to indicate this first cause by its situation; for that cause must have been something in human, or in inanimate, nature.[1] We can therefore always select a spot where that part of human or inanimate nature is most peculiarly manifested, and we should always do this in preference to selecting any scenes of celebrated passages in the individual's life; for those scenes are in themselves the best monuments, and are injured by every addition. Let us observe a few examples. The monument to the Swiss who fell at Paris, defending the king, in 1790, is not in the halls of the Tuileries, which they fortified with their bodies; but it is in the very heart of the land in which their faithfulness was taught and cherished, and whose children they best approved themselves in death: it is cut out in their native crags, in the midst of their beloved mountains; the pure streams whose echo sounded in their ears for ever flow and slumber beside and beneath it; the glance of the purple glaciers, the light of the moving lakes, the folds of the crimson clouds, encompass, with the glory which was the nurse of their young spirits, and which gleamed in the darkness of their dying eyes, the shadowy and silent monument which is at once the emblem of their fidelity and the memorial of what it cost them.
Again, the chief monument to Napoleon is not on the
- ↑ If in divine nature, it is not a distinctive cause; it occasioned not the peculiarity of the individual's character, but an approximation to that general character whose attainment is perfection.
