dreaming. This is the top of some high
mountain, where the crags are cruelly tortured and cast in enormous
splinters on the ledges of cliffs grey with old-world ice. A ravine,
opening at my feet, plunges down immeasurably to a dim and distant
sea. Above me soars a precipice embossed with a gigantic ice-bound
shape. As I gaze thereon, I find the lineaments and limbs of a Titanic
man chained and nailed to the rock. His beard has grown for centuries,
and flowed this way and that, adown his breast and over to the stone
on either side; and the whole of him is covered with a greenish ice,
ancient beyond the memory of man. 'This is Prometheus,' I whisper to
myself, 'and I am alone on Caucasus.'

* * * * *

BACCHUS IN GRAUBUeNDEN

I

Some years' residence in the Canton of the Grisons made me familiar
with all sorts of Valtelline wine; with masculine but rough _Inferno_,
generous _Forzato_, delicate _Sassella_, harsher _Montagner_, the
raspberry flavour of _Grumello_, the sharp invigorating twang of
_Villa_. The colour, ranging from garnet to almandine or ruby, told me
the age and quality of wine; and I could judge from the crust it forms
upon the bottle, whether it had been left long enough in wood to
ripen. I had furthermore arrived at the conclusion that the best
Valtelline can only be tasted in cellars of the Engadine or Davos,
where this vintage matures slowly in the mountain air, and takes a
flavour unknown at lower levels. In a word, it had amused my leisure
to make or think myself a connoisseur. My literary taste was tickled
by the praise bestowed in the Augustan age on Rhaetic grapes by Virgil:

Et quo te carmine dicam,
Rhaetica? nec cellis ideo contende Falernis.

I piqued myself on thinking that could the poet but have drank
one bottle at Samaden--where Stilicho, by the way, in his famous
recruiting expedition may perhaps have drank it--he would have been
less chary in his panegyric. For the point of inferiority on which he
seems to insist, namely, that Valtelline wine does not keep well
in cellar, is only proper to this vintage in Italian climate. Such
meditations led my fancy on the path of history. Is there truth,
then, in the dim tradition that this mountain land was colonised
by Etruscans? Is _Ras_ the root of Rhaetia? The Etruscans were
accomplished wine-growers, we know. It was their Montepulciano which
drew the Gauls to Rome, if Livy can be trusted. Perhaps th