A SECOND MONTH
IN
SWITZERLAND

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

THE DUTY AND DISCIPLINE OF EXTEMPORARY PREACHING.

Second Edition.

New York: C. SCRIBNER & CO.

A WINTER IN THE UNITED STATES.

Being Table-Talk collected during a Tour through the Southern Confederation, the Far West, the Rocky Mountains, &c.

London: JOHN MURRAY.

EGYPT OF THE PHARAOHS AND OF THE KHEDIVÉ.

Second Edition.

A MONTH IN SWITZERLAND.

London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO.

SWITZERLAND AND THE ALPS OF SAVOY & PIEDMONT.
BY KEITH JOHNSTON, F.R.S.E.
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SWISS ALLMENDS
AND A WALK TO SEE THEM

BEING

A SECOND MONTH IN SWITZERLAND

BY

F. BARHAM ZINCKE

VICAR OF WHERSTEAD

CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN

Naturam, optimam ducem, tanquam Deum, sequimur

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1874

All rights reserved

PREFACE.

While I was engaged in writing my ‘Month in Switzerland’ of last year, there was in my mind a half-formed thought, that it might be the first of two or three sketches of the country and of the people. This, notwithstanding that I forbad its growing into anything so visionary as a common expectation, did yet, though somewhat illogically, dispose me to acquiesce in publishing what might have been regarded as the commencement only of a series, which would require time and opportunities for advancing towards anything at all approaching to completeness.

One of the omissions of that first ‘Month,’ the Swiss Allmends, or commonable land, I studied this year with some attention, and, too, with some assistance, for which I was indebted both to the Government, and to several Swiss investigators of the history and present action of the system. The results of this study will be found in the following pages.

As to the excursion itself: the ground it covered was greater in extent, and of more varied interest, than that of the excursion of the previous year. The narrative of its work, objects, and occurrences I give unbroken by digressions. To this the chapter on Einsiedln is not an exception, for it is a contribution to the study of that form of religion which still occupies what was the area of the excursion; and the right understanding of a people includes the right understanding of their religion.

Instead of a sketch-map of the ground passed over this year, which, indeed, would be of little or no value, I prefix to this volume a really good map of the whole country. For this I am indebted to Messrs. Keith Johnston of Edinburgh, and of 18 Paternoster Row, London. It will be found useful not only for the ‘Month’ of this year, but equally for that of last year, and even for ordinary travelling purposes, for it gives the roads, railways, mountains, and glaciers both of Switzerland, and of the contiguous region of France and Italy.

F. B. Z.

Wherstead Vicarage: Nov. 24, 1873.

CONTENTS.

A SECOND MONTH IN SWITZERLAND.

CHAPTER I.

BRETZWYL—BERNE—ZURICH—INTERLAKEN—THE ALMENDS OF THE DELTA OF THE LÜTSCHINE.

Stand, and unfold yourself.—Shakespeare.

On the afternoon of July 30 I found myself at Bretzwyl, a village some twenty miles to the south of Bâle, far from any tourist-beaten track. I had gone there to see M. Heusler, Professeur de Droit in the University of Bâle, and author of a valuable work on the commonable lands of the Canton of Unterwalden. He was then taking his villegiatura at this pleasant and primitive retreat in, as it would appear to English eyes, a farm-house of the ruder sort, though it was in reality the mansion of one of the chief proprietors of the neighbourhood. It was distant about a mile from the village, and known by the name of Sonnen Halle. It was a large, long, rectangular structure. At the end of the ground-plan, furthest from the approach, was the stabling for the cattle; at the other end, that nearest the approach, were the kitchen and store-rooms. Above these departments was the dwelling-house: the best apartments being over the kitchen and store-rooms. It stood on ground that rose all the way from the village, with ground that was much higher behind it. All the land in front of it was in grass, studded thickly with fruit trees; on that behind it, which was higher, and not so well adapted for making hay, were, here and there, small patches of grain, and of potatoes and other culinary vegetables. These patches were unfenced, and seemed taken only for a time out of the grassland.

The Professor and Mme. Heusler were so complaisant as to insist on my spending the evening with them. I showed the Professor a paper of questions on the subject of the Almends, or Swiss commonable land, I had had drawn up in German, and had got put into print, before leaving England. This speedily and completely explained the object I had in view in wishing to see him. He readily gave me all the information, advice, and assistance in his power; including in the latter letters of introduction to several of the leading people in the Cantons of Unterwalden, Uri, Schwyz, and Glarus, who from their position, and knowledge of the subject, might be of use to me in my inquiries. I cannot recall the pleasant evening I spent at Sonnen Halle with the genial Professor and his accomplished wife, without, at the same time, acknowledging the very grateful sense I have of their kindness.

