ure me to yourself, I pray--
A man of my peculiar cut--
Apart from dancing and deray,
Into an Alpine valley shut;

Shut in a kind of damned hotel,
Discountenanced by God and man;
The food?--Sir, you would do as well
To cram your belly full of bran.

The soul of Ruskin was born and fashioned for the mountains. His first
visit to Switzerland in 1833 brought him to "the Gates of the
Hills--opening for me a new life--to cease no more except at the Gates
of the Hills whence one returns not. It is not possible to imagine," he
adds of his first sight of the Alps, "in any time of the world a more
blessed entrance into life for a child of such temperament as mine.... I
went down that evening from the garden terrace of Schaffhausen with my
devotion fixed in all of it that was to be sacred and useful."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Life of Ruskin_, by Sir Edward Cooke
(George Allen and Unwin Ltd.).]

That profound stirring of the depths of the soul which Ruskin avowed as
the impetus to his life's work is only possible when the mind is fired
by a devotion to the mountains which brooks no rival. "For, to myself,
mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery," he
wrote in _The Mountain Glory_; "in them, and in the forms of inferior
landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up." And he
completely and forever reversed Dante's dismal conception of scenery
befitting souls in purgatory by saying that "the best image which the
world can give of Paradise is in the slope of the meadows, orchards, and
cornfields on the sides of a great Alp, with its purple rocks and
eternal snows above."

No lover of mountains has approached Ruskin in intensity of veneration.
Emile Javelle is not far away. Javelle climbed as by a religious
impulse; his imagination was filled by Alpine shapes; he, like Ruskin,
had forfeited his heart to the invisible snow-maiden that dwells above
the clouds. When Javelle was a child his uncle showed him a collection
of plants, and amongst them the "Androsace ... rochers du Mont Blanc."
This roused the desire to climb; the faded bit of moss with the portion
of earth still clinging to the roots became a sacred relic beckoning him
to the shrine of the white mountain. In the same way Ruskin, mature and
didactic, yet withal so beautifully childlike, tells us "that a wild bit
of ferny ground under a fir or two, looking as if possibly one might see
a hill if one got to the othe