labeled bunches, marshaling details into cramped and characterless
order, scrutinizing the ground with a microscope, never surveying it in
bird's-eye view. Two recent novels we eagerly buy, hearing that their
scenes are laid in that vicinity; but each merely speaks, in easy
omniscience, of the "distant chain of blue mountains," or of the
"far-off snow-peaks outlined against the horizon," and the fiction
proves hardly worth sifting for so little fact. Plainly the Pyrenees
lack the voluminous literature of the Alps. Plainly we shall have, in
part, to grope our way. The grooves of Anglo-Saxon travel are many and
deep, lined increasingly with English speech and customs; but they have
not yet been cut into these Spanish mountains.

[1] _Voyage aux Pyrénées_.


The search enlarges the horizon, however. The lonely roads we learn to
qualify in thought with occasional branches of railway; the dangerous
trails, with certain cultivated highways; the dismal road-side inns,
with spasmodic hotels, some even named confidently as "palatial." We
read of spas and springs and French society, more than of chasms and
banditti. We realize in surprise that over all the past of these
mountains flows now in bracing contrast the easy, laughing tide of
modern French fashion,--life so different in detail, so like in kind, to
the day of trapping and tourney.

It is enough:

"Now are we fix'd, and now we will depart,
Never to come again till what we seek
Be found."