harmony. Sound, smell, and hue make up one chord, the
sense of which is pure and perfect peace. The country-people are
kind, letting us pass everywhere, so that we make our way along their
aqueducts and through their gardens, under laden lemon-boughs, the
pale fruit dangling at our ears, and swinging showers of scented dew
upon us as we pass. Far better, however, than lemon or orange trees,
are the olives. Some of these are immensely old, numbering, it is
said, five centuries, so that Petrarch may almost have rested beneath
their shade on his way to Avignon. These veterans are cavernous with
age: gnarled, split, and twisted trunks, throwing out arms that break
into a hundred branches; every branch distinct, and feathered with
innumerable sparks and spikelets of white, wavy, greenish light.
These are the leaves, and the stems are grey with lichens. The sky and
sea--two blues, one full of sunlight and the other purple--set these
fountains of perennial brightness like gems in lapis-lazuli. At a
distance the same olives look hoary and soft--a veil of woven light
or luminous haze. When the wind blows their branches all one way,
they ripple like a sea of silver. But underneath their covert, in
the shade, grey periwinkles wind among the snowy drift of allium. The
narcissus sends its arrowy fragrance through the air, while, far and
wide, red anemones burn like fire, with interchange of blue and lilac
buds, white arums, orchises, and pink gladiolus. Wandering there, and
seeing the pale flowers, stars white and pink and odorous, we dream
of Olivet, or the grave Garden of the Agony, and the trees seem always
whispering of sacred things. How people can blaspheme against the
olives, and call them imitations of the willow, or complain that they
are shabby shrubs, I do not know.[6]

This shore would stand for Shelley's Island of Epipsychidion, or
the golden age which Empedocles describes, when the mild nations
worshipped Aphrodite with incense and the images of beasts and
yellow honey, and no blood was spilt upon her altars--when 'the trees
flourished with perennial leaves and fruit, and ample crops adorned
their boughs through all the year.' This even now is literally true of
the lemon-groves, which do not cease to flower and ripen. Everything
fits in to complete the reproduction of Greek pastoral life. The goats
eat cytisus and myrtle on the shore; a whole flock gathered round me
as I sat beneath a tuft of golden green euphorbia the other day, and
nibbled bread from my hands. The frog still croaks by tank and
fountain, 'whom the Muses have ordained to sing for aye,' in
spite of Bion's death. The narcissus, anemone, and hyacinth still tell
their tales of love and death. Hesper still gazes on the shepherd
from the mountain-head. The slender cypresses still vibrate, the pines
murmur. Pan sleeps in noontide heat, and goat-herds and wayfaring
men lie down to slumber by the roadside, under olive-boughs in which
cicadas sing. The little villages high up are just as white, the
mountains just as grey and shadowy when evening falls. Nothing is
changed--except ourselves. I expect to find a statue of Priapus or
pastoral Pan, hung with wreaths of flowers--the meal cake, honey, and
spilt wine upon his altar, and young boys and maidens dancing round.
Surely, in some far-off glade, by the side of lemon-grove or garden,
near the village, there must be still a pagan remnant of glad
Nature-worship. Surely I shall chance upon some Thyrsis piping in the
pine-tree shade, or Daphne flying from the arms of Phoebus. So I dream
until I come upon the Calvary set on a solitary hillock, with its
prayer-steps lending a wide prospect across the olives and the
orange-trees, and the broad valleys, to immeasurable skies and purple
seas. There is the iron cross, the wounded heart, the spear, the reed,
the nails, the crown of thorns, the cup of sacrificial blood, the
title, with its superscription royal and divine. The other day we
crossed a brook and entered a lemon-field, rich with blossoms
and carpeted with red anemones. Everything basked in sunlight and
glittered with exceeding brilliancy of hue. A tiny white chapel stood
in a corner of the enclosure. Two iron-grated windows let me
see inside: it was a bare place, containing nothing but a wooden
praying-desk, black and worm-eaten, an altar with its candles and no
flowers, and above the altar a square picture brown with age. On the
floor were scattered several pence, and in a vase above the holy-water
vessel stood some withered hyacinths. As my sight became accustomed to
the gloom, I could see from the darkness of the picture a pale Christ
nailed to the cross with agonising upward eyes and ashy aureole above
the bleeding thorns. Thus I stepped suddenly away from the outward
pomp and bravery of nature to the inward aspirations, agonies,
and martyrdoms of man--from Greek legends of the past to the real
Christian present--and I remembered that an illimitable prospect has
been opened to the world, that in spite of ourselves we must turn our
eyes heavenward, inward, to the infinite unseen beyond us and within
our souls. Nothing can take us back to Phoebus or to Pan. Nothing
can again identify us with the simple natural earth. '_Une immense
espérance a traversé la terre_,' and these chapels, with their deep
significances, lurk in the fair landscape like the cares of real life
among our dreams of art, or like a fear of death and the hereafter in
the midst of opera music. It is a strange contrast. The worship of men
in those old times was symbolised by dances in the evening, banquets,
libations, and mirth-making. 'Euphrosyne' was alike the goddess of
the righteous mind and of the merry heart. Old withered women telling
their rosaries at dusk; belated shepherds crossing themselves beneath
the stars when they pass the chapel; maidens weighed down with
Margaret's anguish of unhappy love; youths vowing their life to
contemplation in secluded cloisters,--these are the human forms which
gather round such chapels; and the motto of the worshippers consists
in this, 'Do often violence to thy desire.' In the Tyrol we have seen
whole villages praying together at daybreak before their day's work,
singing their _Miserere_ and their _Gloria_ and their _Dies Iræ_, to
the sound of crashing organs and jangling bells; appealing in the
midst of Nature's splendour to the Spirit which is above Nature, which
dwells in darkness rather than light, and loves the yearnings and
contentions of our soul more than its summer gladness and peace. Even
the olives here tell more to us of Olivet and the Garden than of the
oil-press and the wrestling-ground. The lilies carry us to the Sermon
on the Mount, and teach humility, instead of summoning up some legend
of a god's love for a mortal. The hillside tanks and running streams,
and water-brooks swollen by sudden rain, speak of Palestine. We call
the white flowers stars of Bethlehem. The large sceptre-reed; the
fig-tree, lingering in barrenness when other trees are full of fruit;
the locust-beans of the Caruba:--for one suggestion of Greek idylls
there is yet another, of far deeper, dearer power.

