essed there, on the
visionary images of king or patriarch, in the deeply incised marks of
character, the hoary hair, the massive proportions, telling of a length
of years beyond what is lived now. Surely, past ages, could one get at
the historic soul of them, were not dead but living, rich in company,
for the entertainment, the expansion, of the present: and Duke Carl was
still without suspicion of the cynic afterthought that such historic
soul was but an arbitrary substitution, a generous loan of one's self.

The mystic soul of Nature laid hold on him [146] next, saying, "Come!
understand, interpret me!" He was awakened one morning by the jingle
of sledge-bells along the street beneath his windows. Winter had
descended betimes from the mountains: the pale Rhine below the bridge
of boats on the long way to Kehl was swollen with ice, and for the
first time he realised that Switzerland was at hand. On a sudden he
was captive to the enthusiasm of the mountains, and hastened along the
valley of the Rhine by Alt Breisach and Basle, unrepelled by a thousand
difficulties, to Swiss farmhouses and lonely villages, solemn still,
and untouched by strangers. At Grindelwald, sleeping at last in the
close neighbourhood of the greater Alps, he had the sense of an
overbrooding presence, of some strange new companions around him. Here
one might yield one's self to the unalterable imaginative appeal of the
elements in their highest force and simplicity--light, air, water,
earth. On very early spring days a mantle was suddenly lifted; the
Alps were an apex of natural glory, towards which, in broadening spaces
of light, the whole of Europe sloped upwards. Through them, on the
right hand, as he journeyed on, were the doorways to Italy, to Como or
Venice, from yonder peak Italy's self was visible!--as, on the left
hand, in the South-german towns, in a high-toned, artistic fineness, in
the dainty, flowered ironwork for instance, the overflow of Italian
genius was traceable. These things [147] presented themselves at last
only to remind him that, in a new intellectual hope, he was already on
his way home. Straight through life, straight through nature and man,
with one's own self-knowledge as a light thereon, not by way of the
geographical Italy or Greece, lay the road to the new Hellas, to be
realised now as the outcome of home-born German genius. At times, in
that early fine weather, looking now not southwards, but towards
Germany,