While I Was Feeling These Things, I Was Groping,
Without Knowing It, Toward An Understanding Of What The
Spell Is
Which people find in the Alps, and in no other
mountains - that strange, deep, nameless influence, which,
once felt, cannot
Be forgotten - once felt, leaves always
behind it a restless longing to feel it again - a longing
which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning
which will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will.
I met dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative,
cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far countries
and roamed through the Swiss Alps year after year - they
could not explain why. They had come first, they said,
out of idle curiosity, because everybody talked about it;
they had come since because they could not help it, and they
should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same reason;
they had tried to break their chains and stay away,
but it was futile; now, they had no desire to break them.
Others came nearer formulating what they felt; they said they
could find perfect rest and peace nowhere else when they
were troubled: all frets and worries and chafings sank to
sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps;
the Great Spirit of the Mountain breathed his own peace
upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them;
they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid
things here, before the visible throne of God.
Down the road a piece was a Kursaal - whatever that may be
- and we joined the human tide to see what sort of enjoyment
it might afford.
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