38 COSMOS. 



but he likewise entertained feelings of humane compassion 

 for the enslaved condition of the people, a sentiment which 

 was but seldom expressed in antiquity. On the estates of the 

 younger Pliny no fetters were used ; and the slave was per- 

 mitted freely to bequeath, as a cultivator of the soil, that 

 which he had acquired by the labor of his own hands.* 



No description has been transmitted to us from antiquity 

 of the eternal snow of the Alps, reddened by the evening glow 

 or the morning dawn, of the beauty of the blue ice of the gla- 

 ciers, or of the sublimity of Swiss natural scenery, although 

 statesmen and generals, with men of letters in their retinue, 

 continually passed through Helvetia on their road to Gaul. 

 All these travelers think only of complaining of the wretched- 

 ness of the roads, and never appear to have paid any attention 

 to the romantic beauty of the scenery through which they 

 passed. It is even known that Julius Caesar, when he was 

 returning to his legions in Gaul, employed his time while he 

 was passing over the Alps in preparing a grammatical work 

 entitled De Analogia.\ Silius Italicus, who died in the time 

 of Trajan, when Switzerland was already considerably culti- 

 vated, describes the region of the Alps as a dreary and barren 

 wilderness,! at the same time that he extols with admiration 

 the rocky ravines of Italy, and the woody shores of the Liris 

 (Garigliano).§ It is also worthy of notice, that the remarka- 

 ble appearance of the jointed basaltic columns which are so 

 frequently met with, associated in groups, in Central France, 

 on the banks of the Rhine, and in Lombard y, should never 

 have been described or even mentioned by Roman writers. 



At the period when the feelings died away which had ani- 

 mated classical antiquity, and directed the mmds of men to a 

 visible manifestation of human activity rather than to a pas- 

 sive contemplation of the external world, a new spirit arose ; 

 Christianity gradually diffused itself, and, wherever it was 

 adopted as the religion of the state, it not only exercised a 

 beneficial influence on the condition of the lower classes by 

 inculcating the social freedom of mankind, but also expanded 



* Plin., Epist., iii., 19; viii., 16. 



t Suet., i?i Julio Ccesare, cap. 56. The lost poem of Csesar {Iter) 

 described the journey to Spain, when he led his army to his last mili- 

 tary action from Rome to Cordova by land (which was accomplished 

 in twenty-four days according to Suetonius, and in twenty-seven days ac- 

 cording to Strabo and Appian), when the remnant of Pompey's party, 

 which had been defeated in Africa, liad ralhed together in Spain. 



I Sil. Ital., Punica, lib. iii., v. 477. 



$ Id. ibid., lib. iv , v. 348; lib. viii., v. 399. 



