places remind one of Switzerland, especially about
Saint-Leonard, takes on a harsh and melancholy aspect. Here we come upon
vast tracts of uncultivated land, sandy plains without herbage, hemmed
in on the horizon by the summits of the Correze. These mountains have
neither the abrupt rise of the Alpine ranges nor their splendid ridges;
neither the warm gorges and desolate peaks of the Appenines, nor the
picturesque grandeur of the Pyrenees. Their undulating slopes, due
to the action of water, prove the subsidence of some great natural
catastrophe in which the floods retired slowly. This characteristic,
common to most of the earth convulsions in France, has perhaps
contributed, together with the climate, to the epitaph of _douce_
bestowed by all Europe on our sunny France.

Though this abrupt transition from the smiling landscapes of the
Limousin to the sterner aspects of La Marche and Auvergne may offer to
the thinker and the poet, as he passes them on his way, an image of the
Infinite, that terror of certain minds; though it incites to revelry
the woman of the world, bored as she travels luxuriously in her
carriage,--to the inhabitants of this region Nature is cruel, savage,
and without resources. The soil of these great gray plains is thankless.
The vicinity of a capital town could alone reproduce the miracle worked
in Brie during the last two centuries. Here, however, not only is a
town lacking, but also the great residences which sometimes give life
to these hopeless deserts, where civilization languishes, where the
agriculturist sees only barrenness, and the traveller finds not a single
inn, nor that which, perchance, he is there to seek,--the picturesque.

Great minds, however, do not dislike these barren wastes, necessary
shadows in Nature's vast picture. Quite recently Fenimore Cooper has
magnificently developed with his melancholy genius the poesy of such
solitudes, in his "Prairie." These regions, unknown to botanists,
covered by mineral refuse, round pebbles, and a sterile soil, cast
defiance to civilization. France should adopt the only solution to
these difficulties, as the British have done in Scotland, where patient,
heroic agriculture has changed the arid wastes into fertile farms.
Left in their savage and primitive state these uncultivated social
and natural wastes give birth to discouragement, laziness, weakness
resulting from poor food, and crime when needs become importunate.

These few words prese