(no subject)
"This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where my work was begun thirty-five years ago, within sight of the snows of the higher Alps. In that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought upon every scene I have best loved, or tried to make beloved by others. The light which once flushed those pale summits with its rose at dawn, and purple at sunset, is now umbered and faint; the air which once inlaid the clefts of all their golden crags with azure is now defiled with languid coils of smoke, belched from worse than volcanic fires; their very glacier waves are ebbing, and their snows fading, as if Hell had breathed on them; the waters that once sank at their feet into crystalline rest are now dimmed and foul, from deep to deep and shore to shore. These are no careless words -- they are accurately, horribly, true. I know what the Swiss lakes were; no pool of Alpine fountian at its source was clearer. This morning, on the Lake of Geneva, at half a mile from the beach, I could scarcely see my oar-blade a fathom deep. [...] Ah, masters of modern science, give me back my Athena out of your vials, and seal, if it may be, once more, Asmodeus there."
--John Ruskin (1819-1900)
excerpt from "The Queen of the Air, published in 1869