Beyond the old church the hill slopes up to the Badrutt Park, named after a famous dynasty of hoteliers. Here is provision for golf, abounding in speculative and absorbing contingencies. In the larch wood on the upper road from St. Moritz to Camfer is the Segantini Museum, in which are gradually being collected works of the painter who loved and studied the Engadine with life-long devotion.
In the way of pictures, St. Moritz possesses a treasure of the last kind one would look to find in a mountain village. In the Palace Hotel is—what shall I say?—a copy, a replica, the original, for even that claim has been made for it, of Raphael's Madonna di S. Sisto, assuredly the noblest presentment of motherhood that the world can show. By a happy inspiration it has been placed in the Ladies' Room, where it must awaken a Magnificat in many a heart.
Apart from technique, there are slight but unmistakable differences between it and its famous compeer at Dresden. In the Madonna's gaze is less of wonder and amazement, something reaching far into futurity, assurance of final triumph and disdain of intermediate obstacle; not yet had the sword that should go through her soul set its sign on the young mother's face. In the Child the difference is in an opposite sense; in both pictures there is the same wonderful suggestion of the awakening of the divine spirit amid the strange limitations of humanity, but here it is rather the human pathos than the divine power that holds our attention; there is less imperial moulding of brow and mouth, less profound mastery in the eyes: the eyes to which all things were open but which saw them now as man sees, appear contemplating with perplexed wonder the path that was to be trodden—he had known it all along, but it looked so different now.
In the flat land at the head of the lake, a little more than a mile from St. Moritz, and linked to it by an electric tramway, are the famous chalybeate springs, round which has grown up the cluster of buildings known as St. Moritzbad. About half-way down, on the larch-clad slope that rises to the right of the road, is the Museum Engiadinais, the charming building in old Engadine styles in which Signur Hartmann has housed the magnificent collection of Rhaetian antiquities made by Signur Campell of Celerina. To speak of this museum as a collection of antiquities gives a very inadequate notion of its interior. Whole rooms, halls and corridors have been installed there, and, combined with the old styles of the building and the furniture and surroundings of old life, make wandering about it like an excursion into the past.
A little farther on is the Anglican church, a massive little building in the grey-green gabbro of the neighbourhood. The tower seems to have been suggested by that of the half-ruined church of San Gian, an assimilation of local style that cannot be too highly commended. An English church on the Continent, like the Englishman himself, his clubs, customs, and amusements, is apt to have an air of extraterritoriality. Who has not felt a shock on revisiting some beloved mountain haunt to find that since he was last there the church of his fathers, looking as though it had just stepped from a suburb of London, had added its note of incongruity to those that hotels and bazaars had accumulated on the devoted spot?
The chalybeate waters of St. Moritz have been known from early times. In addition to the original spring there are now two others, one of which wells up in the bed of the Inn. Bubbles of carbonic acid gas that rise to the surface of the lake where the river enters it are thought to indicate another spring below; in fact, the whole mass of crystalline rock that rises into the peaks of Rosatz and Ova Cotschna is probably a vast laboratory, in which the water that falls from heaven and filters down to the river and the lake is charged with healing virtues.
PIZ ALBANA AND PIZ JULIER IN WINTER.
Its efficacy, no doubt, is largely due to the co-operation of the air, and to the ample provision made for the comfort and distraction of health-seekers. Sportsmen, artists, naturalists, and whatnot find wherewithal to occupy them, while those who wish to lounge and dream, who are content for a while simply to exist, have environment to their hearts' content: sleeping lakes and leaping streams, slopes of pasture starred with flowers, solemn sanctuaries of forest, wildernesses filled with the large companionable loneliness of the hills. And all this enchantment shines in the rare mountain air with a vividness that seems scarcely real. Indeed, it is hard to set limits to the many and magical effects of altitude on body and spirit. Though there may be no theological ground for the statement by which it is said encouragement is sometimes given to invalids at St. Moritz that in the worst event they are nearer heaven than in any other health resort of Europe; yet, short of that unnegotiable contingency, there are undoubted advantages at 6,000 feet above the sea not to be found at lower levels.