nutes 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.

II

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 along the southern
sky. It is among these mountains