A CHILD OF THE ALPS.*
THOSE who, while they like " reflective essays," " vignettes of travel," " idylls of the soil," and, above all, idylls of Alpine scenery, like them well stirred up with fiction and a love story, will be pleased with Margaret Symonds's A Child of the Alps, the new volume in Mr. Unwin's " First Novel Library." Those, on the contrary (and the present writer confesses himself to be one of them), who dislike the mix- ture, and greatly prefer both the imaginative essay and the novel " neat," will regret that such delightful descriptions of Swiss mountains and Italian plains should have been subordinated to an amatory plot. So much for grumbling.
All who know that enchanted piece of country which encom- passes Chiavenna, the key of the Julian Alps, as the Romans called it, a land which holds converse on the one side with the Splugen, the Val Bregalia and the Stelvio, and on the other with the Lombard foothills, Como, Varese, Lugano and Monte Generoso, will have old memories and old delights vigorously re-awakened by Margaret Symonds's book. Particularly delight- ful is the chapter entitled " The Villa at Plurs." No one who has been to Plurs and seen the Villa with the carved chestnut wood ceilings will ever forget the awful scene of desolation to which it stands sentinel. Plurs was the Brighton or Vichy of Milan at the beginning of the seventeenth century—the cool place among the hills where the rich nobles and burghers of the Lombard Capital and of the surrounding towns and country went in their horse litters to feast and dance and amuse themselves and pass their " Triaegiaitira." And one day while they were fleeting the time. Carelessly, free, as they thought, from all the dangers of plague • A Child of the Alps. By Margaret.Syglonds, London : T. Esher unsin., vs. 6d. net.1 and sickness and the heat and the discomforts of the city, the mountain unimplored fell upon them and covered them. The pleasure town was overwhelmed by a force more awful than even that of the avalanche or the flood. A great piece of the craggy hill-side detached itself and was hurled in ruin on the Villas of Plum. Only one house escaped. To this day the huge scattered rocks that strew the valley witness to the suddenness and completeness of the town's destruction. In most cases where a town has been destroyed there is some- thing to show, some ruin, some monument to the disaster. At Plurs there is nothing but the tumble of jagged pieces of rock. Plum is not a ruin, but a huge rock-covered grave. Below the tangle of rocks lie not only the dead, but their houses, their furniture, their rich stuffs and all the gear of seventeenth century Italian magnificence which we know so well from pictures—or perhaps even better from the great puppet shows of the Sacri Monti. Orta, with its life-sized terra-cotta figures dressed and grouped only a few years after Plum went to destruction, shows us the grandees of Milan in their habits as they lived.
Though the present writer likes best the Alpine descriptions, the accounts of Venice and the surrounding country are very attractive. These, however, readers must find and taste for themselves. All we are concerned to do is to tell lovers of the Alps and of Northern Italy how much incidental joy they may get from the book.
One word more. We note with interest the quotation kora Thompson's " In the Room." A verse of that terrific poem stands at the head of the chapter on Plurs. It is superficially inappropriate. Fundamentally it is in spiritual liaison with Plurs and its tragedy.
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