But who can resist the influence of Greek ideas at the Cap S. Martin?
Down to the verge of the sea stretch the tall, twisted stems of Levant
pines, and on the caverned limestone breaks the deep blue water.
Dazzling as marble are these rocks, pointed and honeycombed with
constant dashing of the restless sea, tufted with corallines and grey
and purple seaweeds in the little pools, but hard and dry and rough
above tide level. Nor does the sea always lap them quietly; for the
last few days it has come tumbling in, roaring and raging on the beach
with huge waves crystalline in their transparency, and maned with
fleecy spray. Such were the rocks and such the swell of breakers when
Ulysses grasped the shore after his long swim. Samphire, very salt and
fragrant, grows in the rocky honeycomb; then lentisk and beach-loving
myrtle, both exceeding green and bushy; then rosemary and euphorbia
above the reach of spray. Fishermen, with their long reeds, sit lazily
perched upon black rocks above blue waves, sunning themselves as much
as seeking sport. One distant tip of snow, seen far away behind the
hills, reminds us of an alien, unremembered winter. While dreaming
there, this fancy came into my head: Polyphemus was born yonder in
the Gorbio Valley. There he fed his sheep and goats, and on the hills
found scanty pasture for his kine. He and his mother lived in the
white house by the cypress near the stream where tulips grow. Young
Galatea, nursed in the caverns of these rocks, white as the foam, and
shy as the sea fishes, came one morning up the valley to pick mountain
hyacinths, and little Polyphemus led the way. He knew where violets
and sweet narcissus grew, as well as Galatea where pink coralline
and spreading sea-flowers with their waving arms. But Galatea, having
filled her lap with bluebells, quite forgot the leaping kids, and
piping Cyclops, and cool summer caves, and yellow honey, and black
ivy, and sweet vine, and water cold as Alpine snow. Down the swift
streamlet she danced laughingly, and made herself once more bitter
with the sea. But Polyphemus remained,--hungry, sad, gazing on the
barren sea, and piping to the mockery of its waves.

Filled with these Greek fancies, it is strange to come upon a little
sandstone dell furrowed by trickling streams and overgrown with
English primroses; or to enter the village of Roccabruna, with its
mediæval castle and the motto on its walls, _Tempora labuntur
tacitisque senescimus annis_. A true motto for the town, where the
butcher comes but once a week, and where men and boys, and dogs, and
palms, and lemon-trees grow up and flourish and decay in the same
hollow of the sunny mountain-side. Into the hard conglomerate of the
hill the town is built; house walls and precipices mortised into one
another, dovetailed by the art of years gone by, and riveted by
age. The same plants grow from both alike--spurge, cistus, rue, and
henbane, constant to the desolation of abandoned dwellings. From the
castle you look down on roofs, brown tiles and chimney-pots, set one
above the other like a big card-castle. Each house has its foot on a
neighbour's neck, and its shoulder set against the native stone. The
streets meander in and out, and up and down, overarched and balconied,
but very clean. They swarm with children, healthy, happy, little
monkeys, who grow fat on salt fish and yellow polenta, with oil and
sun _ad libitum_.

