I liked the cathedral at Basle and especially the ancient cloisters. As I passed through the latter, filled with funeral inscriptions, I read the names of some Reformers. Protestantism chooses its place and takes its time badly when it sets itself in Catholic monuments; one sees less what it has reformed than what it has destroyed. Those dry pedants who thought that they would re-make a primitive Christianity within an old Christianity which had created society for fifteen centuries were unable to raise a single monument. To what would that monument have responded? What connection would it have had with the manners of the day? Men were not made like Luther[440] and Calvin in the time of Luther and Calvin; they were made like Leo X.[441] with the genius of Raphael, or like St. Louis with the Gothic genius; the few believed in nothing, the many believed in everything. And so Protestantism has as its temples only school-rooms, or as churches only the cathedrals which it has devastated: it has there established its nudity. Jesus Christ and His apostles, no doubt, did tot resemble the Greeks and Romans of their age, but they did not come to _reform_ an old creed; they came to _establish_ a new religion, to replace the gods by a God. LUCERNE, 14 _August_ 1832. The road from Basle to Lucerne through Aargau presents a series of valleys, some of which resemble the Valley of Argelès, minus the Spanish sky of the Pyrenees. At Lucerne, the mountains, differently grouped, shelved, profiled, coloured, end, as they withdraw one behind the other and sink away into the perspective, in the snows bordering on the Saint-Gotthard. If one suppressed the Righi and Mount Pilatus and kept only the hills, with their surfaces of grass and rabbit-warrens, which run down directly to the Lake of the Four Cantons, one would reproduce an Italian lake. The arcades of the cloister of the cemetery surrounding the cathedral are like boxes from which this spectacle can be enjoyed. The monuments of this cemetery have for standards small iron crosses bearing a gilt Christ. In the rays of the sun, these are so many points of light escaping from the tombs; from space to space, there are holy-water fonts in which soaks a twig with which one can bless mourned ashes. I wept none there in particular, but I sprinkled the lustral dew upon the silent community of the Christians and unfortunates, my brothers. One epitaph said to me, "_Hodie mihi, cras tibi_;" another, "_Fuit homo_;" a third, "_Siste, viator; abi, viator._" And I await to-morrow; and I shall have been a man; and a traveller I stop; and a traveller I go away. Leaning against one of the arcades of the cloister, I long contemplated the theatre of the adventures of William Tell and his companions: the theatre of Helvetian liberty so well sung and described by Schiller and Johann von Müller[442]. My eyes sought in the vast picture for the presence of the most illustrious dead and my feet trod on the most unknown ashes.