V. THE SIMPLON 321

best to teach me what the wonders of the little canton were.

84. A little canton, four miles square, and which did not wish to be six miles square! A little town, composed of a cluster of water-mills, a street of penthouses, two wooden bridges, two dozen of stone houses on a little hill, and three or four perpendicular lanes up and down the hill. The four miles of acreage round, in grass, with modest gardens, and farm-dwelling houses; the people, pious, learned, and busy, to a man, to a woman-to a boy, to a girl, of them; progressing to and fro mostly on their feet, and only where they had business. And this bird’s-nest of a place, to be the centre of religious and social thought, and of physical beauty, to all living Europe! That is to say, thinking and designing Europe,-France, Germany, and Italy. They, and their pieties, and their prides, their arts and their insanities, their wraths and slaughters, springing and flowering, building and fortifying, foaming and thundering round this inconceivable point of patience: the most lovely spot, and the most notable, without any possible dispute, of the European universe; yet the nations do not covet it, do not gravitate to it,-what is more wonderful, do not make a wilderness of it. They fight their battles at Chalons and Leipsic; they build their cotton mills on the Aire, and leave the Rhone running with a million of Aire power,-all pure. They build their pleasure houses on Thames shingle, and Seine mud, to look across to Lambeth, and-whatever is on the other side of the Seine. They found their military powers in the sand of Berlin, and leave this precipice-guarded plain in peace. And yet it rules them,-is the focus of thought to them, and of passion, of science, and of contrat social; of rational conduct, and of decent-and other-manners. Saussure’s school and Calvin’s,-Rousseau’s and Byron’s,-Turner’s,-

And of course, I was going to say, mine; but I didn’t write all that last page to end so. Yet Geneva had better

XXXV. X

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