The dawn was whitening in the east next morning, when we again scrambled through the dwarf beechwood to the precipice above the lake.  Like an ink-blot it lay, unruffled, slumbering sadly.  Broad sheets of vapour brooded on the plain, telling of miasma and fever, of which we on the mountain, in the pure cool air, knew nothing.  The Alps were all there now—­cold, unreal, stretching like a phantom line of snowy peaks, from the sharp pyramids of Monte Viso and the Grivola in the west to the distant Bernina and the Ortler in the east.  Supreme among them towered Monte Rosa—­queenly, triumphant, gazing down in proud pre-eminence, as she does when seen from any point of the Italian plain.  There is no mountain like her.  Mont Blanc himself is scarcely so regal; and she seems to know it, for even the clouds sweep humbled round her base, girdling her at most, but leaving her crown clear and free.  Now, however, there were no clouds to be seen in all the sky.  The mountains had a strange unshriven look, as if waiting to be blessed.  Above them, in the cold grey air, hung a low black arch of shadow, the shadow of the bulk of the huge earth, which still concealed the sun.  Slowly, slowly this dark line sank lower, till, one by one, at last, the peaks caught first a pale pink flush; then a sudden golden glory flashed from one to the other, as they leapt joyfully into life.  It is a supreme moment this first burst of life and light over the sleeping world, as one can only see it on rare days and in rare places like the Monte Generoso.  The earth—­enough of it at least for us to picture to ourselves the whole—­lies at our feet; and we feel as the Saviour might have felt, when from the top of that high mountain He beheld the kingdoms of the world and all the glory of them.  Strangely and solemnly may we image to our fancy the lives that are being lived down in those cities of the plain:  how many are waking at this very moment to toil and a painful weariness, to sorrow, or to ‘that unrest which men miscall delight;’ while we upon our mountain buttress, suspended in mid-heaven and for a while removed from daily cares, are drinking in the beauty of the world that God has made so fair and wonderful.  From this same eyrie, only a few years ago, the hostile armies of France, Italy, and Austria might have been watched moving in dim masses across the plains, for the possession of which they were to clash in mortal fight at Solferino and Magenta.  All is peaceful now.  It is hard to picture the waving cornfields trodden down, the burning villages and ransacked vineyards, all the horrors of real war to which that fertile plain has been so often the prey.  But now these memories of

  Old, unhappy, far-off things,
  And battles long ago,