Some, perhaps many, of my readers will have traversed the Great St. Bernard, the Summus Penninus of antiquity. Few who have done so will have been oblivious, as they went, of the many great men in whose steps they were treading. Celts, Romans, Saracens, mediæval warriors, statesmen, saints, bishops, and monks streamed in their day across this col. Here passed Charles the Great and other Holy Roman Emperors, Lanfranc too, and the saintly Anselm in all the fervour of his young enthusiasm. The reader will forgive me for quoting once again Bishop Stubbs' translation of the letter of a Canterbury monk describing his passage of the pass in February 1188:--
"Pardon me for not writing. I have been on the Mount of Jove; on the one hand looking up to the heavens of the mountains, on the other shuddering at the hell of the valleys, feeling myself so much nearer heaven that I was more sure that my prayer would be heard. 'Lord,' I said, 'restore me to my brethren, that I may tell them, that they come not into this place of torment.' Place of torment indeed, where the marble pavement of the stony ground is ice alone, and you cannot set your foot safely; where, strange to say, although it is so slippery that you cannot stand, the death (into which there is every facility for a fall) is certain death. I put my hand in my scrip, that I might scratch out a syllable or two to your sincerity--lo, I found my ink-bottle filled with a dry mass of ice; my fingers too refused to write; my beard was stiff with frost, and my breath congealed into a long icicle. I could not write the news I wished."
[Illustration: 64. PONTE BROLLA. Over the Maggia, near its junction with the Melezza, looking up the Val Centavalli.]
Mr. Coolidge, in that store of Alpine learning, his book entitled _Swiss Travel and Swiss Guide-Books_, reminds us that the first known guide-book was written for the crowd of pilgrims crossing this same pass, by no less unlikely a person than the Abbot of Thingör in Iceland, about 1154. There was a building on the pass before the year 812. A century later the Little St. Bernard was similarly provided. The Simplon was thus equipped before 1235, the St. Gotthard before 1331, and the Grimsel before 1479. Modern Swiss travellers may not be aware of these facts in detail, but it is impossible for any intelligent man to frequent the Alps and not become conscious of the antiquity of the relation between man and the mountains.