he violence of the elements around
them. Once accustomed to look upon these conditions as inevitable in
nature, they may easily transfer the idea of inevitableness and fitness
to the same appearances in their own houses. I said that mountains seem
to have been created to show us the perfection of beauty; but we saw in
the tenth chapter that they also show sometimes the extreme of ugliness:
and to the inhabitants of districts of this kind it is almost necessary
to their daily comfort that they should view without dislike aspects of
desolation which would to others be frightful. And can we blame them,
if, when the rivers are continually loading their fields with heaps of
black slime, and rolling, in time of flood, over the thickets on their
islets, leaving, when the flood is past, every leaf and bough dim with
granite-dust,--never more to be green through all the parching of
summer; when the landslip leaves a ghastly scar among the grassy mounds
of the hill side;--the rocks above are torn by their glaciers into rifts
and wounds that are never healed; and the ice itself blackened league
after league with loose ruin cast upon it as if out of some long and
foul excavation;--can we blame, I say, the peasant, if, beholding these
things daily as necessary appointments in the strong nature around him,
he is careless that the same disorders should appear in his household or
his farm; nor feels discomforted, though his walls should be full of
fissures like the rocks, his furniture covered with dust like the trees,
and his garden like the glacier in unsightliness of trench and
desolation of mound?

Sec. 28. Under these five heads are embraced, as far as I am able to trace
them, the causes of the temper which we are examining; and it will be
seen that only the last is quite peculiar to mountain and marsh
districts, although there is a somewhat greater probability that the
others also may be developed among hills more than in plains. When, by
untoward accident, all are associated, and the conditions described
under the fifth head are very distinct, the result is even sublime in
its painfulness. Of places subjected to such evil influence, none are
quite so characteristic as the town of Sion in the Valais. In the first
place (see Sec. 23), the material on which it works is good; the race of
peasantry being there both handsome and intelligent, as far as they
escape the adverse influences around them; so that on a fete-day or a
Sunday, w