Or, Possibly, You Arise Very Early In The Morning; Totter Down
Stairs In A State Of Somnambulism; Take The Simulacrum Of A Meal By
The Glimmer Of One Lamp In The Deserted Coffee-Room; And Find
Yourself By Seven O'clock Outside In A Belated Moonlight And A
Freezing Chill.
The mail sleigh takes you up and carries you on,
and you reach the top of the ascent in
The first hour of the day.
To trace the fires of the sunrise as they pass from peak to peak,
to see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly against the lighted
sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading
shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half
glorified already with the day and still half confounded with the
greyness of the western heaven - these will seem to repay you for
the discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and
these enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther
side in yet another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, with
such another long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such another
senseless watercourse bickering along the foot. You have had your
moment; but you have not changed the scene. The mountains are
about you like a trap; you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold
the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and corners, and can
change only one for another.
CHAPTER X - HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has
followed in the lives of sick folk. A year or two ago and the
wounded soldiery of mankind were all shut up together in some
basking angle of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting
in dusty olive-yards within earshot of the interminable and
unchanging surf - idle among spiritless idlers; not perhaps dying,
yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after
livelier weather and some vivifying change. These were certainly
beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its
softness. Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine; you were
not certain whether you were being wooed; and these mild shores
would sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death. There was a
lack of a manly element; the air was not reactive; you might write
bits of poetry and practise resignation, but you did not feel that
here was a good spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve.
And it appears, after all, that there was something just in these
appreciations. The invalid is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a
ruder air shall medicine him; the demon of cold is no longer to be
fled from, but bearded in his den. For even Winter has his 'dear
domestic cave,' and in those places where he may be said to dwell
for ever tempers his austerities.
Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental
railroad of America must remember the joy with which he perceived,
after the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and
dismal moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits alone,
the southern sky.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 117 of 136
Words from 60339 to 60872
of 70588
