In France, in Italy, in Spain, in Greece and in Turkey, I hold in memory
many a superb landscape. From boyhood upward I thirsted for all kinds of
Nature's gifts, whether by sea, or by river, lake, mountain, or forest.
For sixty years at least I have roved about the white cliffs, the moors,
the riversides, lakes, and pastures of our own islands from Penzance to
Cape Wrath, from Beachy Head to the Shetlands. I love them all. But
they can not touch me, as do the Alps, with the sense at once of
inexhaustible loveliness and of a sort of conscious sympathy with every
fiber of man's heart and brain. Why then is this so?

I find it in the immense range of the moods in which Nature is seen
in the Alps, as least by those who have fully absorbed all the forms,
sights, sounds, wonders, and adventures they offer. An hour's walk will
show them all in profound contrast and yet in exquisite harmony. The
Alps form a book of Nature as wide and as mysterious as Life.

Earth has no scenes of placid fruitfulness more balmy than the banks of
one of the larger lakes, crowded with vineyards, orchards, groves and
pastures, down to the edge of its watery mirror, wherein, beside a
semi-tropical vegetation, we see the image of some medieval castle, of
some historic tower, and thence the eye strays up to sunless gorges,
swept with avalanches, and steaming with feathery cascades; and higher
yet one sees against the skyline ranges of terrific crags, girt with
glaciers, and so often wreathed in storm clouds.

All that Earth has of most sweet, softest, easiest, most suggestive of
langor and love, of fertility and abundance--here is seen in one vision
beside all that Nature has most hard, most cruel, most unkind to
Man--where life is one long weary battle with a frost bitten soil, and
every peasant's hut has been built up stone by stone, and log by log,
with sweat and groans, and wrecked hopes. In a few hours one may pass
from an enchanted garden, where every sense is satiated, and every
flower and leaf and gleam of light is intoxication, up into a wilderness
of difficult crags and yawning glaciers, which men can reach only by
hard-earned skill, tough muscle and iron nerves....

The Alps are international, European, Humanitarian. Four written
languages are spoken in their valleys, and ten times as many local
dialects. The Alps are not especially Swiss--I used to think they were
English--they belong equally to four nations of Europe; they are the
san