parapet our horses dropped, down through sable spruce and amber larch, down between tangles of rowan and autumnal underwood.  Ever as we sank, the mountains rose—­those sharp embattled precipices, toppling spires, impendent chasms blurred with mist, that make the entrance into Italy sublime.  Nowhere do the Alps exhibit their full stature, their commanding puissance, with such majesty as in the gates of Italy; and of all those gates I think there is none to compare with Maloja, none certainly to rival it in abruptness of initiation into the Italian secret.  Below Vico Soprano we pass already into the violets and blues of Titian’s landscape.  Then come the purple boulders among chestnut trees; then the double dolomite-like peak of Pitz Badin and Promontogno.

It is sad that words can do even less than painting could to bring this window-scene at Promontogno before another eye.  The casement just frames it.  In the foreground are meadow slopes, thinly, capriciously planted with chestnut trees and walnuts, each standing with its shadow cast upon the sward.  A little farther falls the torrent, foaming down between black jaws of rain-stained granite, with the wooden buildings of a rustic mill set on a ledge of rock.  Suddenly above this landscape soars the valley, clothing its steep sides on either hand with pines; and there are emerald isles of pasture on the wooded flanks; and then cliffs, where the red-stemmed larches glow; and at the summit, shooting into ether with a swathe of mist around their basement, soar the double peaks, the one a pyramid, the other a bold broken crystal not unlike the Finsteraarhorn seen from Furka.  These are connected by a snowy saddle, and snow is lying on their inaccessible crags in powdery drifts.  Sunlight pours between them into the ravine.  The green and golden forests now join from either side, and now recede, according as the sinuous valley brings their lines together or disparts them.  There is a sound of cow-bells on the meadows; and the roar of the stream is dulled or quickened as the gusts of this October wind sweep by or slacken. Italiam petimus!

Tangimus Italiam! Chiavenna is a worthy key to this great gate Italian.  We walked at night in the open galleries of the cathedral cloister—­white, smoothly curving, well-proportioned loggie, enclosing a green space, whence soars the campanile to the stars.  The moon had sunk, but her light still silvered the mountains that stand at watch round Chiavenna; and the castle rock was flat and black against that dreamy background.  Jupiter, who walked so lately for us on the long ridge of the Jacobshorn above our pines, had now an ample space of sky over Lombardy to light his lamp in.  Why is it, we asked each other, as we smoked our pipes and strolled, my friend and I;—­why is it that Italian beauty does not leave the spirit so untroubled as an Alpine scene?  Why do we here desire the flower of some emergent feeling to grow from the air, or from the soil, or from humanity to greet us?  This sense of want evoked by Southern beauty is perhaps the antique mythopoeic yearning.  But in our perplexed life it takes another form, and seems the longing for emotion, ever fleeting, ever new, unrealised, unreal, insatiable.