his personal
requirements, scrupulous in his choice of words, averse to unnecessary
physical exertion, preferring town to country life, _cannot_
deeply feel the charm of the Alps. Such a man will dislike German art,
and however much he may strive to be Catholic in his tastes, will find
as he grows older that his liking for Gothic architecture and modern
painting diminish almost to aversion before an increasing admiration
for Greek peristyles and the Medicean Venus. If in respect of
speculation all men are either Platonists or Aristotelians, in respect
of taste all men are either Greek or German.

At present the German, the indefinite, the natural, commands; the
Greek, the finite, the cultivated, is in abeyance. We who talk so
much about the feeling of the Alps, are creatures, not creators of our
_cultus_,--a strange reflection, proving how much greater man is
than men, the common reason of the age in which we live than our own
reasons, its constituents and subjects.

Perhaps it is our modern tendency to 'individualism' which makes the
Alps so much to us. Society is there reduced to a vanishing point--no
claims are made on human sympathies--there is no need to toil in
yoke-service with our fellows. We may be alone, dream our own
dreams, and sound the depths of personality without the reproach of
selfishness, without a restless wish to join in action or money-making
or the pursuit of fame. To habitual residents among the Alps this
absence of social duties and advantages may be barbarising, even
brutalising. But to men wearied with too much civilisation,
and deafened by the noise of great cities, it is beyond measure
refreshing. Then, again, among the mountains history finds no place.
The Alps have no past nor present nor future. The human beings who
live upon their sides are at odds with nature, clinging on for bare
existence to the soil, sheltering themselves beneath protecting rocks
from avalanches, damming up destructive streams, all but annihilated
every spring. Man, who is paramount in the plain, is nothing here. His
arts and sciences, and dynasties, and modes of life, and mighty works,
and conquests and decays, demand our whole attention in Italy or
Egypt. But here the mountains, immemorially the same, which were,
which are, and which are to be, present a theatre on which the soul
breathes freely and feels herself alone. Around her on all sides is
God, and Nature, who is here the face of God and not the slave of m