At night from Roccabruna you may see the flaring gas-lamps of the
gaming-house at Monaco, that Armida's garden of the nineteenth
century. It is the sunniest and most sheltered spot of all the coast.
Long ago Lucan said of Monaco, '_Non Corus in illum jus habet aut
Zephyrus_;' winter never comes to nip its tangled cactuses, and
aloes, and geraniums. The air swoons with the scent of lemon-groves;
tall palm-trees wave their graceful branches by the shore; music of
the softest and the loudest swells from the palace; cool corridors
and sunny seats stand ready for the noontide heat or evening calm;
without, are olive-gardens, green and fresh and full of flowers. But
the witch herself holds her high court and never-ending festival of
sin in the painted banquet-halls and among the green tables.

Let us leave this scene and turn with the country-folk of Roccabruna
to S. Michael's Church at Mentone. High above the sea it stands,
and from its open doors you look across the mountains with their
olive-trees. Inside the church is a seething mass of country-folk and
townspeople, mostly women, and these almost all old, but picturesque
beyond description; kerchiefs of every colour, wrinkles of every shape
and depth, skins of every tone of brown and yellow, voices of every
gruffness, shrillness, strength, and weakness. Wherever an empty
corner can be found, it is soon filled by tottering babies and
mischievous children. The country-women come with their large dangling
earrings of thin gold, wearing pink tulips or lemon-buds in their
black hair. A low buzz of gossiping and mutual recognition keeps the
air alive. The whole service seems a holiday--a general enjoyment of
gala dresses and friendly greetings, very different from the
silence, immobility, and _noli me tangere_ aspect of an English
congregation. Over all drones, rattles, snores, and shrieks the organ;
wailing, querulous, asthmatic, incomplete, its everlasting nasal
chant--always beginning, never ending, through a range of two or three
notes ground into one monotony. The voices of the congregation
rise and sink above it. These southern people, like the Arabs, the
Apulians, and the Spaniards, seem to find their music in a hurdy-gurdy
swell of sound. The other day we met a little girl, walking and
spinning, and singing all the while, whose song was just another
version of this chant. It has a discontented plaintive wail, as if it
came from some vast age, and were a cousin of primeval winds.

At first sight, by the side of Mentone, San Remo is sadly prosaic. The
valleys seem to sprawl, and the universal olives are monotonously grey
upon their thick clay soil. Yet the wealth of flowers in the fat
earth is wonderful. One might fancy oneself in a weedy farm flower-bed
invaded by stray oats and beans and cabbages and garlic from the
kitchen-garden. The country does not suggest a single Greek idea.
It has no form or outline--no barren peaks, no spare and difficult
vegetation. The beauty is rich but tame--valleys green with oats and
corn, blossoming cherry-trees, and sweet bean-fields, figs coming into
leaf, and arrowy bay-trees by the side of sparkling streams: here and
there a broken aqueduct or rainbow bridge hung with maidenhair and
briar and clematis and sarsaparilla.

In the cathedral church of San Siro on Good Friday they hang the
columns and the windows with black; they cover the pictures and deface
the altar; above the high altar they raise a crucifix, and below they
place a catafalque with the effigy of the dead Christ. To this sad
symbol they address their prayers and incense, chant their 'litanies
and lurries,' and clash the rattles, which commemorate their rage
against the traitor Judas. So far have we already passed away from the
Greek feeling of Mentone. As I listened to the hideous din, I could
not but remember the Theocritean burial of Adonis. Two funeral beds
prepared: two feasts recurring in the springtime of the year. What a
difference beneath this superficial similarity--[Greek: kalos nekus
oia katheudôn]--_attritus ægrâ macie_. But the fast of Good
Friday is followed by the festival of Easter. That, after all, is the
chief difference.

