These were certainly
beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its
softness. Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine; you were
not certain whether you were being wooed; and these mild shores
would sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death. There was a
lack of a manly element; the air was not reactive; you might write
bits of poetry and practise resignation, but you did not feel that
here was a good spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve.
And it appears, after all, that there was something just in these
appreciations. The invalid is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a
ruder air shall medicine him; the demon of cold is no longer to be
fled from, but bearded in his den. For even Winter has his 'dear
domestic cave,' and in those places where he may be said to dwell
for ever tempers his austerities.
Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental
railroad of America must remember the joy with which he perceived,
after the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and
dismal moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits alone,
the southern sky. It is among these mountains in the new State of
Colorado that the sick man may find, not merely an alleviation of
his ailments, but the possibility of an active life and an honest
livelihood. There, no longer as a lounger in a plaid, but as a
working farmer, sweating at his work, he may prolong and begin anew
his life.
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