As we returned to the village—for the Professor insisted on accompanying me back to the little Inn at which I had ordered a bed—there was wafted up to us, on the night air, across the meadows, the sound of music. On entering the village I found that the villagers were concluding the day with a dance and concert; songs, in which many voices joined, alternating with dances. This entertainment was being held in a large upper room, which externally bore the appearance of doing duty as the Hotel de Ville of the humble Commune. Those who had not the right of entrée, or who preferred the cooler air outside, were standing in groups in the street. While driving through the village, early in the afternoon, I had found the roadway blocked by a crowd that was collected round the stage of a cheap jack, who was putting up to auction lots of gaudily printed cotton handkerchiefs. I afterwards found that these were not the whole of his stock in trade. The stir was great. I had heard the sound of loud merriment before I reached the crowd; and, when I was passing through it, had observed in the faces of most of those who composed it, much eagerness and animation. Such an advent from the outer world was an event of some magnitude in such a village, which its miniature proprietors can seldom leave. With many it was their only chance, for the twelve months, of investing a little of their precious hoard in a little long-wished-for finery. It was an event that moved every mind—minds masculine as well as feminine; that brought everybody into the street; and that was worthy of being commemorated in the evening with a dance and concert; which, too, would act, in so Arcadian a community, as a safety-valve for carrying off the highly wrought excitement of the day.

On being shown to my bed-room, I found that it was a long corridor with beds set head to foot, reaching from the door to the further end. On each was a loftily puffed out eider-down quilt. The day had been unusually hot, and the night was correspondingly warm. I, therefore, lifted the downy mountain from the bed nearest the door, which I had selected for myself, and deposited it on the next, the second bed. As I did this I looked beyond the mountain of eider-down on the third bed. This led to the discovery, on the pillow beyond the eider-down, of a shock of black hair. I was to be, then, not the sole occupant of the many-bedded corridor. By this time I had made also another discovery: there was in the room an overpowering odour of cows and horses. The corridor, therefore, was only the upper storey, with us it would have been the hay-loft, of a long line of stalls for cattle below. As every bed had a window opposite to it, not a yard distant—the shock of black hair had intended to spend the sultry night, under his eider-down, with every window closed—I set the one over against my bed wide open. This, by allowing the exit of the warm air from the room, and the entrance of fresh air from outside, speedily removed the accumulation of stored up effluvium. The room itself, and everything in it, walls, ceiling, furniture, bedding, &c., were of snowy whiteness, and faultlessly clean.

I was up early next morning: but not so early as the good women of the village, for as I was dressing I heard from many houses the clatter of the shuttle. Bretzwyl, then, is still so primitive as not yet to have abandoned hand-weaving; though even there it must be confined to fabrics of silk, or of wool. Money must be very hard to come at, and a little of it must go a long way, in a place where the human hand can compete with the power-loom. Being a guest of a rather unusual calibre for Bretzwyl—I had even engaged a private carriage to take me some dozen miles to the railway station at Liesthal—my breakfast was served not in the bar room of the little Inn, but in the parlour. The chair was so placed for me at the table as that I should look on the back of the door of the room. On that door was suspended, as a trophy, a work of art, a precious possession, the object which, in the general excitement of yesterday, the mistress of the house had conceived the desire of acquiring, and had bid for in the presence of the village, and paid her money for, and carried home with no ill-founded pride. And now it was displayed on that door for all to contemplate. All would be glad at least to look at it. Perhaps some favoured few might be allowed to take it in their hands, and examine its materials, and structure. It would have shown an unnatural state of mind, and an inability to enter into other people’s feelings, if such an object had forthwith been put away in a box, or drawer. It was done more considerately, and with a truer sense of the conditions of the matter, to place it where all might come, and take their fill of looking at it, and might admire it, and might understand how happy its possessor must be; for was it not—to the possession of which the aspirations of no Bretzwyl dame, or maiden, had previously risen—an embroidered, fringed, riband-trimmed panier?

July 31.—Went to Zurich to see another learned Professor, to whom I had a letter of introduction. I found that he had gone, for his vacation, to the Simmenthal. But I had also a secondary object in going to Zurich, for I wished to take another look at the collection of objects from the sites of the old lake-villages, of which I gave some account in the ‘Month in Switzerland’ I published last year. Again I regarded them with undiminished interest, as everyone would, who has any tincture of history in his composition: for they are an historical record, in which there can be no misrepresentations, or deceptions, of the resources, manners, customs, and life of a branch of our remote progenitors, unconsciously bequeathed to us by themselves, and upon the possession of which we have only lately entered. I missed, however, the custodian of last year, who had spoken of the interest of the objects in the collection, to which he was in succession directing the attention of his visitors, with the bated breath of heartfelt reverence.

