; Inspruck and such others being wholly modern,
while Fribourg yet retains much of the aspect it had in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. The valley of Chamouni, another spot also
unique in its way, is rapidly being turned into a kind of Cremorne
Gardens; and I can see, within the perspective of but few years, the
town of Lucerne consisting of a row of symmetrical hotels round the foot
of the lake, its old bridges destroyed, an iron one built over the
Reuss, and an acacia promenade carried along the lake-shore, with a
German band playing under a Chinese temple at the end of it, and the
enlightened travellers, representatives of European civilization,
performing before the Alps, in each afternoon summer sunlight, in their
modern manner, the Dance of Death.

Sec. 42. All this is inevitable; and it has its good as well as its evil
side. I can imagine the zealous modernist replying to me that when all
this is happily accomplished, my melancholy peasants of the valley of
Trient will be turned into thriving shopkeepers, the desolate streets of
Sion into glittering thoroughfares, and the marshes of the Valais into
prosperous market-gardens. I hope so; and indeed am striving every day
to conceive more accurately, and regulate all my efforts by the
expectation of, the state of society, not now, I suppose, much more
than twenty years in advance of us, when Europe, having satisfactorily
effaced all memorials of the past, and reduced itself to the likeness of
America, or of any other new country (only with less room for exertion),
shall begin to consider what is next to be done, and to what newness of
arts and interests may best be devoted the wealth of its marts, and the
strength of its multitudes. Which anticipations and estimates, however,
I have never been able, as yet, to carry out with any clearness, being
always arrested by the confused notion of a necessity for solitude,
disdain of buying and selling, and other elements of that old mediaeval
and mountain gloom, as in some way connected with the efforts of nearly
all men who have either seen far into the destiny, or been much helpful
to the souls, of their race. And the grounds of this feeling, whether
right or wrong, I hope to analyze more fully in the next volume; only
noting, finally, in this, one or two points for the consideration of
those among us with whom it may sometimes become a question, whether
they will help forward, or not, the turning of a sweet mountain