and then be trebly impressed with the size of the masses which
overwhelmed it. The architecture would not lose, and the crags would
gain, by the juxtaposition; but the cottage, which must be felt to be a
thing which the weakest stream of the Alps could toss down before it
like a foam-globe, is offensively contemptible: it is like a child's toy
let fall accidentally on the hillside; it does not unite with the scene;
it is not content to sink into a quiet corner, and personify humility
and peace; but it draws attention upon itself by its pretension to
decoration, while its decorations themselves cannot bear examination,
because they are useless, unmeaning and incongruous.

43. So much for its faults; and I have had no mercy upon them, the
rather, because I am always afraid of being biased in its favor by my
excessive love for its sweet nationality. Now for its beauties. Wherever
it is found, it always suggests ideas of a gentle, pure, and pastoral
life.[6] One feels that the peasants whose hands carved the planks so
neatly, and adorned their cottage so industriously, and still preserve
it so perfectly, and so neatly, can be no dull, drunken, lazy boors; one
feels, also, that it requires both firm resolution, and determined
industry, to maintain so successful a struggle against "the crush of
thunder, and the warring winds." Sweet ideas float over the imagination
of such passages of peasant life as the gentle Walton so loved; of the
full milk-pail, and the mantling cream-bowl; of the evening dance and
the matin song; of the herdsmen on the Alps, of the maidens by the
fountain; of all that is peculiarly and indisputably Swiss. For the
cottage is beautifully national; there is nothing to be found the least
like it in any other country. The moment a glimpse is caught of its
projecting galleries, one knows that it is the land of Tell and
Winkelried; and the traveler feels, that, were he indeed Swiss-born and
Alp-bred, a bit of that carved plank, meeting his eye in a foreign land,
would be as effectual as a note of the _Ranz des Vaches_ upon the ear.

[Footnote 6: Compare _Modern Painters_, vol. iv. chap. xi, and vol. v.
chap. ix.]

44. Again, when a number of these cottages are grouped together, they
break upon each other's formality, and form a mass of fantastic
proportion, of carved window and overhanging roof, full of character and
picturesque in the extreme. An excellent example of this is the Bernese
village of Untersee