August 1.—To Berne, by the first morning train, for a letter from M. Cérésole, the President of the Swiss Confederation—I knew it was awaiting my arrival—in which he would request all Landammans, and other official people, wherever in the country I might go, to give me what aid might be in their power, in furtherance of the inquiries I was desirous of making.

Having reached Berne, and received the President’s letter, which, as I had expected, was ready for me, I ordered an early dinner at the Schweizer Hof, a large new Hotel, the back balcony of which commands an admirable view of the mountains of the Bernese Oberland. I occupied the interval with a walk down the main street to the bridge over the Aare, returning by the parallel street that takes you by the Cathedral. During dinner I looked at the distant snow-capped peaks with some thought of the thousands from many lands, who were at that moment around, and among, and upon them. I reached Interlaken as the evening was closing in, having witnessed some of the effects of a fine sunset from the lake of Thun.

At Interlaken took up my quarters at the Jungfrau, in the dépendance behind the Hotel. My room commanded, even as I lay in bed, a view of the Jungfrau itself. This being the height of the season the place was full with the part then in transitu of the 150,000 travellers who are said to visit it, now, yearly. Sixty years since a carriage could not be found in the place, nor a building that was not of wood. A comparison of these two statements, I do not call them facts, for I have no means of verifying either, will help us in an attempt to measure the progress both the Swiss world, and that beyond, have, in the interval, made in wealth, and in the means of locomotion.

During the night two violent thunderstorms burst on this neighbourhood, separated by a lull of about an hour. They were accompanied by an amount of rain greater, I was told, than any that had fallen, at one time, in living memory. I afterwards saw much of the devastating effects of these storms. I had passed through a very similar one, on the night of the previous Tuesday, between Paris and Bâle. The rain had then come down not so much in drops as in descending jets, and the lightning had appeared to accompany, and invest the train, being before and behind it, to the right and the left of it—everywhere, equally—at the same time. At the end of the following week, I fell in with a third storm of the same kind, to the south of the Alps, again at night. As far, therefore, as travellers, and particularly pedestrians, were concerned, their effects were only advantageous, for they lowered the temperature for a time, and washed away the dust. All this time the weather was unusually warm.

August 2.—Asked the master of the Hotel to see whether he could procure for me a guide, who understood the patois of the Forest Cantons, and could also speak English and French; and then, as the storm of last night had brought a pleasant morning, went out to take a look at what we here at home would call the allotments of the peasants, but which, in those Swiss Cantons, where they are found, are their own immemorial common property. Though, indeed, in the word allotment is embedded the historical fact that such land was, in this country, once common; and that it was from time to time reportioned, and reassigned to the common holders by lot. For the purpose I now had in view I had to walk over the eastern part of the level tract of ground on which Interlaken stands.

But first a few words about this level tract itself. The whole of it was evidently formed by the Lombach and the Lütschine. Originally the two lakes of Brienz and Thun were one continuous sheet of water. At this middle point of the old continuous lake, it happened that, by a convex bend to the south in the mountains that formed its northern boundary, and by a projecting spur, to the north, of the mountains that formed its southern boundary, the width of the old lake had been narrowed from its average of two miles to about three-fourths of a mile. It also happened, by a fortunate coincidence, that, just at this narrowed part, the torrent of the Lombach entered the lake from the north, and that of the Lütschine from the south. Each was impetuous, and often swollen, and so brought down a very large amount of detrital matter. The result was inevitable: the three quarters of a mile of lake must be displaced by transported fragments of rock, sand, and soil. As the two streams worked against one another just where Interlaken and Unterseen stand, this became dry land first; and for the same reason the deposit was here heaped up somewhat higher than it is now, when each is working out only into the still lake. Having jointly in this way put a bar across the lake, they turned their backs upon each other, and the Lombach began to deposit to the west of the bar, and the Lütschine to the east of it; and then they continued their work in these opposite directions, till the Lombach had filled up all the space to the foot of the mountain to the west, and the Lütschine all the space to the foot of the mountain to the east. The alluvial tract thus formed may be spoken of, roughly, as about four miles long, and two miles wide; with the spur, on which stands the Jungfrau Blick Hotel, protruding into it from the south. Of course the Aare kept open for itself a channel through the alluvium. It is obvious that the Lombach, coming from the north, would force down the channel of the Aare as far as possible to the south, and that the Lütschine, coming from the south, would force up the channel of the Aare as far as possible to the north: and this is precisely what each has done. The Lütschine, being by far the larger stream of the two, has done far the greater part of the work. Every particular, as it presents itself to us, is perfectly intelligible. We see what had to be done; and under what conditions, with what means, and in what manner it was done.

