of virtue. Love, patience, hospitality, faith,--these things they know.
To glean their meadows side by side, so happier; to bear the burden up
the breathless mountain flank, unmurmuringly; to bid the stranger drink
from their vessel of milk; to see at the foot of their low deathbeds a
pale figure upon a cross, dying also, patiently;--in this they are
different from the cattle and from the stones, but in all this
unrewarded as far as concerns the present life. For them, there is
neither hope nor passion of spirit; for them neither advance nor
exultation. Black bread, rude roof, dark night, laborious day, weary arm
at sunset; and life ebbs away. No books, no thoughts, no attainments, no
rest; except only sometimes a little sitting in the sun under the church
wall, as the bell tolls thin and far in the mountain air; a pattering of
a few prayers, not understood, by the altar rails of the dimly gilded
chapel, and so back to the sombre home, with the cloud upon them still
unbroken--that cloud of rocky gloom, born out of the wild torrents and
ruinous stones, and unlightened, even in their religion, except by the
vague promise of some better thing unknown, mingled with threatening,
and obscured by an unspeakable horror,--a smoke, as it were, of
martyrdom, coiling up with the incense, and, amidst the images of
tortured bodies and lamenting spirits in hurtling flames, the very
cross, for them, dashed more deeply than for others, with gouts of
blood.

Sec. 5. Do not let this be thought a darkened picture of the life of these
mountaineers. It is literal fact. No contrast can be more painful than
that between the dwelling of any well-conducted English cottager, and
that of the equally honest Savoyard. The one, set in the midst of its
dull flat fields and uninteresting hedgerows, shows in itself the love
of brightness and beauty; its daisy-studded garden beds, its smoothly
swept brick path to the threshold, its freshly sanded floor and orderly
shelves of household furniture, all testify to energy of heart, and
happiness in the simple course and simple possessions of daily life. The
other cottage, in the midst of an inconceivable, inexpressible beauty,
set on some sloping bank of golden sward, with clear fountains flowing
beside it, and wild flowers, and noble trees, and goodly rocks gathered
round into a perfection as of Paradise, is itself a dark and plague-like
stain in the midst of the gentle landscape. Within a certain distance