CHAPTER THE LAST. 381 



tilings, and to places that are dear to him, a barren 

 name ; but remembering each as connected with an 

 event call it how he will the word he chooses will 

 have a meaning, a significance. The wider our world, 

 the less sympathy have we for individual objects ; but 

 if we make a valley our home, we become as intimate 

 with every part, and with all belonging to the dale, 

 as we are with the children, and the men and w r omen 

 that inhabit it. And, where this is the case, such ob- 

 jects become a part of us ; they live in our heart, and 

 we invest them with attributes, and we speak of them 

 almost as though they had feelings like ourselves. 

 Hence the personifications which we find in the talk 

 of the mountaineer, the vapours, the storm, the tor- 

 rents, the deep lake, are to him not inanimate things : 

 he has heard or looked on them with dread or with 

 complacent joy ; and he knows the ways of each, as 

 though it were a living creature which he himself had 

 reared. And this is the beginning of poetry. 



I have often asked the name of a peak, or field of 

 snow, only in the hope I might hear that it was some 

 " Spitz/' or " Kopf," or "Firner." The positive pleasure 

 such mere names afford me is greater than I can say. 

 "Wetter Spitz," "Teufels Horn," " Uebergossener 

 Alp," " Gems Wand," " Sonnen Joch," " Steinenes 

 Meer," what painting there is in these words -, what 

 scenes they call up, and how they invest the dead, 

 senseless rock with a living interest ! Yonder peak 

 becomes, for me, more than a mere mass of dumb 

 stone, when I hear that there the wild elements come 



