4 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



brooks and green meadows in the heart of the tawny Apennine. 

 As a foreign critic has laid down, amcenitas, pleasantness, is the 

 keynote to Roman appreciation of scenery. 1 We have no des- 

 cription of the Passage of the Alps or of the Pyrenees from a 

 picturesque point of view in Latin literature. Livy, Claudian, 

 and Silius Italicus, when dealing with Alpine campaigns, emphasise 

 only their disagreeable features. 



In the days of the Empire, while the Roman Peace lasted and 

 Roman roads, with their elaborate system of inns and post houses, 

 were kept in repair, the Alps were no very serious obstacle. They 

 could be neglected, if not ignored. But when to the difficulties 

 of broken tracks were added the dangers from Saracenic marauders 

 or ordinary outlaws, they began to be looked on with extreme 

 disfavour. In the tenth century an old English monk, who had 

 doubtless suffered in crossing the Great St. Bernard on his way to 

 Rome, wrote of ' the bitter blasts of glaciers and the Pennine 

 army of evil spirits.' He used this quaint formula more than 

 once as a malediction against any breaker of the covenants con- 

 tained in the legal documents he was called on to draft. 2 It 

 should be borne in mind that the mediaeval pilgrims to Rome 

 generally crossed the passes at the worst possible season, before 

 Easter, when the late avalanches are falling ; at the moment of 

 the year when spring is holding her first revel in the lowlands, 

 and her fingers have not yet spread the brilliant flower -carpet of 

 an Alpine summer over the higher pastures, where the brown bare 

 slopes are still flecked with ugly patches of half -melting snow. 



Thus the third or modern period, that of ' the love of the 

 Alps,' was preceded by centuries during which the feeling for 

 natural scenery was restricted within narrow bounds, and only 

 such regions as could be put to human uses were brought within 

 the reach of human sympathies. In the case of the High Alps, the 

 discovery of such uses was very gradual. It came about mainly 

 in this wise. As the years went on and the old order broke up, 

 the Alpine valleys were found to contain retreats serviceable for 

 the cure both of souls and bodies. The Church took the lead in 

 familiarising men with mountains by showing that the solitudes 



1 Friedlander, Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Koms, vol. ii. 

 1 In some of the later documents a less-travelled scribe, puzzled by Pennine, 

 substituted for it pemici. 