After leaving the cathedral we saw a pretty picture in a dull old
street of San Remo--three children leaning from a window, blowing
bubbles. The bubbles floated down the street, of every colour, round
and trembling, like the dreams of life which children dream. The town
is certainly most picturesque. It resembles a huge glacier of houses
poured over a wedge of rock, running down the sides and along the
ridge, and spreading itself into a fan between two torrents on the
shore below. House over house, with balcony and staircase, convent
turret and church tower, palm-trees and olives, roof gardens and
clinging creepers--this white cataract of buildings streams downward
from the lazar-house, and sanctuary, and sandstone quarries on the
hill. It is a mass of streets placed close above each other, and
linked together with arms and arches of solid masonry, as a protection
from the earthquakes, which are frequent at San Remo. The walls are
tall, and form a labyrinth of gloomy passages and treacherous blind
alleys, where the Moors of old might meet with a ferocious welcome.
Indeed, San Remo is a fortress as well as a dwelling-place. Over its
gateways may still be traced the pipes for molten lead, and on its
walls the eyeloops for arrows, with brackets for the feet of archers.
Masses of building have been shaken down by earthquakes. The ruins of
what once were houses gape with blackened chimneys and dark forlorn
cellars; mazes of fungus and unhealthy weeds among the still secure
habitations. Hardly a ray of light penetrates the streets; one learns
the meaning of the Italian word _uggia_ from their cold and
gloom. During the day they are deserted by every one but babies and
witchlike old women--some gossiping, some sitting vacant at the house
door, some spinning or weaving, or minding little children--ugly and
ancient as are their own homes, yet clean as are the streets. The
younger population goes afield; the men on mules laden for the hills,
the women burdened like mules with heavy and disgusting loads. It is
an exceptionally good-looking race; tall, well-grown, and strong.--But
to the streets again. The shops in the upper town are few, chiefly
wine-booths and stalls for the sale of salt fish, eggs, and bread,
or cobblers' and tinkers' ware. Notwithstanding the darkness of their
dwellings, the people have a love of flowers; azaleas lean from their
windows, and vines, carefully protected by a sheath of brickwork,
climb the six stories, to blossom out into a pergola upon the roof.
Look at that mass of greenery and colours, dimly seen from beneath,
with a yellow cat sunning herself upon the parapet! To reach such a
garden and such sunlight who would not mount six stories and thread
a labyrinth of passages? I should prefer a room upon the east side of
the town, looking southward to the Molo and the sea, with a sound
of water beneath, and a palm soaring up to fan my window with his
feathery leaves.

The shrines are little spots of brightness in the gloomy streets.
Madonna with a sword; Christ holding His pierced and bleeding heart;
l'Eterno Padre pointing to the dead Son stretched upon His knee; some
souls in torment; S. Roch reminding us of old plagues by the spot upon
his thigh;--these are the symbols of the shrines. Before them stand
rows of pots filled with gillyflowers, placed there by pious, simple,
praying hands--by maidens come to tell their sorrows to our Lady rich
in sorrow, by old women bent and shrivelled, in hopes of paradise or
gratitude for happy days, when Madonna kept Cecchino faithful to his
home, or saved the baby from the fever.

Lower down, between the sea and the hill, is the municipal,
aristocratic, ecclesiastical quarter of San Remo. There stands the
Palace Borea--a truly princely pile, built in the last Renaissance
style of splendour, with sea-nymphs and dolphins, and satyric heads,
half lips, half leafage, round about its doors and windows. Once it
formed the dwelling of a feudal family, but now it is a roomy
anthill of a hundred houses, shops, and offices, the Boreas of to-day
retaining but a portion of one flat, and making profit of the rest.
There, too, are the barracks and the syndic's hall; the Jesuits'
school, crowded with boys and girls; the shops for clothes,
confectionery, and trinkets; the piazza, with its fountain and
tasselled planes, and flowery chestnut-trees, a mass of greenery.
Under these trees the idlers lounge, boys play at leap-frog, men at
bowls. Women in San Remo work all day, but men and boys play for the
most part at bowls or toss-penny or leap-frog or morra. San Siro, the
cathedral, stands at one end of the square. Do not go inside; it has
a sickly smell of immemorial incense and garlic, undefinable and
horrible. Far better looks San Siro from the parapet above the
torrent. There you see its irregular half-Gothic outline across a
tangle of lemon-trees and olives. The stream rushes by through high
walls, covered with creepers, spanned by ferny bridges, feathered by
one or two old tufty palms. And over all rises the ancient turret of
San Siro, like a Spanish giralda, a minaret of pinnacles and pyramids
and dome bubbles, with windows showing heavy bells, old clocks, and
sundials painted on the walls, and a cupola of green and yellow tiles
like serpent-scales, to crown the whole. The sea lies beyond, and
the house-roofs break it with grey horizontal lines. Then there are
convents, legions of them, large white edifices, Jesuitical apparently
for the most part, clanging importunate bells, leaning rose-blossoms
and cypress-boughs over their jealous walls.

Lastly, there is the port--the mole running out into the sea, the quay
planted with plane-trees, and the fishing-boats--by which San Remo is
connected with the naval glory of the past--with the Riviera that gave
birth to Columbus--with the Liguria that the Dorias ruled--with the
great name of Genoa. The port is empty enough now; but from the pier
you look back on San Remo and its circling hills, a jewelled town
set in illimitable olive greyness. The quay seems also to be the
cattle-market. There the small buff cows of North Italy repose after
their long voyage or march, kneeling on the sandy ground or rubbing
their sides against the wooden cross awry with age and shorn of all
its symbols. Lambs frisk among the boats; impudent kids nibble
the drooping ears of patient mules. Hinds in white jackets and
knee-breeches made of skins, lead shaggy rams and fiercely bearded
goats, ready to butt at every barking dog, and always seeking
opportunities of flight. Farmers and parish priests in black
petticoats feel the cattle and dispute about the price, or whet their
bargains with a draught of wine. Meanwhile the nets are brought on
shore glittering with the fry of sardines, which are cooked like
whitebait, with cuttlefish--amorphous objects stretching shiny feelers
on the hot dry sand--and prickly purple eggs of the sea-urchin. Women
go about their labour through the throng, some carrying stones upon
their heads, or unloading boats and bearing planks of wood in single
file, two marching side by side beneath one load of lime, others
scarcely visible under a stack of oats, another with her baby in its
cradle fast asleep.

