he more sharply by the
contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding
contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a
spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a
million vanished races of men and judged them; and would judge a
million more--and still be there, watching unchanged and
unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have
become a vacant desolation

While I was feeling these things, I was groping, without knowing it,
toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in
the Alps, and in no other mountains; that strange, deep, nameless
influence which, once felt, cannot be forgotten; once felt, leaves
always behind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing
which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning, which
will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will. I met
dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative, cultivated and
uncultivated, who had come from far countries and roamed through the
Swiss Alps year after year--they could not explain why. They had
come first, they said, out of idle curiosity, because everybody
talked about it; they had come since because they could not help it,
and they should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same
reason; they had tried to break their chains and stay away, but it
was futile; now they had no desire to break them. Others came
nearer formulating what they felt; they said they could find perfect
rest and peace nowhere else when they were troubled: all frets and
worries and chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant
serenity of the Alps; the Great Spirit of the mountain breathed his
own peace upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them;
they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid things
here, before the visible throne of God.

Indeed, all the serious matter in the book is good. The reader's chief
regret is likely to be that there is not more of it. The main difficulty
with the humor is that it seems overdone. It is likely to be carried
too far, and continued too long. The ascent of Riffelberg is an example.
Though spotted with delights it seems, to one reader at least, less
admirable than other of the book's important features, striking, as it
does, more emphatically the chief note of the book's humor--that is t