ome!
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 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, he seemed to trace the
outspread of a faint, not wholly natural, aurora over the dark northern
country. And it was in an actual sunrise that the news came which
finally put him on the directest road homewards. One hardly dared
breathe in the rapid uprise of all-embracing light which seemed like
the intellectual rising of the Fatherland, when up the straggling path
to his high beech-grown summit (was one safe nowhere?) protesting over
the roughness of the way, came the too familiar voices (ennui itself
made audible) of certain high functionaries of Rosenmold, come to claim
their new sovereig