“_Montani semper liberi_,” everywhere mountainous regions have been favorable to a free and manly spirit in the people; in every zone the mountain races are a free, a pastoral, an unchanging people, rather confirming Emerson’s hasty generalization as to snow and civil freedom. In the East the warlike hill-tribes have been less subject to despotic rule than the milder races dwelling on the plains. The varied grandeur of the mountains no less than the awful power of the ocean counts for something in the perpetuation of distinctive characteristics. But the spirit of freedom is thought to take a different color from the sea and from the mountain; in the mountain it is stubborn and resolute; by the sea it is excitable and fickle. The hill-tribes of Judea kept their covenant, the tribes of Jordan fell away; those Medes who never changed their laws descended from the Caspian Alps, those Greeks who sought new things from day to day were dwellers by the Ægean Sea. Among the vines and olives in Italian gardens men are soft, poetic, phosphorescent, no less full of fire than they are fond of change; among the pines and larches of the Swiss glaciers men are hardy, patient, dumb, as slow to fume and flash as they are hard to bend and break. The poet Wordsworth represents that it was the peculiar fortune of Switzerland to enjoy the influence of mountain and sea at once,-- “Two voices are there: one is of the sea, One of the mountains; each a mighty voice: In both, from age to age, thou didst rejoice, They were thy chosen music, Liberty.”