San Remo has an elder brother among the hills, which is called San
Romolo, after one of the old bishops of Genoa. Who San Remo was is
buried in remote antiquity; but his town has prospered, while of San
Romolo nothing remains but a ruined hill-convent among pine-trees. The
old convent is worth visiting. Its road carries you into the heart of
the sierra which surrounds San Remo, a hill-country something like
the Jura, undulating and green to the very top with maritime pines and
pinasters. Riding up, you hear all manner of Alpine sounds; brawling
streams, tinkling cowbells, and herdsmen calling to each other on the
slopes. Beneath you lies San Remo, scarcely visible; and over it the
great sea rises ever so far into the sky, until the white sails hang
in air, and cloud and sea-line melt into each other indistinguishably.
Spanish chestnuts surround the monastery with bright blue gentians,
hepaticas, forget-me-nots, and primroses about their roots. The house
itself is perched on a knoll with ample prospect to the sea and to
the mountains, very near to heaven, within a theatre of noble
contemplations and soul-stirring thoughts. If Mentone spoke to me of
the poetry of Greek pastoral life, this convent speaks of mediæval
monasticism--of solitude with God, above, beneath, and all around, of
silence and repose from agitating cares, of continuity in prayer, and
changelessness of daily life. Some precepts of the _Imitatio_
came into my mind: 'Be never wholly idle; read or write, pray or
meditate, or work with diligence for the common needs.' 'Praiseworthy
is it for the religious man to go abroad but seldom, and to seem to
shun, and keep his eyes from men.' 'Sweet is the cell when it is often
sought, but if we gad about, it wearies us by its seclusion.' Then I
thought of the monks so living in this solitude; their cell windows
looking across the valley to the sea, through summer and winter, under
sun and stars. Then would they read or write, what long melodious
hours! or would they pray, what stations on the pine-clad hills! or
would they toil, what terraces to build and plant with corn, what
flowers to tend, what cows to milk and pasture, what wood to cut,
what fir-cones to gather for the winter fire! or should they yearn for
silence, silence from their comrades of the solitude, what whispering
galleries of God, where never human voice breaks loudly, but winds
and streams and lonely birds disturb the awful stillness! In such a
hermitage as this, only more wild, lived S. Francis of Assisi, among
the Apennines.[7] It was there that he learned the tongues of beasts
and birds, and preached them sermons. Stretched for hours motionless
on the bare rocks, coloured like them and rough like them in his brown
peasant's serge, he prayed and meditated, saw the vision of Christ
crucified, and planned his order to regenerate a vicious age. So still
he lay, so long, so like a stone, so gentle were his eyes, so kind
and low his voice, that the mice nibbled breadcrumbs from his wallet,
lizards ran over him, and larks sang to him in the air. There, too, in
those long, solitary vigils, the Spirit of God came upon him, and the
spirit of Nature was even as God's Spirit, and he sang: 'Laudato sia
Dio mio Signore, con tutte le creature, specialmente messer lo frate
sole; per suor luna, e per le stelle; per frate vento e per l'aire, e
nuvolo, e sereno e ogni tempo.' Half the value of this hymn would
be lost were we to forget how it was written, in what solitudes and
mountains far from men, or to ticket it with some abstract word
like Pantheism. Pantheism it is not; but an acknowledgment of that
brotherhood, beneath the love of God, by which the sun and moon and
stars, and wind and air and cloud, and clearness and all weather, and
all creatures, are bound together with the soul of man.

Few, of course, were like S. Francis. Probably no monk of San Romolo
was inspired with his enthusiasm for humanity, or had his revelation
of the Divine Spirit inherent in the world. Still fewer can have felt
the æsthetic charm of Nature but most vaguely. It was as much as they
could boast, if they kept steadily to the rule of their order, and
attended to the concerns each of his own soul. A terrible selfishness,
if rightly considered; but one which accorded with the delusion that
this world is a cave of care, the other world a place of torture or
undying bliss, death the prime object of our meditation, and lifelong
abandonment of our fellow-men the highest mode of existence. Why,
then, should monks, so persuaded of the riddle of the earth, have
placed themselves in scenes so beautiful? Why rose the Camaldolis and
Chartreuses over Europe? white convents on the brows of lofty hills,
among the rustling boughs of Vallombrosas, in the grassy meadows of
Engelbergs,--always the eyries of Nature's lovers, men smitten with
the loveliness of earth? There is surely some meaning in these poetic
stations.