What, then, I had gone out to look at was the allotments of the peasants in the eastern side of the Delta of the Lütschine. This eastern side, from Interlaken to Böningen, is about two miles at the base, and about the same length from the base to the apex. Of course the land is highest, driest, and best at the apex, and gradually deteriorates as you approach the base. As you go along the road, which is a straight line not far from the base, on your right hand spade-husbandry preponderates; on your left is grass, worsening into marsh, and ending in swamp. The cultivated part belongs to the villages that surround it. The lower part belongs chiefly to Interlaken. I walked to about the middle of the road; and then turning to the right among the allotments, walked to the apex, that I might see in what way, to what purpose, and with what ideas and feelings, it was cultivated. The wheat, which was not in a large proportion, was of a coarse and unproductive kind, though doubtless it was suited to the rather wet soil. It was nowhere a heavy crop. The ears were small, being only two-set, and with only six lifts. Compared with our English wheats, it would give the miller much offal, and not much flour. The barley varied much in yield. It was a good ear that had twenty-six grains. Maize was a favourite crop. This also varied much: some was very good, and some very indifferent. Potatoes were still more largely cultivated than maize, and formed the chief crop of all. In Switzerland they are generally of a small sort, small both in the haulm and in the tuber. The latter is unusually hard; and, therefore, probably hardy also, which may be its merit, in the eyes of the utilitarian Switzer. There were several patches of haricots, some of cabbages, and a few of hemp. The land was, for the most part, insufficiently manured. In some places it was clean enough, but in quite as many very foul with weeds.

There were here no indications of that love for the land, which, in Switzerland, is so pleasing a sight, wherever it is the absolute property of the man who cultivates it. Nowhere did I see anyone on these allotments, either pulling up weeds, or come to note what damage the heavy storm of last night had done. It was evident that the heart of the cultivator was not in his land. It was regarded not at all as the beloved associate of a life, as a sympathizing helper, as a kindly nursing mother, but was treated, as a slave, with grudging niggardliness, only with the thought of extorting all that it could be compelled to yield to such treatment. It was manifest, at a glance, that the property in this land was common, and that it was reportioned, and reallotted from time to time.

I walked upon, and by the side of the embankment of the Lütschine from the head of the Delta down to the lake. The rapid, turbid stream, five-and-twenty yards wide, was flowing at a height of two, or three feet above the level of the Delta, heavily charged with ash-coloured mud. As much of this as might be required might easily be warped on to the land in the fashion so successfully practised in some parts of England. It might be brought on to the low, marshy, swampy land to the left of the road, so that, when the mud had been deposited, the clear water might then pass off into the lake. This would rapidly raise the low swamps, now producing only reeds and aquatic plants, to such a level as would enable them to produce excellent grass. This is undeniable, for the deposit would be of precisely the same soil, chemically and mechanically, as that of the most productive part of the apex. As the low swamps along the base belong to the municipality of Interlaken, this will probably some day be done. I suggested the scheme to one of the chief people in the town, and found that, as far as he knew, the possibility of turning to such account the mud of the Lütschine had not yet been debated.

Having finished my inspection of this part of the Delta, all, that is to say, that lies on the left-hand bank of the Lütschine, I crossed the bridge to look at the commonable land on the right-hand bank. This belongs to the Commune of Böningen. The only difference I saw here was that the land was somewhat drier and better; and that it had upon it a few fruit trees. This was a pleasing feature, and results from the enforcement of a regulation in this Commune that a certain number of such trees shall be maintained upon the allotments by their shifting and temporary occupants.

On returning to the Jungfrau, was told by the proprietor that the kind of guide I wanted was nowhere to be found in Interlaken. I, therefore, applied to the proprietor of the neighbouring Victoria, the largest Hotel in the place. He advised me to take Heinrich Ammer. As Ammer had been recommended to me at Berne also, and as I could hear of no one else, after some little conversation with him, I engaged him for three weeks, at eight francs a day, tout compris. I had more than misgivings as to Heinrich’s sufficiency for my purpose; but, as will sometimes happen under such circumstances, I was impatient; and so I persuaded myself that I had no time for making further inquiries; and then I went a step further, and said to myself that if he were to prove insufficient, it would be a matter of no great consequence.

Reader, in the foregoing pages we have been whisked along the rail to, and through, some places we visited together last year. What has been said by the way will have given you to understand, that I had in view a special object. You will now also know what that object was, and will see that it was one, which might be sufficiently attended to without much interference with the ordinary objects of a Swiss excursion; if they are, as I take them to be, for the mind the enjoyment of mountain scenery, and for the body more or less vigorous exertion. For an excursion of this mixed kind, carried out in a leisurely fashion, and with some contentment, in the narrative of which the special object will take the position, as it did in fact, of so much collateral by-work, I would now bespeak your friendly company.

