is in that brown-purple zone, and along the
flanks of every valley that divides it, another Lombardy of cultivable
land; and every drift of rain that swells the mountain torrents if it
were caught where it falls is literally rain of gold. We seek gold
beneath the rocks; and we will not so much as make a trench along the
hillside to catch it where it falls from heaven, and where, if not so
caught, it changes into a frantic monster, first ravaging hamlet, hill,
and plain, then sinking along the shores of Venice into poisoned sleep.
Think what that belt of the Alps might be--up to four thousand feet
above the plain--if the system of terraced irrigation which even
half-savage nations discovered and practiced long ago in China and in
Borneo, and by which our own engineers have subdued vast districts of
farthest India, were but in part also practiced here--here, in the
oldest and proudest center of European arts, where Leonardo da
Vinci--master among masters--first discerned the laws of the coiling
clouds and wandering streams, so that to this day his engineering
remains unbettered by modern science; and yet in this center of all
human achievements of genius no thought has been taken to receive with
sacred art these great gifts of quiet snow and flying rain. Think, I
repeat, what that south slope of the Alps might be: one paradise of
lovely pasture and avenued forest of chestnut and blossomed trees, with
cascades docile and innocent as infants, laughing all summer long from
crag to crag and pool to pool, and the Adige and the Po, the Dora and
the Ticino, no more defiled, no more alternating between fierce flood
and venomous languor, but in calm clear currents bearing ships to every
city and health to every field of all that azure plain of Lombard
Italy....

241. "It has now become a most grave object with me to get some of the
great pictures of the Italian schools into England; and that, I think,
at this time--with good help--might be contrived. Further, without in
the least urging my plans impatiently on anyone else, I know thoroughly
that this, which I have said _should_ be done, _can_ be done, for the
Italian rivers, and that no method of employment of our idle
able-bodied laborers would be in the end more remunerative, or in the
beginnings of it more healthful and every way beneficial than, with the
concurrence of the Italian and Swiss governments, setting them to redeem
the valleys of the Ticino and the Rhone. And I pray