a blood sleep. And this sleep, this heat of physical experience, becomes
at length a bondage, at last a crucifixion. It is the life and the
fulfilment of the peasant, this flow of sensuous experience. But at last
it drives him almost mad, because he cannot escape.

For overhead there is always the strange radiance of the mountains,
there is the mystery of the icy river rushing through its pink shoals
into the darkness of the pine-woods, there is always the faint tang of
ice on the air, and the rush of hoarse-sounding water.

And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless
immunity from the flux and the warmth of life. Overhead they transcend
all life, all the soft, moist fire of the blood. So that a man must
needs live under the radiance of his own negation.

There is a strange, clear beauty of form about the men of the Bavarian
highlands, about both men and women. They are large and clear and
handsome in form, with blue eyes very keen, the pupil small, tightened,
the iris keen, like sharp light shining on blue ice. Their large,
full-moulded limbs and erect bodies are distinct, separate, as if they
were perfectly chiselled out of the stuff of life, static, cut off.
Where they are everything is set back, as in a clear frosty air.

Their beauty is almost this, this strange, clean-cut isolation, as if
each one of them would isolate himself still further and for ever from
the rest of his fellows.

Yet they are convivial, they are almost the only race with the souls of
artists. Still they act the mystery plays with instinctive fullness of
interpretation, they sing strangely in the mountain fields, they love