We should go towards the Schoellenen gorge¹, and as we went, our fresh morning senses would gather together a thousand factors for our impression of this more civilised world. A Modern Utopia will have done with yapping about nationality, and so the ugly fortifications, the barracks and military defilements of the earthly vale of Urseren will be wanting. Instead there will be a great multitude of gracious little houses clustering in college-like groups, no doubt about their common kitchens and halls, down and about the valley slopes. And there will be many more trees, and a great variety of trees — all the world will have been ransacked² for winter conifers. Despite the height of the valley there will be a double avenue along the road. This high road with its tramway would turn with us to descend³ the gorge, and we should hesitate upon the adventure of boarding the train. But now we should have the memory of our landlord’s curious eye upon us, and we should decide at last to defer⁴ the risk of explanations such an enterprise might precipitate⁵.

We should go by the great road for a time, and note something of the difference between Utopian and terrestrial engineering.

The tramway, the train road, the culverts, and bridges, the Urnerloch tunnel, into which the road plunges⁶, will all be beautiful things.

There is nothing in machinery⁷, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection; a thing of human making is for the most part ugly in proportion to the poverty of its constructive⁸ thought, to the failure of its producer fully⁹ to grasp the purpose of its being. Everything to which men continue to give thought and attention, which they make and remake in the same direction, and with a continuing desire to do as well as they can, grows beautiful

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