in the admiration due to the far scope of their discovery. But I will be
judged by themselves, if I have not bitter reason to ask them to teach us
more than yet they have taught.

This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where my work was begun
thirty-five years ago, within sight of the snows of the higher Alps. In
that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought
upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by others.
The light which once flushed those pale summits with its rose at dawn,
and purple at sunset, is now umbered and faint; the air which once inlaid
the clefts of all their golden crags with azure is now defiled with
languid coils of smoke, belched from worse than volcanic fires; their
very glacier waves are ebbing, and their snows fading, as if hell had
breathed on them; the waters that once sank at their feet into
crystalline rest are now dimmed and foul, from deep to deep, and shore to
shore. These are no careless words--they are accurately, horribly, true.
I know what the Swiss lakes were; no pool of Alpine fountain at its
source was clearer. This morning, on the Lake of Geneva, at half a mile
from the beach, I could scarcely see my oar-blade a fathom deep.

The light, the air, the waters, all defiled! How of the earth itself?
Take this one fact for type of honour done by the modern Swiss to the
earth of his native land. There used to be a little rock at the end of
the avenue by the port of Neuchâtel; there, the last marble of the foot
of Jura, sloping to the blue water, and (at this time of year) covered
with bright pink tufts of Saponaria. I went, three days since, to gather
a blossom at the place. The goodly native rock and its flowers were
covered with the dust and refuse of the town; but, in the middle of the
avenue, was a newly-constructed artificial rockery, with a fountain
twisted through a spinning spout, and an inscription on one of its