MARY (after some pause). We shall all like reading Greek history
so much better after this! but it has put everything else out of
our heads that we wanted to ask.
L. I can tell you one of the things; and I might take credit for
generosity in telling you; but I have a personal reason--Lucilla's
verse about the creation.
DORA. Oh, yes--yes; and its "pain together, until now."
L. I call you back to that, because I must warn you against an old
error of my own. Somewhere in the fourth volume of "Modern
Painters," I said that the earth seemed to have passed through its
highest state: and that, after ascending by a series of phases,
culminating in its habitation by man, it seems to be now gradually
becoming less fit for that habitation.
MARY. Yes, I remember.
L. I wrote those passages under a very bitter impression of the
gradual perishing of beauty from the loveliest scenes which I knew
in the physical world;--not in any doubtful way, such as I might
have attributed to loss of sensation in myself--but by violent and
definite physical action; such as the filling up of the Lac de
Chede by landslips from the Rochers des Fiz;--the narrowing of the
Lake Lucerne by the gaining delta of the stream of the Muotta-
Thal, which, in the course of years, will cut the lake into two,
as that of Brientz has been divided from that of Thun;--the steady
diminishing of the glaciers north of the Alps, and still more, of
the sheets of snow on their southern slopes, which supply the
refreshing streams of Lombardy:--the equally steady increase of
deadly maremma round Pisa and Venice; and other such phenomena,
quite measurably traceable within the limits even of short life,
and unaccompanied, as it seemed, by redeeming or compensatory
agencies.
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