One of the most beautiful and memorable of human experiences is to start, one fine morning, from some point in German Switzerland or Tyrol and, in two or three days--or it may be in one swinging stretch--to tramp over an Alpine pass and down into the Promised Land below. It is of no use to rush it in a motor; you might as well hop over by aeroplane. In order to savor the experience to the full, you must take staff and scrip, like the Ritter Tannhaeuser, and go the pilgrim's way. It is a joy even to pass from the guttural and explosive place names of Teutonia to the liquid music of the southern vocables--from Brieg to Domo d'Ossola, from Goeschenen to Bellinzona, from St. Moritz to Chiavenna, from Botzen and Brixen to Ala and Verona. It is a still greater joy to exchange the harsh, staring colors of the north for the soft luminosity of the south, as you zigzag down from the bare snows to the pines, from the pines to the chestnuts, from the chestnuts to the trellised vineyards. And just about where the vineyards begin, you come upon two wayside posts, one of them inscribed "Schweiz" or "Oesterreich," the other bearing the magic word "Italia." If your heart does not leap at the sight of it you may as well about-turn and get you home again; for you have no sense of history, no love of art, no hunger for divine, inexhaustible beauty. For all these things are implicit in the one word, "Italy." Alas! the charm of this excursion has from of old made irresistible appeal to the northern barbarian. That has been Italy's historic misfortune. For certain centuries, under the dominance of Rome, she kept the Goths and Huns and Vandals aloof by what is called in India a "forward policy"--by throwing the outworks of civilization far beyond the Alpine barrier. But Rome fell to decay, and, wave upon wave, the barbarian--generally the Teuton, under one alias or another--surged over her glorious highlands, her bounteous lowlands, and her marvelous cities. It is barely half a century since the hated Tedeschi were expelled from the greater part of their Cisalpine possessions; and now, in the fullness of time, Italy has resolved to redeem the last of her ravished provinces and to make her boundaries practically conterminous with Italian speech and race.