Any Wide Difference In Fortune Does Practically Amount To A Specific Difference, Which Renders The Members Of Either Species More Or Less Suspicious Of Those Of The Other, And Seldom Fertile Inter Se.

The well-to-do working-man can help his poorer friends better than we can.

If an educated man has money to spare, he will apply it better in helping poor educated people than those who are more strictly called the poor. As long as the world is progressing, wide class distinctions are inevitable; their discontinuance will be a sign that equilibrium has been reached. Then human civilisation will become as stationary as that of ants and bees. Some may say it will be very sad when this is so; others, that it will be a good thing; in truth, it is good either way, for progress and equilibrium have each of them advantages and disadvantages which make it impossible to assign superiority to either; but in both cases the good greatly overbalances the evil; for in both the great majority will be fairly well contented, and would hate to live under any other system.

Equilibrium, if it is ever reached, will be attained very slowly, and the importance of any change in a system depends entirely upon the rate at which it is made. No amount of change shocks - or, in other words, is important - if it is made sufficiently slowly, while hardly any change is too small to shock if it is made suddenly. We may go down a ladder of ten thousand feet in height if we do so step by step, while a sudden fall of six or seven feet may kill us. The importance, therefore, does not lie in the change, but in the abruptness of its introduction. Nothing is absolutely important or absolutely unimportant, absolutely good or absolutely bad.

This is not what we like to contemplate. The instinct of those whose religion and culture are on the surface only is to conceive that they have found, or can find, an absolute and eternal standard, about which they can be as earnest as they choose. They would have even the pains of hell eternal if they could. If there had been any means discoverable by which they could torment themselves beyond endurance, we may be sure they would long since have found it out; but fortunately there is a stronger power which bars them inexorably from their desire, and which has ensured that intolerable pain shall last only for a very little while. For either the circumstances or the sufferer will change after no long time. If the circumstances are intolerable, the sufferer dies: if they are not intolerable, he becomes accustomed to them, and will cease to feel them grievously. No matter what the burden, there always has been, and always must be, a way for us also to escape.

CHAPTER XVII - Soazza and the Valley of Mesocco

I regret that I have not space for any of the sketches I took at Bellinzona, than which few towns are more full of admirable subjects. The Hotel de la Ville is an excellent house, and the town is well adapted for an artist's headquarters. Turner's two water-colour drawings of Bellinzona in the National Gallery are doubtless very fine as works of art, but they are not like Bellinzona, the spirit of which place (though not the letter) is better represented by the background to Basaiti's Madonna and child, also in our gallery, supposing the castle on the hill to have gone to ruin.

At Bellinzona a man told me that one of the two towers was built by the Visconti and the other by Julius Caesar, a hundred years earlier. So, poor old Mrs. Barratt at Langar could conceive no longer time than a hundred years. The Trojan war did not last ten years, but ten years was as big a lie as Homer knew.

Almost all days in the subalpine valleys of North Italy have a beauty with them of some kind or another, but none are more lovely than a quiet gray day just at the beginning of autumn, when the clouds are drawing lazily and in the softest fleeces over the pine forests high up on the mountain sides. On such days the mountains are very dark till close up to the level of the clouds; here, if there is dewy or rain-besprinkled pasture, it tells of a luminous silvery colour by reason of the light which the clouds reflect upon it; the bottom edges of the clouds are also light through the reflection upward from the grass, but I do not know which begins this battledore and shuttlecock arrangement. These things are like quarrels between two old and intimate friends; one can never say who begins them. Sometimes on a dull gray day like this, I have seen the shadow parts of clouds take a greenish-ashen-coloured tinge from the grass below them.

On one of these most enjoyable days we left Bellinzona for Mesocco on the S. Bernardino road. The air was warm, there was not so much as a breath of wind, but it was not sultry: there had been rain, and the grass, though no longer decked with the glory of its spring flowers, was of the most brilliant emerald, save where flecked with delicate purple by myriads of autumnal crocuses. The level ground at the bottom of the valley where the Moesa runs is cultivated with great care. Here the people have gathered the stones in heaps round any great rock which is too difficult to move, and the whole mass has in time taken a mulberry hue, varied with gray and russet lichens, or blobs of velvety green moss. These heaps of stone crop up from the smooth shaven grass, and are overhung with barberries, mountain ash, and mountain elder with their brilliant scarlet berries - sometimes, again, with dwarf oaks, or alder, or nut, whose leaves have just so far begun to be tinged as to increase the variety of the colouring.

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