CHAPTER II.

A CULTIVATED ITALIAN.

He cannot be a perfect man,

Not being tried and tutored in the world.—Shakespeare.

But before we enter on the narrative of the excursion itself, which will afterwards be uninterrupted throughout, I would ask leave to give a short account of a meeting I had with a fellow wanderer at its first step—while I was crossing the threshold to enter upon it. It was one of those little incidents that are ever occurring in travel, and contribute in no small degree to its pleasure.

August 3.—At a little before 9 A.M. I was on board the boat for Brienz. The morning was fresh and bright. Only here and there a streak of thin white fleece flecked the clear, smooth, unfathomable blue. The late storm had given to the atmosphere a transparency that to the eye brought the mountains very near. I placed myself on a bench athwart the vessel, that I might have the lake before me, and be able to look on the mountains on each side. I had just taken this seat, when a gentleman walked up to me, and asked, if I knew at what hour in the evening the last train left Interlaken for Berne. My interrogator—for we get into a habit of taking an inventory of people, under such circumstances, at a glance—was not stout, but inclined to become so; well-dressed, carefully, but quietly; middle-aged, but looking young for his years; with light hair slightly silvered, the gray just beginning to be perceptible; and of a fresh complexion. He had the assured manner of one, who, from having mixed much in the world, has acquired a facility in making his way, with, under the conditions of the moment, the least amount of friction. I was able to give him the information he wanted.

‘Excuse me,’ he replied, ‘but are you sure that that is the time?’

My authority, I said, was Bradshaw. It happened that I had been asked the same question yesterday.

‘Again excuse me,’ he rejoined, ‘but is your Bradshaw that for this month?’

Somewhat amused, I answered that it was not; and added that, if he would allow me to say so, he was as exacting in his reception of evidence as a lawyer.

‘But,’ said he, ‘I am not a lawyer.’

‘Perhaps then,’ I ventured with a smile, ‘a philosopher, who ought to be not less exacting.’

‘Of that, perhaps, a little,’ was his answer, returning the smile, and taking his seat beside me.

We remained in pleasant conversation, without leaving our seats, for the hour that elapsed from the time we came on board till we reached Giesbach, which was his destination. At first I had supposed from his appearance and language that he was an Englishman. I soon, however, found that he spoke French and German with equal ease; and that he was an Italian.

When he had left the boat I tried to recall what we had been talking about. As the subjects came back to mind, I was somewhat surprised at their range and variety; not, too, without some sense of humiliation on thinking how few Englishmen, notwithstanding our vaunted public schools and universities, and the large proportion of us who are able to devote their lives to culture, have the breadth of culture of this Italian; and the power of so using their acquisitions as to make them contribute, as he made his, to their own enjoyment, and that of others.

He appeared at home, as much so as if he had made a special study of it, on every subject on which we conversed. He quoted readily, and accurately, from the Greek and Latin Classics. For instance, on my telling him, in reply to the question whether I had any particular object in visiting Switzerland, that I was desirous of looking into the history and existing state of the commonable land in some of the Swiss Cantons, I found him well up on this subject. He repeated, verbatim, what Tacitus says of the land customs of the ancient Germans, giving his interpretation of the passage, and his reasons for so interpreting it. He was familiar with the land system of England; and thought it impossible that what had results so much at variance with the wants and spirit of the age, could be maintained much longer. He approved of the French system to the extent implied in the remark, that the State, presumably, had a right to take care that parents, who can provide for their children, should not leave any of them destitute, or in a condition in which they are likely to become bad citizens, or in any way a burden to the State. He knew how loudly the doctrine of laissez faire was proclaimed in England: but this was only what might be expected from those, whom our system placed, and maintained, in exceptionally favourable conditions.

Something having been said that led me to remark that, for many centuries, in the pre-Homeric, almost prehistoric, period, Phœnicia had been an autonomous dependency of Egypt, he was ready with the parallel of the partial dependence of Genoa upon Spain: a position that was not altogether disadvantageous for a commercial community that needed protection against powerful and jealous neighbours.

We talked of the effects modern knowledge, and love of nature, are producing in men’s ideas and opinions; of the causes, in literature and art, of periods of brilliancy, and then of obscuration; of the present state, and future of Europe; of the attitude and policy of the Papacy; and of the prospects of religion.

The bearing and appearance of the representatives, on board the steamer, of the fairer half of creation led us to notice the rapid decay, in our time, of female grace. Women seem now hardly to aim at it, men hardly to look for it. This indicates a great revolution in ideas and sentiments. The loss may be accompanied with counter-balancing advantages, still it is a loss very much to be regretted; and, I think, we were quite in agreement both as to the fact, and in a preference for what was being lost to what might be gained.

