intention of living some years in the
neighborhood of Geneva, and had established myself experimentally on
the eastern slope of the Mont Saleve; but I was forced to abandon my
purpose at last, because I could not endure the rabid howling, on
Sunday evenings, of the holiday-makers who came out from Geneva to get
drunk in the mountain village. By the way, your last letter, with its
extracts about our traffic in gin, is very valuable. I will come to
that part of the business in a little while. Meantime, my friend, note
this, respecting what I have told you, that in the very center of
Europe, in a country which is visited for their chief pleasure by the
most refined and thoughtful persons among all Christian nations--a
country made by God's hand the most beautiful in the temperate regions
of the earth, and inhabited by a race once capable of the sternest
patriotism and simplest purity of life, your modern religion, in the
very stronghold of it, has reduced the song and dance of ancient
virginal thanksgiving to the howlings and staggerings of men
betraying, in intoxication, a nature sunk more than half-way towards
the beasts; and you will begin to understand why the Bible should have
been "illustrated" by Gustave Dore.

48. One word more is needful, though this letter is long already. The
peculiar ghastliness of this Swiss mode of festivity is in its utter
failure of joy; the paralysis and helplessness of a vice in which
there is neither pleasure, nor art. But we are not, throughout Europe,
wholly thus. There is such a thing, yet, as rapturous song and dance
among us, though not indicative, by any means, of joy over repentant
sinners. You must come back to Paris with me again. I had an evening
to spare there, last summer, for investigation of theaters; and as
there was nothing at any of them that I cared much about seeing, I
asked a valet-de-place at Meurice's what people were generally going
to. He said, "All the English went to see the _Lanterne Magique_." I
do not care to tell you what general entertainment I received in
following, for once, the lead of my countrymen; but it closed with
the representation of the characteristic dancing of all ages of the
world; and the dance given as characteristic of modern time was the
Cancan, which you will see alluded to in the extract given in the note
at page 80 of 'Sesame and Lilies' (the small edition; and page 54 of
Vol. I. of the Revised Series of the Entire Works). "The ball
t