The Swiss serve God and serve Liberty; two facts which go far to solve all the phenomena of their remarkable history. They hold with Plutarch that “a city might more easily be founded without territory than a state without belief in God.” It may be, as Professor Tyndall contends, that there is “morality in the oxygen of the mountains.” Man feels himself reduced to nonentity under the stupendous architecture of these elevated regions which carries his thoughts up to the Creator. A cultivated and pious mind may find itself stayed and soothed and carried upward, at some evening hour, by those great symbols of a duration without an end to a throne above the sky; and this impression may be deepened until the outward glory reproduces itself in the inward, and causes it to cry out:
“Great Hierarch! Tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.”
The lives of the Swiss are in continual struggle with the elements, the visible power of the Deity; their sober habits, simple, natural, imaginative, all predispose them to believe; and the Gospel easily obtained dominion over their faith and feelings.
The sublime works of nature are equally calculated to arouse sentiments of patriotism; they are capable of a companionship with man, full of expression of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse. No race of men can dwell in Switzerland, amidst its mountains, its precipices, its rocks, glaciers, avalanches, and torrents, without being strong, brave, and resolute. Just as we recognize an elevated region by its growth of peculiar timber, whether stunted or lofty, alike in their power of resisting the tempest, and by its hardy plants characterized by their intense tenacity of life, just so a mountainous country is indicated by a courageous, athletic, close-knit population of liberty-loving, patriotic men.
“Montani semper liberi,” everywhere mountainous regions have been favorable to a free and manly spirit in the people; in every zone the mountain races are a free, a pastoral, an unchanging people, rather confirming Emerson’s hasty generalization as to snow and civil freedom. In the East the warlike hill-tribes have been less subject to despotic rule than the milder races dwelling on the plains. The varied grandeur of the mountains no less than the awful power of the ocean counts for something in the perpetuation of distinctive characteristics. But the spirit of freedom is thought to take a different color from the sea and from the mountain; in the mountain it is stubborn and resolute; by the sea it is excitable and fickle. The hill-tribes of Judea kept their covenant, the tribes of Jordan fell away; those Medes who never changed their laws descended from the Caspian Alps, those Greeks who sought new things from day to day were dwellers by the Ægean Sea. Among the vines and olives in Italian gardens men are soft, poetic, phosphorescent, no less full of fire than they are fond of change; among the pines and larches of the Swiss glaciers men are hardy, patient, dumb, as slow to fume and flash as they are hard to bend and break. The poet Wordsworth represents that it was the peculiar fortune of Switzerland to enjoy the influence of mountain and sea at once,—
“Two voices are there: one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty voice:
In both, from age to age, thou didst rejoice,