CHAPTER V

THE SIMPLON

83. MORE and more deeply every hour, in retracing Alpine paths,-by my fireside,-the wonder grows on me, what Heaven made the Alps for, and gave the chamois its foot, and the gentian its blue,-yet gave no one the heart to love them. And in the Alps, why especially that mighty central pass was so divinely planned, yet no one to pass it but against their wills, till Napoleon came, and made a road over it.

Nor often, since, with any joy; though in truth there is no other such piece of beauty and power, full of human interest of the most strangely varied kind, in all the mountain scenery of the globe, as that traverse, with its two terminal cities, Geneva and Milan; its two lovely lakes of approach, Leman and Maggiore; its two tremendous valleys of vestibule, the Valais and Val d’Ossola; and its own, not desolate nor terrible, but wholly beautiful, upper region of rose and snow.

Of my early joy in Milan, I have already told;¹ of Geneva, there is no telling, though I must now give what poor picture I may of the days we spent there, happy to young and old alike, again and again, in ’33, ’35, ’42, and now, with full deliberation, in ’44, knowing, and, in their repetitions twice, and thrice, and four times, magnifying, the well-remembered joys. And still I am more thankful, through every year of added life, that I was born in London, near enough to Geneva for me to reach it easily;-and yet a city so contrary to everything Genevoise as

¹ [See i. § 136; above, p. 117.]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]