Here is a sentence of the _Imitatio_ which throws some light upon
the hymn of S. Francis and the sites of Benedictine monasteries, by
explaining the value of natural beauty for monks who spent their life
in studying death: 'If thy heart were right, then would every creature
be to thee a mirror of life, and a book of holy doctrine. There is no
creature so small and vile that does not show forth the goodness
of God.' With this sentence bound about their foreheads, walked Fra
Angelico and S. Francis. To men like them the mountain valleys and the
skies, and all that they contained, were full of deep significance.
Though they reasoned '_de conditione humanæ miseriæ_,' and '_de
contemptu mundi_,' yet the whole world was a pageant of God's
glory, a testimony to His goodness. Their chastened senses, pure
hearts, and simple wills were as wings by which they soared above the
things of earth, and sent the music of their souls aloft with every
other creature in the symphony of praise. To them, as to Blake, the
sun was no mere blazing disc or ball, but 'an innumerable company
of the heavenly host singing, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God
Almighty."' To them the winds were brothers, and the streams were
sisters--brethren in common dependence upon God their Father, brethren
in common consecration to His service, brethren by blood, brethren by
vows of holiness. Unquestioning faith rendered this world no puzzle;
they overlooked the things of sense because the spiritual things
were ever present, and as clear as day. Yet did they not forget
that spiritual things are symbolised by things of sense; and so the
smallest herb of grass was vital to their tranquil contemplations.
We who have lost sight of the invisible world, who set our affections
more on things of earth, fancy that because these monks despised the
world, and did not write about its landscapes, therefore they were
dead to its beauty. This is mere vanity: the mountains, stars, seas,
fields, and living things were only swallowed up in the one thought of
God, and made subordinate to the awfulness of human destinies. We
to whom hills are hills, and seas are seas, and stars are ponderable
quantities, speak, write, and reason of them as of objects interesting
in themselves. The monks were less ostensibly concerned about such
things, because they only found in them the vestibules and symbols of
a hidden mystery.

The contrast between the Greek and mediæval modes of regarding
Nature is not a little remarkable. Both Greeks and monks, judged by
nineteenth-century standards, were unobservant of natural beauties.
They make but brief and general remarks upon landscapes and the like.
The [Greek: pontiôn te kumatôn anêrithmon gelasma] is very
rare. But the Greeks stopped at the threshold of Nature; the forces
they found there, the gods, were inherent in Nature, and distinct.
They did not, like the monks, place one spiritual power, omnipotent
and omnipresent, above all, and see in Nature lessons of Divine
government. We ourselves having somewhat overstrained the latter point
of view, are now apt to return vaguely to Greek fancies. Perhaps, too,
we talk so much about scenery because it is scenery to us, and the
life has gone out of it.

I cannot leave the Cornice without one word about a place which lies
between Mentone and San Remo. Bordighera has a beauty which is quite
distinct from both. Palms are its chief characteristics. They lean
against the garden walls, and feather the wells outside the town,
where women come with brazen pitchers to draw water. In some of the
marshy tangles of the plain, they spring from a thick undergrowth of
spiky leaves, and rear their tall aërial arms against the deep blue
background of the sea or darker purple of the distant hills. White
pigeons fly about among their branches, and the air is loud with
cooings and with rustlings, and the hoarser croaking of innumerable
frogs. Then, in the olive-groves that stretch along the level shore,
are labyrinths of rare and curious plants, painted tulips and white
periwinkles, flinging their light of blossoms and dark glossy leaves
down the swift channels of the brawling streams. On each side of the
rivulets they grow, like sister cataracts of flowers instead of spray.
At night fresh stars come out along the coast, beneath the stars
of heaven; for you can see the lamps of Ventimiglia and Mentone
and Monaco, and, far away, the lighthouses upon the promontories of
Antibes and the Estrelles. At dawn, a vision of Corsica grows from
the sea. The island lies eighty miles away, but one can trace the
dark strip of irregular peaks glowing amid the gold and purple of the
rising sun. If the air is clear and bright, the snows and overvaulting
clouds which crown its mountains shine all day, and glitter like an
apparition in the bright blue sky. 'Phantom fair,' half raised above
the sea, it stands, as unreal and transparent as the moon when seen in
April sunlight, yet not to be confounded with the shape of any cloud.
If Mentone speaks of Greek legends, and San Romolo restores the
monastic past, we feel ourselves at Bordighera transported to the
East; and lying under its tall palms can fancy ourselves at Tyre or
Daphne, or in the gardens of a Moslem prince.

    Note.--Dec. 1873. My old impressions are renewed and confirmed
    by a third visit, after seven years, to this coast. For purely
    idyllic loveliness, the Cornice is surpassed by nothing in
    the South. A very few spots in Sicily, the road between
    Castellammare and Amalfi, and the island of Corfu, are its
    only rivals in this style of scenery. From Cannes to Sestri is
    one continuous line of exquisitely modulated landscape beauty,
    which can only be fully appreciated by travellers in carriage
    or on foot.