He had reasons to give for the opinion he had formed upon the relation of the Latin of Cicero, and of the Augustan, or rather, for that would be too short, of the golden period of the language, to that of the rest of Italy; and of that again to modern Italian; and upon the character of the civilization of ancient Etruria; and upon the probability that its upper governing class was not of the same race as the subject population.

I do not know whether he was a scholar in our narrow sense of the word scholarship, but he had made a higher and better use of the Classics, for he had studied them as an indispensable introduction to the right understanding of the modern world. Though very largely familiar with books, there was nothing bookish about him. He spoke of books as a man of affairs, and of the world, speaks of his experience and observation of the world. He was clear and logical in thought. His knowledge was full, and at the same time accurate. His judgments were balanced. He looked at subjects from all sides. He took into consideration what others thought and felt; and the way in which circumstances affect opinion and conduct. His statements and conclusions gained much in persuasiveness from the pleasing manner in which they were put. In him everything appeared to have been cultivated—the tongue as well as the mind and the tones of the voice as well as the ability to use the right word in the right place.

CHAPTER III.

THE BRÜNIG—LUNGERN—SACHELN—SARNEN—ALPNACH—STANZ—ENNETBURGEN.

Liberty,

Whose touch gives double life—Thomson.

At 10.45, got on our legs at Brienz. The sun had now become warm, but there was a fresh air. Two four-horse diligences were waiting for the arrival of the boat. I placed my malle weighing 30 lbs., and my sac 12 lbs., on the roof of one of them, with orders that they should be left for me at Lungern; and we were off.

One begins a walking expedition jauntily. You are going to do the work yourself; and you feel equal to it. You are breaking away from the conventions and bondage of society. The cords snap as you step out. You will be emancipated from the clock. You are shaking off the incubus of duty. Responsibility, duty’s daughter, goes with her. You shrug your shoulders to make sure that they are going. Conscience means now to go where you please; and to stop when, and where, you please. You are strong and free; and the sense of strength and freedom is intoxicating. Liberty, thy law is good, and shall be mine! Your heart beats gaily. You have simplified the grammar by abolishing the conditional mood: henceforth you will deal only in the indicative and the imperative.

For the first two miles, or so, the road continues in the valley with the newly embanked channel of the Aare on the right, and some high cliffs on the left. It then begins to ascend the Brünig. We reached Lungern—the books say the distance is 10½ miles—in 2½ hours. The two diligences drew up at the door of the hotel as we were entering it. They had, therefore, taken just the same time as we had to come from Brienz. We, however, had for some part of the way come by the more direct line of the old horse-road; and when using the carriage-road had cut off the zig zags. There are some good views on the Brünig in both directions. To the south, there are spots from which it commands parts of the Vale of Hasli, with many snowy summits beyond. To the north, the eye ranges over the top of the forest, along the whole valley of Unterwalden, between its two bounding ranges, with very varying outlines, over the lakes of Lungern and Sarnen, to the distant Pilatus.

The interest of a walk among the mountains never flags, whether they are naked, or clothed with forest; and still more, if the ground you are passing over is diversified with forests, prairies, rocks, upland pastures, and streams. On the north side of the Brünig are some charming bits, where lofty trees, beech and fir, with straight stems, reach up to you from below, on your right as you descend to Lungern; and others on your left, with straight stems also, springing from above the road, here cut in a groove, tower above you. And, then, if you lift your eyes from the immediate entourage, you have, in the distance, Alps and valley combined; and below you spots of greenest turf with detached trees and châlets. In the short cuts through the forest you have the chequered light and shade, luxuriant ferns, and the odour of the pines. On this day it was cool under foot from the soaking the hills had got two nights back, and which had also so thoroughly washed the road that no dust was anywhere to be seen.

I remained at Lungern for the rest of the day, that I might look at the allotments of the peasants. These were chiefly in the 500 acres of bottom land, which had been gained by lowering the lake. This work was accomplished by the peasants themselves, by cutting a tunnel through the rocky ridge that forms the foot, here the northern boundary, of the lake. You everywhere see the old margin of the lake, about 120 feet in vertical height, above the present level of the water. The diminished lake, like its neighbour of Sarnen, abounds in fish, which this day contributed to both my dinner and supper. While I was taking the latter, with no companion but my own thoughts, a young woman, connected with the Inn, approached, and leaning against the sill of the window opposite to my chair, entered into conversation with me. At first I supposed that she was prompted merely by the good-natured desire that a solitary stranger should have some one to talk with. But she soon told me that her object was to find whether I could assist her in carrying out a wish she had to get to England, to learn English. She was willing to give her services, sans gages, to a family that would board and lodge her, and give her a lesson daily in English. Of course, this little scheme was not motived by a disinterested thirst for knowledge, but by a praiseworthy desire to get on in the world. For an acquaintance with English is an accomplishment which at present secures for those, who have attained to it, well-paid places in Swiss hotels.

