air, to feel the religion of noble mountains. In the Pyrenees is all
this, and more,--the present and the past as well. As we call down the
shades of old chroniclers from the dust of upper library tiers, we grow
more and more in desire of a closer acquaintance. Cæsar, Charlemagne,
Roland, the Black Prince, Gaston Phoebus, Montgomery and knightly King
Henry stand in ghostly armor and beckon us on.


II.

Facts of detail prove farther to seek. We inquire almost in vain for
travelers' notes on the Pyrenees. Those who had written on Spanish
travel spoke of the range admiringly. But these authors, we find,
invariably, only passed by the eastern extremity, or the western, of the
great mountain wall; the mountains themselves they did not visit. Search
in the large libraries brings out a few scant volumes of Pyrenean
travel, but all, with two or three exceptions, bear date within the
first three-fifths of the century. It is with books, often, as with the
_Furançon_, the wine of the Pyrenees, and with certain other vintages:
age improves them only up to a certain limit; when put away longer than
a generation, they lose value.

Taine's glowing _Tour_,[1] itself made nearly thirty years ago, is a
delight, almost a marvel; the style, the torrent of simile, the vivid
thought, rank it as a classic. But M. Taine's is less a book of travel
than a work of art; in the iridescence of the descriptions, you lose the
reflection of the things described. Even hand-books, the way-clearing
lictors of travel, prove, as to the Pyrenees region, first scarce and
then scanty. The few we unearth in the stores are armed only with the
usual perfunctory fasces of facts,--cording information into stiff,