Excerpt from In Praise of Switzerland: Being the Alps, in Prose and Verse
In the building of Europe, Nature placed as a guard and a barrier at the head of each southern tongue of land, a formidable screen of mountains - the Balkans, the Pyrenees and the Alps. Of all these ranges far and away the most formidable is the Alps. It stretches from sea to sea - from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic. It contains mountains of every shape and form, from the great rounded formation of Mont Blanc to the needle points of the Dolomites. It includes great lakes, rich valleys, wide mountain pastures. It leans down to grassy slopes and up to eternal snows. It comprises vast glaciers and huge plains. In building such a barrier Nature seems to have had some prophetic feeling that it was to be a protection for a race destined to give to Europe both a law and a religion.
For the human interest of the Alps is almost as great as their natural beauty. They protected that early civilisation of Rome from the invading masses of the barbarians, and afterwards sheltered the first flowering of Christianity from the rude hands of Northern heathenism. Not only so, but in modern days the Alps have themselves become the centre and home of a race wrought like beaten iron out of all that is strongest and most valiant in Europe. Throughout the centuries the Western races, whenever pressed by war and persecution, have found their refuge in the mountains. 'From the hills cometh my help!' cried the Psalmist in ancient days; and it was in the mountains that men in the Middle Ages found the only refuge from the inquisitor and the tyrant.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге In Praise of Switzerland