“A little cultivated space / Amid the rocky wilderness” (MS VIII;
Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—While
Ruskinʼs cousin,
Mary Richardson,
declared the village of
Splügen “a poor place”
(
Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833, 41),
Ruskin represents the village as a pastoral respite from the sublime experience of the
Via Mala.
In his guidebook to
Switzerland,
John Murray III treats
Splügen
in a businesslike manner as “the chief place in the desolate pastoral vale of the
Rheinwald. . . .
The atmosphere is very chilly here, and barley barely ripens”. The villageʼs economy,
Murray explains,
depended on serving as a transport hub, “prosper[ing] by the constant passage of goods and travellers to and from
Italy.
In autumn it is thronged with drovers; large herds of cattle and many horses then cross the
Alps for the
Milan market”
(
Murray, Hand‐book for Travellers in Switzerland, 209).
According to
William Brockedon, the villageʼs “importance” as a “depôt” did not decline owing to the
Austrian governmentʼs recent engineering
improvements to carriage roads through the
Splügen Pass, although prior to the increased flow of self‐sufficient conveyances,
the village maintained “some hundreds of horses and mules . . . for the transport of goods”
(
Brockedon, Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps, vol. 2, no. 9, p. 9).
None of these conditions is evident in
Johnʼs poem, in which the only sign of droversʼ herds is a bucolic “few cattle straying”.