Hilaire Belloc

“ The rails have a rhythm of slight falls and rises ... they make a loud roar like a perpetual torrent; they cover up the mind with a veil.
Once only, when a number of men were shouting 'POGGI-BON-SI,' like a war-cry to the clank of bronze, did I open my eyes sleepily to see a hill, a castle wall, many cypresses, and a strange tower bulging out at the top (such towers I learned were the feature of Tuscany) . Then in a moment, as it seemed, I awoke in the station of Siena, where the railway ends and goes no farther. ”

“ The long slope of the hills fell away for miles to where, by daylight, would have lain the misty plain of Emilia. The darkness confused the landscape. The silence of the mountains and the awful solemnity of the place lent that vast panorama a sense of the terrible, under the dizzy roof of the stars. Every now and again some animal of the night gave a cry in the undergrowth of the valley, and the great rock of Castel-Nuovo, now close and enormous--bare, rugged, a desert place--added something of doom. ”

“ I could not understand his songs nor he mine, but there was wine in common between us, and salami and a merry heart, bread which is the bond of all mankind, and that prime solution of ill-ease--I mean the forgetfulness of money.
That was a good drive, an honest drive, a human aspiring drive, a drive of Christians, a glorifying and uplifted drive, a drive worthy of remembrance for ever. The moon has shone on but few like it though she is old; the lake of Bolsena has glittered beneath none like it since the Etruscans here unbended after the solemnities of a triumph. ”

“ The road through it, gap though it was, went up steeply, and the further valley was evidently higher than the one I was leaving. It was already evening as I entered this narrow ravine; the sun only caught the tops of the rock-walls. My fatigue was very great, and my walking painful to an extreme, when, having come to a place where the gorge was narrowest and where the two sides were like the posts of a giant's stile, where also the fifth ridge of the Jura stood up beyond me in the further valley, a vast shadow, I sat down wearily and drew what not even my exhaustion could render unremarkable. ”

“ There--high, jagged, rapt into the sky--stood such a group of mountains as men dream of in good dreams, or see in the works of painters when old age permits them revelations. Their height was evident from the faint mist and grey of their hues; their outline was tumultuous, yet balanced; full of accident and poise. It was as though these high walls of Carrara, the western boundary of the valley, had been shaped expressly for man, in order to exalt him with unexpected and fantastic shapes, and to expand his dull life with a permanent surprise. ”

“ Only Lector I keep by me for a very little while longer with a special purpose, but even he must soon leave me; for all good things come to an end, and this book is coming to an end--has come to an end. The leaves fall, and they are renewed; the sun sets on the Vexin hills, but he rises again over the woods of Marly. Human companionship once broken can never be restored, and you and I shall not meet or understand each other again. It is so of all the poor links whereby we try to bridge the impassable gulf between soul and soul. ”

“ You will be granted a prevision of complete success, and your hearts shall be filled--but you must not expect to find this mood on the Emilian Way when it is raining.
All you that feel youth slipping past you and that are desolate at the approach of age, be merry; it is not what it looks like from in front and from outside. There is a glory in all completion, and all good endings are but shining transitions. There will come a sharp moment of revelation when you shall bless the effect of time. But this divine moment--- it is not on the Emilian Way in the rain that you should seek it. ”

“ As I left the last house of the village I was not secure from loneliness, and when the road began to climb up the hill into the wild and the trees I was wondering how the night would pass.
With every step upward a greater mystery surrounded me. A few stars were out, and the brown night mist was creeping along the water below, but there was still light enough to see the road, and even to distinguish the bracken in the deserted hollows. The highway became little better than a lane; at the top of the hill it plunged under tall pines, and was vaulted over with darkness. ”

“ Then and on till evening I reconciled myself with misfortune, and when I heard again at Airolo the speech of civilized men, and saw the strong Latin eyes and straight forms of the Race after all those days of fog and frost and German speech and the north, my eyes filled with tears and I was as glad as a man come home again, and I could have kissed the ground.
The wine of Airolo and its songs, how greatly they refreshed me! To see men with answering eyes and to find a salute returned; the noise of careless mouths talking all together ”

“ Get it out of a guide-book. I rose when I felt inclined; I was delighted to find it still raining. A dense mist above the rain gave me still greater pleasure. I had started quite at my leisure late in the day, and I did the thing stolidly, and my heart was like a dully-heated mass of coal or iron because I was acknowledging defeat. You who have never taken a straight line and held it, nor seen strange men and remote places, you do not know what it is to have to go round by the common way. ”

“ I could not sit at tables and expand the air with terrible stories of adventure, nor ask about their politics, nor provoke them to laughter or sadness by my tales. It seemed a poor pilgrimage taken among dumb men.
Also I have no doubt that I had experienced the ebb of some vitality, for it is the saddest thing about us that this bright spirit with which we are lit from within like lanterns, can suffer dimness. Such frailty makes one fear that extinction is our final destiny, and it saps us with numbness, and we are less than ourselves. ”

“ When I was about half-way down and had come to a place where a shoulder of heaped rock stood on my left and where little parallel ledges led up to it, having grown accustomed to the descent and easier in my mind, I sat down on a slab and drew imperfectly the things I saw: the lake below me, the first forests clinging to the foot of the Alps beyond, their higher slopes of snow, and the clouds that had now begun to gather round them and that altogether hid the last third of their enormous height.
Then I saw a steamer on the lake. I felt in touch with men. The slope grew easier. ”

