the Adriatic, in the high passes of the
Alps; but in that little space of four days I made acquaintance with
their influence, and I owe them a perpetual gratitude for their
architecture and their tales. I had come from France, which is full of
an active memory of Rome. I was to debouch into those larger plains of
Italy, which keep about them an atmosphere of Rome in decay. Here in
Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern, exterior, and
barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a distorted Latin
tongue, and only after the first day began to give me a Teutonic
dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they had about them
neither the Latin order nor the Latin power to create, but were
contemplative and easily absorbed by a little effort.

The German spirit is a marvel. There lay Porrentruy. An odd door with
Gothic turrets marked the entry to the town. To the right of this
gateway a tower, more enormous than anything I remembered to have
seen, even in dreams, flanked the approach to the city. How vast it
was, how protected, how high, how eaved, how enduring! I was told
later that some part of that great bastion was Roman, and I can
believe it. The Germans hate to destroy. It overwhelmed me as visions
overwhelm, and I felt in its presence as boys feel when they first see
the mountains. Had I not been a Christian, I would have worshipped and
propitiated this obsession, this everlasting thing.

As it was I entered Porrentruy soberly. I passed under its deep
gateway and up its steep hill. The moment I was well into the main
street, something other of the Middle Ages possessed me, and I began
to think of food and wine. I went to the very first small guest-house
I could find, and asked them if they could serve me food. They said
that at such an early hour (it was not yet ten) they could give me
nothing but bread, yesterday's meat, and wine. I said that would do
very well, and all these things were set before me, and by a custom of
the country I paid before I ate. (A bad custom. Up in the Limousin,
when I was a boy, in the noisy valley of the Torrent, on the Vienne, I
remember a woman that did not allow me to pay till she had held the
bottle up to the light, measured the veal with her finger, and
estimated the bread with her eye; also she charged me double. God
rest her soul!) I say I paid. And had I had to pay twenty or
twenty-three times as much it would have been worth it for the wine.

I am hurryi