Aug. 4.—Had breakfasted, and left Lungern at 6 A.M. Sent on my malle and sac by a porter, who started 15 minutes before me. Reached Sacheln at 8.30, and found that the porter had already arrived. The road passes along what remains of the lake of Lungern, next along a gentle descent of two or three miles, and then along the lake of Sarnen. At Lungern I found that the carriage traffic had been interrupted for a time by the storm of Friday night. It took all the labour, that could be brought upon the road, during the two following days, to render it passable. As I walked along, I counted twelve places where torrents had, on that night, in their descent from the mountains, cut through the road, or deposited barriers of mountain débris upon it. In two instances culverts, for carrying torrents beneath the road, had been swept away. As such a storm had occurred, I was glad to have an opportunity for seeing its effects. In some places, where the storm-torrents had cut for themselves channels on the mountain side, only soil had been brought down, and in some only small stones. These were places in which the incline was not great. In other places, where the mountain side was precipitous, large rocks had been undermined, and dislodged, and swept down by the rush of water. The largest rock I saw on the road—I did not go off the road to look for effects—was in a place where it passed through a wood, and a bridge had been carried away. Here the prisoners from the jail of Sarnen, with shackled feet, were at work under the inspection of a gendarme. This rock was a cube of somewhat more than 3 feet. There were tens of thousands of tons of rocks of less size above, and below, and around. One can imagine with what crashing, and thundering, they must have come down through this wood—a torrent, a continuous avalanche, of rocks.

I observed in one place, where a torrent had at last reached a gently sloping meadow, that it had formed for itself a levée on each side, and had rigidly confined itself to the space between the two levées. The pieces of wood and stone, and the earth it had carried along with it, when running down a greater incline, it had, when it reached the meadow, where, from flowing with less rapidity, it was no longer able to carry them along, dropped, and piled up on the right and left. And, then, these torrent-constructed barriers had confined the torrent, that had constructed them, to the intermediate space. The grass, just fit to be cut for the second hay crop, was standing outside the levées, as erect as if there had been no storm at all; but between the levées it was either completely washed up by the roots, and carried away, or flattened down to the ground. It was interesting, and instructive, to have presented for leisurely examination this instance of the way in which rivers often embank themselves. The immediate bank of the Nile is generally raised considerably above the level of the country it is passing through; and so it must be with all rivers whose waters are at times much charged with solid matter, readily deposited. If during the coal epoch the amount of rain-fall in this part of the world, or generally throughout the world, was greatly in excess of what it is now, the kind of work exhibited in my walk of this morning, that is to say the transportation of soil and broken rock from higher to lower levels, must then have been going on upon a grand scale. There are, I suppose, reasons for believing in a wet epoch at that time, just as there are for believing that there was once a glacial epoch.

On the gently rising mountain, on the side of the lake of Sarnen opposite to the road, there is a great deal of land in small prairies. It may be inferred that almost all these prairies are private property from the way in which they are interspersed with châlets, and planted with trees. Here and there are patches of grain, the golden colour of which, at this season, contrasts well with the bright green of the prairies, and the dark green of the trees, and patches of wood. Above, are more extended forests, and mountain pastures. Many of both of these latter belong to the Commune. In the foreground is the blue lake. The whole is a varied, quiet, charming scene.

I called a halt at Sacheln, as I had a letter to one of the magnates of the place—in the address he was styled as Bundesrichter—who had paid some attention to the history, and present working, in Unterwalden, of the Swiss system of commonable land. I intended in the afternoon to go on to Sarnen. I put up at the Rössli Inn, between the road and the church, kept by Von Ah. He is a rough-looking fellow, but I found him good-natured, talkative, and intelligent. He had much to say about the past history of the Canton, and the present condition of the people. He was proud, and with good reason, of the gaststube of his wooden house. Its walls were covered with carved panelling. The buffet was very rich in carving, into which was introduced the date of 1619. The clock, by the same token, had been ticking for a hundred and one years.

For dinner he gave me two kinds of fish from the lake—alet and boriksen, as the rosy, black-eyed damsel in attendance told me, with pleasure at finding that she could answer the stranger’s questions. Then came, in succession, a veal steak, a mutton stew, stewed prunes, cheese, dessert, and a bottle of eau de Seltz. As the good man’s charge for all this was but two francs, and, to be precise, ten centimes, he must have taken the satisfaction he had felt at showing his gaststube in part payment.

