(IV.) You have despised Nature; that is to say, all the deep and
sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French revolutionists
made stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made race-courses
of the cathedrals of the earth. Your ONE conception of pleasure is
to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their
altars. {16} You have put a railroad-bridge over the falls of
Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's
chapel; you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva;
there is not a quiet valley in England that you have not filled with
bellowing fire; there is no particle left of English land which you
have not trampled coal ashes into {17}--nor any foreign city in
which the spread of your presence is not marked among its fair old
streets and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of new hotels
and perfumers' shops: the Alps themselves, which your own poets
used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-
garden, which you set yourselves to climb and slide down again, with
"shrieks of delight." When you are past shrieking, having no human
articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of
their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with
cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough
of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrowfullest
spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the deep inner
significance of them, are the English mobs in the valley of
Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty howitzers; and the
Swiss vintagers of Zurich expressing their Christian thanks for the
gift of the vine, by assembling in knots in the "towers of the
vineyards," and slowly loading and firing horse-pistols from morning
till evening. It is pitiful, to have dim conceptions of duty; more
pitiful, it seems to me, to have conceptions like these, of mirth.