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In a country where the Sabbath is almost entirely forgotten; where on that sacred day the country stores exhibit their wares for sale, and the public-houses resound with the shouts of drunken revelry; where the servant is frequently punished, for refusing to obey his master's commands to its desecration; where blasphemy and sacrilege, in which master vies with man, is constantly heard; and where ignorance and vice stalk triumphant through the land, some conception may be formed of the stupendous nature of the reform to be effected.
But I must give up the attempt; only further remarking that the finest trees here were cedars, of which I saw one and there may have been many such immense in girth, and not less than three centuries old. I likewise saw a vast heap of laurel, two hundred feet in circumference, all growing from one root; and the gardener offered to show us another growth of twice that stupendous size.
In the face of the stupendous movements which must have happened in order to bring about the successive growth of forests one above another on the same spot, the question at once arises as to how these movements of the solid earth came about, and what was the cause which operated in such a manner.
Yet the thoughtful mind will hesitate about accepting them without the fullest proof, for they spring upon the world a social problem of stupendous importance. The dangers apprehended by Mr. Malthus and his followers become remote and commonplace by the side of this new and terrible issue.
It would be useless to search the annals of mankind for a more startling exhibition of purely moral force. The causes of its failure will appear causes altogether of a temporary and unexpected character, when we come to examine them. But the stupendous spectacle itself was enough to impress the beholder with the irresistible effect which it could not fail to produce.
Huge, incredibly huge, a colossal amphitheatre of jet, a stupendous semi-circle, held within its mighty arc the ivory platform on which I stood. It reared itself almost perpendicularly hundreds of feet up into the sparkling heavens, and thrust down on each side its ebon bulwarks like monstrous paws.
"Come," he wrote in one of his letters, "and take a near view, my dear Athenaïs, of these stupendous Pyrenees, whose every ravine is a landscape, and every valley an Eden. To all these beauties yours alone is wanting. You will be here like Diana, the divinity of these noble forests." The excuses which the marchioness offered did by no means satisfy her husband.
If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a truth, our contemplation of her beauty and marvel is seen to be a method of illumination, and her varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-writing, a revelation through the eye of the soul of the stupendous purport of the universe.
The theory on which this is done is that you can secure peace only by showing you are ready to fight; that if one nation is sure that it can thrash another, it will probably plan an opportunity to do so. Such is the theory; but what is the tragic result? Military expenditures have increased at a stupendous rate and all Europe groans under a burden of almost unendurable taxation.
Although the exertions of the former had been stupendous, such was the eagerness and determination of the latter, that at each step he gained perceptibly on his victim. The immediate course taken was in a direct line for the ravine, which it evidently was the object of the fugitive to clear at its nearest point.
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