616 REPORT—1904. 
Easter, they traversed the Maurienne while the ground was still brown with frost 
and patched untidily with half-melted snowdrifts. It is no wonder that Gray and 
Richardson, having left spring in the meadows and orchards of Chambéry, 
grumbled at the wintry aspect of Lanslebourg. 
That at the end of the eighteenth century a literary lady of Western Europe 
preferred a Paris gutter to the Lake of Geneva is an amusing caricature of the 
spirit of the age that was passing away, but it is no proof that the love of 
mountains is a new mania, and that all earlier ages and peoples looked on them 
with indifference or dislike. Wordsworth and Byron and Scott in this country, 
Rousseau and Goethe, De Saussure and his school abroad broke the ice, but it was 
the ice of a winter frost, not of a glacial period. 
Consider for a moment the literature of the two peoples who have most influ- 
enced European thought—the Jews and the Greeks. I need hardly quote a book 
that before people quarrelled over education was known to every child—the Bible. 
I would rather refer you to a delightful poem in rhyming German verse written in 
the seventeenth century by a Swiss author, Rebman, in which he relates all the 
great things that happened on mountains in Jewish history : how Solomon enjoyed 
his Sommerfrische on Lebanon, and Moses and Elias both disappeared on moun- 
tain tops; how kings and prophets found their help among the hills; how closely 
the hills of Palestine are connected with the story of the Gospels. 
Consider, again, Greece, where I have just heen wandering. Did the Greeks pay 
no regard to their mountains? They seized eagerly on any striking piece of hill 
scenery and connected it with a legend or a shrine. They took their highest 
mountain, broad-backed Olympus, for the home of the gods; their most conspicuous 
mountain, Parnassus, for the home of poetry. They found in the cliffs of Delphi a 
dwelling for their greatest oracle and a centre for their patriotism. One who has 
lately stood on the tep of Parnassus and seen the first rays of the sun as it springs 
from the waves of the gean strike its snows, while Attica and Beeotia and 
Eubcea still lay in deep shadow under his feet, will appreciate the famous lines of 
Sophocles, which I will not quote,as I am uncertain how you may pronounce 
Greek in this University. You may remember, too, that Lucian makes Hermes 
take Charon, when he has a day out from Hell, to the twin-crested summit, 
and show him the panorama of land and sea, of rivers and famous cities. 
The Vale of Tempe, the deep gap between Olympus and Ossa, beautiful in 
its great red cliffs, fountains, and spreading plane-trees, was part of a Roman’s 
classical tour. ‘The superb buttresses in which Taygetus breaks down on the 
valley of the Eurotas were used by the Spartans for other purposes besides the 
disposal of criminals and weally babies. The middle regions—the lawns above 
the Langada Pass, ‘ virginibus bacchata Lacewnis Taygeta’—are frequented to 
this day as a summer resort by Spartan damsels, The very top, the great rock 
that from a height of 8,000 feet looks down through its woods of oaks and Aleppo 
pines on the twin bays of the southern sea, is a place of immemorial pilgrimages. 
It is now occupied by a chapel framed in a tiny court, so choked with snow at the 
beginning of June that I took the ridge of the chapel roof for a dilapidated 
stoneman. I have no time to-day to look for evidence in classical literature, to 
refer to the discriminating epithets applied in it to mountain scenes. 
A third race destined apparently to play a great part in the world’s history 
—the Japanese—are ancient mountain lovers. We are all aware that Fusiyama to 
the Japanese is (as Ararat to the Armenians) a national symbol; that its ascent 
is constantly made by bands of pilgrims; that it is depicted in every aspect. 
Those who have read the pleasant book of Mr. Watson, who, as English chaplain 
for some years at Tokio, had exceptional opportunities of travel in the interior, 
will remember how often he met with shrines and temples on the summits of the 
mountains, and how he found pilgrims who frequented them in the belief that 
they fell there more readily into spiritual trances. The Japanese Minister, 
when he attended Mr. Watson’s lecture at the Alpine Club, told us that his 
countrymen never climbed mountains without a serious—that is to say, a religious 
—object. 
fede and China would add to my evidence had I knowledge and time enough 
