have
braved for a thousand years the battle and the breeze. It has spots
where empires have been lost and won, and where the dead of the tented
field sleep their dreamless sleep. It has fine old cathedrals, with
their antique carvings, their recumbent statues of old-world bishops,
and their Scripture pieces by various masters, sorely faded; and here
and there, above the rich foliage of its various woods, like the tall
mast of a ship at sea, is seen the handsome and lofty campanile, so
peculiar to the architecture of Lombardy.

The great Alps look down with most benignant aspect upon this plain.
They seem quite proud of it, and nurse it with the care and tenderness
of a parent. Noble rivers not a few--the Ticino, the Adige, and streams
and torrents without number--do they send down, to keep its beauty ever
fresh. These streams cross and re-cross its green bosom in all
directions, forming by their interlacings a curious network of silvery
lines, like the bright threads in the mine, or the white veins in the
porphyritic slab. Observe this little flower, with its bright petals,
growing by the wayside. That humble flower owes its beauty to yonder
chain. From the frozen summits of the Alps come the waters at which it
daily drinks. And when the dog-days come, and a fiery sun looks down
upon the plain from a sky that is cloudless for months together, and
when every leaf droops, and even the tall poplar seems to bow itself
beneath the intolerable heat, the mountains, pitying the panting plain,
send down their cool breezes to revive it. Would that from the lofty
pinnacles of rank and talent there descended upon the lower levels of
society an influence equally wholesome and beneficent! Were there more
streams from the mountain, there would be more fruits upon the plain.
The world would not be the scorched desert which it is, in which the
vipers of envy and discontent hiss and sting; but a fragrant garden,
full of the fruits of social order and of moral principle. Truly, man
might learn many a useful lesson from the earth on which he treads: the
great, to dispense freely out of their abundance,--for by dispensing
they but multiply their blessings, as Mont Blanc, by sending down its
streams to enrich the plain, feeds those snows which are its glory and
crown,--and the humble, the lesson of a thankful reciprocation. This
plain does not drink in the waters of the Alps, and sullenly refuse to
own its obligations. Like a duteous child,