       *       *       *       *       *




_AJACCIO_


It generally happens that visitors to Ajaccio pass over from the
Cornice coast, leaving Nice at night, and waking about sunrise to find
themselves beneath the frowning mountains of Corsica. The difference
between the scenery of the island and the shores which they have
left is very striking. Instead of the rocky mountains of the Cornice,
intolerably dry and barren at their summits, but covered at their base
with villages and ancient towns and olive-fields, Corsica presents a
scene of solitary and peculiar grandeur. The highest mountain-tops are
covered with snow, and beneath the snow-level to the sea they are
as green as Irish or as English hills, but nearly uninhabited and
uncultivated. Valleys of almost Alpine verdure are succeeded by
tracts of chestnut wood and scattered pines, or deep and flowery
brushwood--the 'maquis' of Corsica, which yields shelter to its
traditional outlaws and bandits. Yet upon these hillsides there
are hardly any signs of life; the whole country seems abandoned to
primeval wildness and the majesty of desolation. Nothing can possibly
be more unlike the smiling Riviera, every square mile of which is
cultivated like a garden, and every valley and bay dotted over with
white villages. After steaming for a few hours along this savage
coast, the rocks which guard the entrance to the bay of Ajaccio,
murderous-looking teeth and needles ominously christened Sanguinari,
are passed, and we enter the splendid land-locked harbour, on the
northern shore of which Ajaccio is built. About three centuries ago
the town, which used to occupy the extreme or eastern end of the bay,
was removed to a more healthy point upon the northern coast, so that
Ajaccio is quite a modern city. Visitors who expect to find in it
the picturesqueness of Genoa or San Remo, or even of Mentone, will
be sadly disappointed. It is simply a healthy, well-appointed town of
recent date, the chief merits of which are, that it has wide streets,
and is free, externally at least, from the filth and rubbish of most
southern seaports.

But if Ajaccio itself is not picturesque, the scenery which
it commands, and in the heart of which it lies, is of the most
magnificent. The bay of Ajaccio resembles a vast Italian lake--a Lago
Maggiore, with greater space between the mountains and the shore.
From the snow-peaks of the interior, huge granite crystals clothed in
white, to the southern extremity of the bay, peak succeeds peak and
ridge rises behind ridge in a line of wonderful variety and beauty.
The atmospheric changes of light and shadow, cloud and colour, on this
upland country, are as subtle and as various as those which lend their
beauty to the scenery of the lakes, while the sea below is blue and
rarely troubled. One could never get tired with looking at this view.
Morning and evening add new charms to its sublimity and beauty. In the
early morning Monte d'Oro sparkles like a Monte Rosa with its fresh
snow, and the whole inferior range puts on the crystal blueness of
dawn among the Alps. In the evening, violet and purple tints and
the golden glow of Italian sunset lend a different lustre to the
fairyland. In fact, the beauties of Switzerland and Italy are
curiously blended in this landscape.

In soil and vegetation the country round Ajaccio differs much from the
Cornice. There are very few olive-trees, nor is the cultivated ground
backed up so immediately by stony mountains; but between the seashore
and the hills there is plenty of space for pasture-land, and orchards
of apricot and peach-trees, and orange gardens. This undulating
champaign, green with meadows and watered with clear streams, is very
refreshing to the eyes of Northern people, who may have wearied of the
bareness and greyness of Nice or Mentone. It is traversed by excellent
roads, recently constructed on a plan of the French Government, which
intersect the country in all directions, and offer an infinite variety
of rides or drives to visitors. The broken granite of which these
roads are made is very pleasant for riding over. Most of the hills
through which they strike, after starting from Ajaccio, are
clothed with a thick brushwood of box, ilex, lentisk, arbutus,
and laurustinus, which stretches down irregularly into vineyards,
olive-gardens, and meadows. It is, indeed, the native growth of the
island; for wherever a piece of ground is left untilled, the macchi
grow up, and the scent of their multitudinous aromatic blossoms is so
strong that it may be smelt miles out at sea. Napoleon, at S. Helena,
referred to this fragrance when he said that he should know Corsica
blindfold by the smell of its soil. Occasional woods of holm oak make
darker patches on the landscape, and a few pines fringe the side of
enclosure walls or towers. The prickly pear runs riot in and out
among the hedges and upon the walls, diversifying the colours of the
landscape with its strange grey-green masses and unwieldy fans. In
spring, when peach and almond trees are in blossom, and when the
roadside is starred with asphodels, this country is most beautiful in
its gladness. The macchi blaze with cistus flowers of red and silver.
Golden broom mixes with the dark purple of the great French lavender,
and over the whole mass of blossom wave plumes of Mediterranean heath
and sweet-scented yellow coronilla. Under the stems of the ilex peep
cyclamens, pink and sweet; the hedgerows are a tangle of vetches,
convolvuluses, lupines, orchises, and alliums, with here and there a
purple iris. It would be difficult to describe all the rare and lovely
plants which are found here in a profusion that surpasses even the
flower-gardens of the Cornice, and reminds one of the most favoured
Alpine valleys in their early spring.

