gone
days, traditions of their fathers' time, are interwoven with the passing
hour--and where primitive habits and tastes are believed to carry
with them a blessing, as to those who honour their fathers' memories.
National gratitude is far more closely allied with individual gratitude
than is usually believed. Under the shade of the great tree the little
plant is often nurtured. It is easy to imagine well of the individual,
where the masses are moved by noble aspirations.

Scarcely a valley, not a single defile here, is without Us historic
glories--many of them as of yesterday, and yet, in their simple
heroism, recalling a time when personal valour was of greater worth than
strategic skill and science. I always regret that Scott, who understood
mountains and those who dwell thereon so thoroughly, should never have
made the Tyrol the scene of a romance.

Even among the "simple annals of the poor" here are little incidents
eminently romantic in their character, while so distinctly national that
they tell, in every detail, the mind of the people who enacted them.

How I should like once more to be young of heart and limb, and able to
travel these winding glens and climb these mountain steeps as once I
could have done! Even now, as I sit here in this little "Wirth's-Haus,"
how the old spirit of wandering comes back 'again as I watch the
peasant, with his long staff in hand, braving the mountain side, or
standing for a second on some rocky peak, to gaze down into the steep
depth below--that narrow valley filled by road and river.

"Gott hat sein plan Fuer Jedenmann."

What a road is that from Landeck to Meran!--at once the most beautiful
and the grandest of all the Tyrol passes. The gorge is so narrow, that
it seems rather like a deep channel cut by the river itself; where, on
either side, hundreds of feet in height, rise the rocks--not straight,
but actually impending above the head, leaving, in some places, the
ravine narrower above than beneath.

Escarped in this rock, the road winds on, protected by a little parapet
along the edge of the precipice. Beneath, at a depth to make the
head dizzy to gaze at, is seen the river, whose waters are of a pale
sky-blue, the most delicate and beautiful colour I ever beheld. As the
necessities of the road require, you have to cross the river; more
than once, on wooden bridges, which in themselves are curious for their
ingenuity of construction, if one could think of aught sa