curtain falls upon
our own stage of life, we shall begin to comprehend that the justice we
loved was intended to have been done in fact, and not in poetry, and the
felicity we sympathized in, to have been bestowed and not feigned. We
talk much of money's worth, yet perhaps may one day be surprised to find
that what the wise and charitable European public gave to one night's
rehearsal of hypocrisy,--to one hour's pleasant warbling of Linda or
Lucia,--would have filled a whole Alpine Valley with happiness, and
poured the waves of harvest over the famine of many a Lammermoor.[101]

Sec. 7. "Nay," perhaps the reader answers, "it is vain to hope that this
could ever be. The perfect beauty of the ideal must always be
fictitious. It is rational to amuse ourselves with the fair imagination;
but it would be madness to endeavor to put it into practice, in the face
of the ordinances of Nature. Real shepherdesses must always be rude, and
real peasants miserable; suffer us to turn away our gentle eyes from
their coarseness and their pain, and to seek comfort in cultivated
voices and purchased smiles. We cannot hew down the rocks, nor turn the
sands of the torrent into gold."

Sec. 8. This is no answer. Be assured of the great truth--that what is
impossible in reality is ridiculous in fancy. If it is not in the nature
of things that peasants should be gentle and happy, then the
imagination of such peasantry is ridiculous, and to delight in such
imagination wrong; as delight in any kind of falsehood is always. But if
in the nature of things it be possible that among the wildness of hills
the human heart should be refined, and if the comfort of dress, and the
gentleness of language, and the joy of progress in knowledge, and of
variety in thought, are possible to the mountaineer in his true
existence, let us strive to write this true poetry upon the rocks before
we indulge it in our visions, and try whether, among all the fine arts,
one of the finest be not that of painting cheeks with health rather than
rouge.

Sec. 9. "But is such refinement possible? Do not the conditions of the
mountain peasant's life, in the plurality of instances, necessarily
forbid it?"

As bearing sternly on this question, it is necessary to examine one
peculiarity of feeling which manifests itself among the European
nations, so far as I have noticed, irregularly,--appearing sometimes to
be the characteristic of a particular time, sometimes of a particular