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 Neuchatel; 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.
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