Since the French occupied Corsica they have done much for the island
by improving its harbours and making good roads, and endeavouring
to mitigate the ferocity of the people. But they have many things to
contend against, and Corsica is still behind the other provinces of
France. The people are idle, haughty, umbrageous, fiery, quarrelsome,
fond of gipsy life, and retentive through generations of old feuds and
prejudices to an almost inconceivable extent. Then the nature of the
country itself offers serious obstacles to its proper colonisation
and cultivation. The savage state of the island and its internal feuds
have disposed the Corsicans to quit the seaboard for their mountain
villages and fortresses, so that the great plains at the foot of the
hills are unwholesome for want of tillage and drainage. Again,
the mountains themselves have in many parts been stripped of their
forests, and converted into mere wildernesses of macchi stretching
up and down their slopes for miles and miles of useless desolation.
Another impediment to proper cultivation is found in the old habit of
what is called free pasturage. The highland shepherds are allowed
by the national custom to drive down their flocks and herds to the
lowlands during the winter, so that fences are broken, young crops
are browsed over and trampled down, and agriculture becomes a mere
impossibility. The last and chief difficulty against which the French
have had to contend, and up to this time with apparent success, is
brigandage. The Corsican system of brigandage is so very different
from that of the Italians, Sicilians, and Greeks, that a word may be
said about its peculiar character. In the first place, it has nothing
at all to do with robbery and thieving. The Corsican bandit took to a
free life among the macchi, not for the sake of supporting himself by
lawless depredation, but because he had put himself under a legal and
social ban by murdering some one in obedience to the strict code of
honour of his country. His victim may have been the hereditary foe of
his house for generations, or else the newly made enemy of yesterday.
But in either case, if he had killed him fairly, after a due
notification of his intention to do so, he was held to have fulfilled
a duty rather than to have committed a crime. He then betook himself
to the dense tangles of evergreens which I have described, where he
lived upon the charity of countryfolk and shepherds. In the eyes of
those simple people it was a sacred duty to relieve the necessities of
the outlaws, and to guard them from the bloodhounds of justice. There
was scarcely a respectable family in Corsica who had not one or more
of its members thus _alla campagna_, as it was euphemistically
styled. The Corsicans themselves have attributed this miserable state
of things to two principal causes. The first of these was the ancient
bad government of the island: under its Genoese rulers no justice was
administered, and private vengeance for homicide or insult became a
necessary consequence among the haughty and warlike families of
the mountain villages. Secondly, the Corsicans have been from time
immemorial accustomed to wear arms in everyday life. They used to sit
at their house doors and pace the streets with musket, pistol, dagger,
and cartouch-box on their persons; and on the most trivial occasion
of merriment or enthusiasm they would discharge their firearms. This
habit gave a bloody termination to many quarrels, which might have
ended more peaceably had the parties been unarmed; and so the seeds
of _vendetta_ were constantly being sown. Statistics published
by the French Government present a hideous picture of the state of
bloodshed in Corsica even during this century. In one period of thirty
years (between 1821 and 1850) there were 4319 murders in the island.
Almost every man was watching for his neighbour's life, or seeking how
to save his own; and agriculture and commerce were neglected for this
grisly game of hide-and-seek. In 1853 the French began to take strong
measures, and, under the Prefect Thuillier, they hunted the bandits
from the macchi, killing between 200 and 300 of them. At the same time
an edict was promulgated against bearing arms. It is forbidden to sell
the old Corsican stiletto in the shops, and no one may carry a gun,
even for sporting purposes, unless he obtains a special licence. These
licences, moreover, are only granted for short and precisely measured
periods.

In order to appreciate the stern and gloomy character of the
Corsicans, it is necessary to leave the smiling gardens of Ajaccio,
and to visit some of the more distant mountain villages--Vico, Cavro,
Bastelica, or Bocognano, any of which may easily be reached from the
capital. Immediately after quitting the seaboard, we enter a country
austere in its simplicity, solemn without relief, yet dignified by its
majesty and by the sense of freedom it inspires. As we approach the
mountains, the macchi become taller, feathering man-high above the
road, and stretching far away upon the hills. Gigantic masses of
granite, shaped like buttresses and bastions, seem to guard the
approaches to these hills; while, looking backward over the green
plain, the sea lies smiling in a haze of blue among the rocky horns
and misty headlands of the coast. There is a stateliness about the
abrupt inclination of these granite 

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