“Here let us leave him: for his shroud the snow, For funeral lamps he has the planets seven, For a great sign the icy stair shall go Between the stars to heaven. One moment stood he as the angels stand, High in the stainless eminence of air. The next he was not, to his fatherland Translated unaware.” Mrs. Holland has written, as a dedication for a book of Alpine travel, lines which have the authentic note; and Mr. Masefield in a few verses has caught the savage aloofness of the peaks better than most mountaineers in pages of redundant description. The contrast is rather too marked between the work of those who loved mountains without climbing them and the literature of the professional mountaineers. Even writers like Mr. Kipling, who have only touched mountains in a few casual lines, seem to have captured the mountain atmosphere more successfully than many a climber who has devoted articles galore to his craft. Of course, Mr. Kipling is a genius and the average Alpine writer is not; but surely one might not unreasonably expect a unique literature from those who know the mountains in all their changing tenses, and who by service of toil and danger have wrung from them intimate secrets unguessed at by those who linger outside the shrine. Mountaineering has, of course, produced some great literature. There is Leslie Stephen, though even Stephen at his best is immeasurably below Ruskin’s finest mountain passages. But Leslie Stephens are rare in the history of Alpine literature, whereas the inarticulate are always with us.