Once more in Switzerland; I have more pleasure now in revisiting a
country which has left pleasant reminiscences in my mind, than in
passing through one hitherto unexplored. In the latter case, I am
usually disappointed. When we revisit those spots in which our
childhood was passed, how invariably do we find that the memory is true
to what the place appeared to us when children, and hardly to be
recognised when our ideas and powers of mind have been developed and
enlarged in proportion with our frames. Is it possible? thought I, when
I returned, after a lapse of fifteen years, to the house of my childhood
out of mere curiosity, for my family had long quitted it. Is this the
pond which appeared so immense to my eyes, and this the house in my
memory so vast? Why it is a nutshell! I presume that we estimate the
relative size of objects in proportion to our stature, and, as when
children, we are only half the size of men, of course, to children,
everything appears to be twice the size which it really is. And not
only the objects about us, but everything in the moral world as well.
Our joy is twice the joy of others, and our grief, for the moment, twice
as deep: and these joys and griefs all for trifles. Our code of right
and wrong is equally magnified: trifles appeared to be crimes of the
first magnitude, and the punishments, slight as they were, enough to
dissolve our whole frame into tears until we were pardoned. Oh dear!
all that's gone, as Byron says--
"No more, no more, O never more on me,
The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew."
The cathedral at Basle is nearly one thousand years old, which is a ripe
old age, even for a cathedral. I believe that it is only in
Switzerland, and England, and Holland, that you find the Protestants in
possession of these edifices, raised to celebrate the Catholic faith.
I met here a very intelligent Frenchman who has resided many years in
the town. One of the first questions I put to him was the following:
For more than twenty years Switzerland has been overrun with English and
other visitors, who have spent an enormous sum of money in the country:
what has become of all this money?
He replied that I might well ask the question.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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