Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/10

4 and how willingly would I both think and feel! The glorious scene before me excites my soul to its inmost depths, and impels me to be doing; and yet what can I do—what do I? I now sit down and scribble and describe. Away with you, ye descriptions! Delude my friend, make him believe that I am doing something,—that he sees and reads something.

Were, then, these Switzers free?—free, these opulent burghers in their little pent-up towns?—free, those poor devils on their rocks and crags? What is it that man cannot be made to believe, especially when he cherishes in his heart the memory of some old tale of marvel? Once, forsooth, they did break a tyrant's yoke, and might, for the moment, fancy themselves free; but out of the carcass of the single oppressor the good sun, by a strange new birth, has hatched a swarm of petty tyrants. And so, now, they are ever telling that old tale of marvel: one hears it till one is sick of it. They formerly made themselves free, and have ever since remained free; and now they sit behind their walls, hugging themselves with their customs and laws—their philandering and philistering. And there, too, on the rocks, it is surely fine to talk of liberty, when for six months of the year they, like the marmot, are bound hand and foot by the snow.

Alas! how wretched must any work of man look in the midst of this great and glorious Nature, but especially such sorry, poverty-stricken works as these black and dirty little towns, such mean heaps of stones and rubbish! Large rubble and other stones on the roofs, too, that the miserable thatch may not be carried off from the top of them; and then the filth, the dung, and the gaping idiots! When here you meet with man and the wretched work of his hands, you are glad to run away immediately from both.