green and gladden the thirsty turf throughout the heat and drought of summer.  The soil is a Jurassic limestone:  the rain penetrates the porous rock, and sinks through cracks and fissures, to reappear above the base of the mountain in a full-grown stream.  This is a defect in the Generoso, as much to be regretted as the want of shade upon its higher pastures.  Here, as elsewhere in Piedmont, the forests are cut for charcoal; the beech-scrub, which covers large tracts of the hills, never having the chance of growing into trees much higher than a man.  It is this which makes an Italian mountain at a distance look woolly, like a sheep’s back.  Among the brushwood, however, lilies-of-the-valley and Solomon’s seals delight to grow; and the league-long beds of wild strawberries prove that when the laburnums have faded, the mountain will become a garden of feasting.

It was on the crest of Monte Generoso, late one afternoon in May, that we saw a sight of great beauty.  The sun had yet about an hour before it sank behind the peaks of Monte Rosa, and the sky was clear, except for a few white clouds that floated across the plain of Lombardy.  Then as we sat upon the crags, tufted with soldanellas and auriculas, we could see a fleecy vapour gliding upward from the hollows of the mountain, very thin and pale, yet dense enough to blot the landscape to the south and east from sight.  It rose with an imperceptible motion, as the Oceanides might have soared from the sea to comfort Prometheus in the tragedy of AEschylus.  Already the sun had touched its upper edge with gold, and we were expecting to be enveloped in a mist; when suddenly upon the outspread sheet before us there appeared two forms, larger than life, yet not gigantic, surrounded with haloes of such tempered iridescence as the moon half hidden by a summer cloud is wont to make.  They were the glorified figures of ourselves; and what we did, the phantoms mocked, rising or bowing, or spreading wide their arms.  Some scarce-felt breeze prevented the vapour from passing across the ridge to westward, though it still rose from beneath, and kept fading away into thin air above our heads.  Therefore the vision lasted as long as the sun stayed yet above the Alps; and the images with their aureoles shrank and dilated with the undulations of the mist.  I could not but think of that old formula for an anthropomorphic Deity—­’the Brocken-spectre of the human spirit projected on the mists of the Non-ego.’  Even like those cloud-phantoms are the gods made in the image of man, who have been worshipped through successive ages of the world, gods dowered with like passions to those of the races who have crouched before them, gods cruel and malignant and lustful, jealous and noble and just, radiant or gloomy, the counterparts of men upon a vast and shadowy scale.  But here another question rose.  If the gods that men have made and ignorantly worshipped be really but glorified copies of their own souls, where is the sun in this parallel?