singing of the thrushes among the pine
boughs; and, on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it
was by grey cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off
their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, and with the shadows
of the pines flickering upon his plumage from above; but with the fall
of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the
green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam
globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a
scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own
secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers the sudden
blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavoured, in
order more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to
imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New
Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its
music; the hills became oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the
boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had
been dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory
of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from
things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing. Those
ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had been dyed by the
deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue; and the crests of
the sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper
worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of
Joux, and the four-square keep of Granson.

It is as the centralization and protectress of this sacred influence,
that Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious
thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we
cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all
imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the
uncorrupted marble bears!--how many pages of doubtful record might we
not often spare, for a few stones left one upon another! The ambition
of the old Babel builders was well directed for this world:[163] there
are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and
Architecture; and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is
mightier in its reality: it is well to have, not only what men have
thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength
wrought, and thei