Saviour might have felt, when from the top of that
high mountain He beheld the kingdoms of the world and all the glory of
them. Strangely and solemnly may we image to our fancy the lives that
are being lived down in those cities of the plain: how many are waking
at this very moment to toil and a painful weariness, to sorrow, or to
'that unrest which men miscall delight;' while we upon our mountain
buttress, suspended in mid-heaven and for a while removed from daily
cares, are drinking in the beauty of the world that God has made so
fair and wonderful. From this same eyrie, only a few years ago, the
hostile armies of France, Italy, and Austria might have been watched
moving in dim masses across the plains, for the possession of which
they were to clash in mortal fight at Solferino and Magenta. All is
peaceful now. It is hard to picture the waving cornfields trodden
down, the burning villages and ransacked vineyards, all the horrors of
real war to which that fertile plain has been so often the prey. But
now these memories of

Old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago,

do but add a calm and beauty to the radiant scene that lies before us.
And the thoughts which it suggests, the images with which it stores
our mind, are not without their noblest uses. The glory of the world
sinks deeper into our shallow souls than we well know; and the spirit
of its splendour is always ready to revisit us on dark and dreary days
at home with an unspeakable refreshment. Even as I write, I seem to
see the golden glow sweeping in broad waves over the purple hills
nearer and nearer, till the lake brightens at our feet, and the
windows of Lugano flash with sunlight, and little boats creep forth
across the water like spiders on a pond, leaving an arrowy track of
light upon the green behind them, while Monte Salvadore with its tiny
chapel and a patch of the further landscape are still kept in darkness
by the shadow of the Generoso itself. The birds wake into song as the
sun's light comes; cuckoo answers cuckoo from ridge to ridge; dogs
bark; and even the sounds of human life rise up to us: children's
voices and the murmurs of the market-place ascending faintly from the
many villages hidden among the chestnut-trees beneath our feet; while
the creaking of a cart we can but just see slowly crawling along the
straight road by the lake, is heard at intervals.

The full beauty of the sunrise is but brief. Already the low lakelike
mist