D. H. Lawrence had a special gift for portraying what he called the spirit of place. Landscape is an essential character in his narratives, but often it is more a spiritual than a physical landscape, one that incorporates the physical facts of the place with the people who inhabit it and who have been formed by it. "I am not Baedeker," Lawrence said, referring to the popular tourist guidebooks. His friend Aldous Huxley called him "a kind of mystical materialist." Lawrence's travel writing is more about his own reactions to people and places than descriptions of the places he visited. The places are physically there, but the reader travels mainly inside Lawrence's feelings about the places and the people. For example, his essay "Christs in the Tirol," first published in the 22 March 1913 issue of the Saturday Westminster Gazette, does not actually describe the land through which he passed...