Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/38

54 people are the old Goths and Rhetians; on the plains the Allemanni; in the west Burgundians mingled with Romans. On the banks of the Aar the German tongue prevails, around Lake Leman the Romande.

“A few miles only in Switzerland will divide life of the most primitive races from that of the most highly civilized cities; here herdsmen who often change their dwelling-place, there towns on the shores of the lakes, the Smyrna and Tyre of the Cantons. The old customs of the Sabines mingle with those of republicans, who live in daily intercourse with the two hemispheres. The extremes of time, climatized as it were, are drawn together. Two valleys bring into close proximity the most ancient institutions with those which are in the advance movement of the present time. Whilst more than one Canton endeavors with pious reverence to maintain its most ancient laws, the extreme opinions of modern freedom were advocated in Geneva long before they were adopted in France. Basle, in 1691, passed through a storm unobserved by Europe, which, exactly a hundred years afterwards, produced in France, the revolution. This Alpine valley speaks at this day the Romande language of the middle-ages; whilst from that Swiss town proceeded the movement which gave, in the sixteenth century, construction and rule to the French tongue, and from this other, that which prepared the way for Schiller and Goethe. Every thing approximates, every thing crowds together. A thousand colors are reflected as it were, in one Alpine lake. One contrast ceases merely to give place to another. When law is becoming universal, religion comes in and shelters it.