“ I noticed Lombardy out of the windows. It is flat. I listened to the talk of the crowded peasants in the train. I did not understand it. I twice leaned out to see if Milan were not standing up before me out of the plain, but I saw nothing. Then I fell asleep, and when I woke suddenly it was because we were in the terminus of that noble great town, which I then set out to traverse in search of my necessary money and sustenance. It was yet but early in the afternoon.
What a magnificent city is Milan! The great houses are all of stone, and stand regular and in order, along wide straight streets. ”

“ All the balance of judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable life--all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely to be despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no longer entirely to be admired.
The Catholic Church will have no philosophies. She will permit no comforts; the cry of the martyrs is in her far voice; her eyes that see beyond the world present us heaven and hell to the confusion of our human reconciliations, our happy blending of good and evil things. ”

“ As soon march through evil dreams!
The north is the place for men. Eden was there; and the four rivers of Paradise are the Seine, the Oise, the Thames, and the Arun; there are grasses there, and the trees are generous, and the air is an unnoticed pleasure. The waters brim up to the edges of the fields. But for this bare Tuscany I was never made.
How far I had gone I could not tell, nor precisely how much farther San Quirico, the neighbouring town, might be. The imperfect map I had bought at Siena was too minute to give me clear indications. ”

“ It must be so; for the villages and ruins in one landscape comprised all the first generations of the history of Rome. The stones we admire, the large spirit of the last expression came from that rough village and sprang from the broils of that one plain; Rome was most vigorous before it could speak. So a man's verse, and all he has, are but the last outward appearance, late and already rigid, of an earlier, more plastic, and diviner fire. ”

“ Master of all happy men! Are you sleeping there pressed into desecrated earth under the doss-house of the Rue St Paul, or do you not rather drink cool wine in some elysian Chinon looking on the Vienne where it rises in Paradise? Are you sleeping or drinking that you will not lend us the staff of Friar John wherewith he slaughtered and bashed the invaders of the vineyards, who are but a parable for the mincing pedants and bloodless thin-faced rogues of the world? ”

“ I climbed up this sunken lane towards it, not knowing what might be beyond, when, at the crest, there shone before me in the sunrise one of those unexpected and united landscapes which are among the glories of Italy. They have changed the very mind in a hundred northern painters, when men travelled hither to Rome to learn their art, and coming in by her mountain roads saw, time and again, the set views of plains like gardens, surrounded by sharp mountain-land and framed. ”

“ They cannot long remain apart from visions.
Then in front of you southward and eastward, if you are marching to Rome, come the Highlanders. I had never been among them, and I was to see them in a day; the people of the high hills, the race whom we all feel to be enemies, and who run straight across the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific, understanding each other, not understood by us. I saw their first rampart, the mountains called the Jura, on the horizon, and above my great field of view the clouds still tumbled, lit from beneath with evening. ”

“ Then I came home and ate their admirable food and drank the wine which the Burgundians had trodden upon the hills of gold so many years before. They showed me a regal kind of a room where a bed with great hangings invited repose.
All my days of marching, the dirty inns, the forests, the nights abroad, the cold, the mists, the sleeplessness, the faintness, the dust, the dazzling sun, the Apennines--all my days came over me, and there fell on me a peaceful weight, as his two hundred years fell upon Charlemagne in the tower of Saragossa when the battle was done ”

“ For there was no track of any kind and no bridge, and Calestano stood opposite me, a purple cluster of houses in the dusk against the farther mountain side.
Very warily, lobbing stones as I had been taught, and following up and down each branch to find a place, I forded one by one the six little cold and violent rivers, and reaching the farther shore, I reached also, as I thought, supper, companionship, and a bed.
But it is not in this simple way that human life is arranged. What awaited me in Calestano was ill favour, a prison, release, base flattery, and a very tardy meal. ”

“ For some miles past the hills had grown higher and higher upon either side, the valley floor narrower, the torrent less abundant; there now stood up before me the marshy slopes and the enormous forests of pine that forbid a passage south. Up through these the main road has been pierced, tortuous and at an even gradient mile after mile to the very top of the hill; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so shaped that it is impossible for the Moselle valley to communicate with the Gap of Belfort save by some track right over its summit. ”

“ As I went, the mountain of Amiato came more and more nearly abreast of me in the west; in its foothills near me were ravines and unexpected rocks; upon one of them hung a village. I watched its church and one tall cypress next it, as they stood black against the last of daylight. Then for miles I went on the dusty way, and crossed by old bridges watercourses in which stood nothing but green pools; and the night deepened. ”

“ This much, then, is worth telling of the valley of the Serchio, that it is narrow, garrulous with water brawling, wooded densely, and contained by fantastic mountains. That it has a splendid name, like the clashing of cymbals--Garfagnana; that it leads to the Tuscan plain, and that it is over a day's march long. Also, it is an oven.
Never since the early liars first cooked eggs in the sand was there such heat, and it was made hotter by the consciousness of folly, than which there is no more heating thing ”

“ The fire-flies darted in the depths of vineyards and of trees below; then the noise of the grasshoppers brought back suddenly the gardens of home, and whatever benediction surrounds our childhood. Some promise of eternal pleasures and of rest deserved haunted the village of Sillano.
In very early youth the soul can still remember its immortal habitation, and clouds and the edges of hills are of another kind from ours, and every scent and colour has a savour of Paradise. ”

“ THE UPPER EMMEN
a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and eternal, and as a poet who is too little known has well said in one of his unpublished lyrics, we, by the art of writing--
Can fix the high elusive hour And stand in things divine.
And as for high elusive hours, devil a bit of one was there all the way from Burgdorf to the Inn of the Bridge, except the ecstatic flash of joy when I sent that horse careering down the road with his bad master after him and all his gang shouting among the hollow hills. ”