448 PRÆTERITA-II

and plum trees, and towering shade of walnuts, with trunks eight or ten feet in girth; a little space left to light the fronts of the cottages themselves, whose roof and balconies, the vines seem to think, have been constructed for their pleasure only, and climb, wreathe, and swing themselves about accordingly wherever they choose, tossing their young tendrils far up into the blue sky of spring, and festooning the balconies in autumn with Correggian fresco of purple, relieved against the pendent gold of the harvested maize.

The absolute seclusion and independence of this manner of rural life, totally without thought or forethought of any foreign help or parsimonious store, drinking its wine out of the cluster, and saving of the last year’s harvest only seed for the next,-the serene laissez faire given to God and nature, with thanks for the good, and submission to the temporary evil of blight or flood, as due to sinful mortality; and the persistence, through better or worse, in their fathers’ ways, and use of their fathers’ tools, and holding to their fathers’ names and fields, faithfully as the trees to their roots, or the rocks to their wild flowers,-all this beside us for our Sunday walk, with the grey, inaccessible walls of the Tower of Arpenaz above, dim in their distant height, and all the morning air twice brighter for the glow of the cloudless glaciers, gave me deeper and more wonderful joy than all the careful beauty and disciplined rightness of the Bernese Oberland, or even the stately streets of my dearest cities of Italy.

219. Here is a little bit of diary, five years later, giving a detail or two of the opposite hillside above Sallenches:-

“ST. MARTIN’S, 26th July, 1854.-I was up by the millstream this evening, and climbed to the right of it, up among the sloping waves of grass. I never was so struck by their intense beauty,-the masses of walnut shading them with their broad, cool, clearly-formed leafage; the glossy grey stems of the cherry trees, as if bound round tight with satin, twining and writhing

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