A LETTER TO AN AUSTRIAN FELLOW-STUDENT
My dear Franz,
That was the familiar device you wrote in the book you gave me when twelve years ago we drank our final Bruderschaft at Innsbruck station. I was saying good-bye to your Alpenrose, your Rose of the Alps, where the great mountains spring up their ten and fourteen thousand feet out of the very pavements, where the Golden Roof glitters over its antique arcades, where the great bronze warriors guard the sleep of your Emperor Max, where Andreas Hofer fought the good fight against an imperial tyrant, where inns, old before the French Revolution, all but touch gables across the narrow, immemorial gassen. You wanted me to remember all that, but most of all, I think, you wanted me to remember the quiet valleys, full of colour and peace, the red cupolaed churches where we went to Mass at four o'clock of a Sunday morning, the mountains we conquered together, with their summit air that we thought better than wine, until we came back, leg-weary if heart-high, in the evening to drink your thin country vintage,
