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Is a citizen of the year 1872 any happier than one of the year
1672? Less oppressed, better informed; furnished with more comforts, all that is certain; but I do not know if he is more cheerful. One thing alone increases—experience, and with it science, industry, power. In all else, we lose as much as we gain, and the surest progress lies in resignation.
IV.
This valley is everywhere refreshed and made, fertile by running water. On the road to Pierrefitte two swift streams prattle under the shade of the flowering hedges: no travelling companion could be gayer. On both sides, from every meadow, flow streamlets that cross each other, separate, come together, and finally together spring into the Gave. In this way the peasants water all their crops; a field has five or six lines of streams which run hemmed in by beds of slate. The bounding troop tosses itself in the sunlight, like a madcap band of boys just let loose from school. The turf that they nourish is of an incomparable freshness and vigor; the herbage grows thick along the brink, bathes its feet in the water, or lies under the rush of the little waves, and its ribbons tremble in a pearly reflection under the ripples of silver. You cannot walk ten steps without stumbling upon a waterfall; swollen and boiling cascades pour down upon great blocks of stone; transparent sheets stretch themselves over the rocky shelves; threadlike streaks of foam wind from the verge to the very valley; springs ooze out alongside the hanging grasses and fall drop by drop; on the right rolls the Gave, and drowns all these murmurs with its great monotonous voice. The beautiful blue iris thrives along the marshy slopes; woods and Crops climb very high among the rocks. The valley smiles, encircled with verdure; but on the horizon the embattled peaks, the serrate crests and black escarpments of the notched mountains rise into the blue sky, beneath their mantle of snow.