I found the Bundesrichter ready to give me the information I required, and to aid me in any way he could. He procured for me a printed copy of all the regulations relating to the public property of the Commune; and offered to answer by post whatever questions might subsequently occur to me.

At Sacheln, of course, one goes to the church to stand before the bones, and the old coat, of St. Nicholas Von der Flüe, for the sake of the thoughts the sight may give rise to in the mind, on the spot. He a saint! Heaven save the mark; and some day send the simple folk of Unterwalden better ideas on what goes to make a saint. This saint was one only because to indulge a morbid crotchet, at all events a mistaken and mischievous idea, he deserted his family, and the duties he owed to them, to his neighbours, and to himself, to live in solitude, and mortification, in a cave; and who gave out, as vouching for his sanctity, that for eighteen years heaven had supported his body with no other food than the sacramental wafer, received once a month. This was what made him a saint. Why, there is not a rural parish in England without its poor Hodge, who is a better man, a truer saint than he; and who, if at last he were to break down under the strain on mind and body he is now manfully sustaining, and attempt what invested this old crazy ascetic with the halo of sainthood, would be bid by the law to maintain, and not to desert, his family. And who, if he were to defend his dereliction of natural duty by the assertion that heaven was keeping him alive without food, would be regarded as belonging to the same class of impostors as the Welsh fasting girl. And yet here, in this church, dedicated to the God of truth, and Who is to be served by truth, are exhibited the troglodyte’s bones, and his old coat, by the priest who ministers at the altar, and by the ecclesiastical authorities who stand behind the priest; and who are teaching the peasants of Unterwalden that these bones, and this old coat, work miracles. Over the old coat they have set up the text of Holy Writ, from the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, which tells us that ‘from the body of Paul were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs and aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them.’ And there on the walls around are the tablets which affirm the miracles this old coat has worked. It must have worked them, for the infallible authority of God’s Vicar will vouch for it. Poor Hodge! let us hope that your turn will some day come; and that the miracle of patient and unnoticed self-denial, your life exhibits, will work the mighty miracle of bringing some of us to understand in what virtue and sanctity consist, and of casting out the evil spirits of discontent, selfishness, and vice.

From Sacheln to Sarnen I went by the lake. The boat was of unpainted deal, of the size, form, and colour of the boats you see on all the Swiss and Italian lakes. It was propelled by two men, standing up, and working their paddles, vis-a-vis. You are reminded of a gondola, though why is not obvious, for the resemblance is as lacking in body as that between Monmouth and Macedon. These lake-boats are flat-bottomed, with their bows rising out of the water in the segment of a circle. Any village carpenter might put them together. The flat bottom is connected with the perpendicular sides by wooden angle-pieces, fastened with wooden pins. Till recently iron was dear in Switzerland; and wood, and, in winter, time were cheap. The same cause led to the same practice in the construction of their châlets, for which wooden trenails were used. In the English church at Meiringen, hardly yet finished, I observed that the fastenings of the benches, of the church furniture, of the window mullions, &c., were of the same material, though by the aid of the railway iron fastenings must be now of much the same price in Meiringen as in Belgium and Germany. In this, as in many other things, a practice, long after what gave rise to it has been removed by a change in circumstances, is still conserved by custom.

To Sarnen the lake is about three quarters of an hour. I was satisfied at finding myself on the water; not merely because it was a pleasant change from exertion to repose, but also because it gave an opportunity for seeing both sides of the valley to advantage. But that was not all. There is in water something that is of itself pleasing. We may not be able to define precisely what it is that makes it so, but we feel that it is so. It has a kind of history; a kind of life; an intelligible purpose. It came from far, from other parts of the world, on the way it had passed through other forms. It is moving back to the great ocean from whence it came. It will, as it returns, be supporting organized life. To the eye, to the ear, to the bodily sense, it is pleasing: and so is it also to the mental apprehension.

As you enter Sarnen you pass its asylum for the destitute. Upon its front is the inscription ‘Christo in pauperibus.’ I suppose this is meant as a reference to His saying that whatever is done to the least of His brethren—it being implied that those who have nothing in this world are least of all—He will regard as done unto Himself. He, then, is in the pauper, looking for, and ready to acknowledge, the charity of the disciple. The expression is worthy of the idea, and of the sentiment that animates the idea.

Sarnen is a quaint, quiet place. Ammer would have me go to the Hotel de Ville to see a model in relief of Switzerland, and the portraits of some score, or more, of landammans, enriched and sanctified, of course, by that of Nicholas Von der Flüe, for he is everywhere in Unterwalden. The preternatural ugliness, the out-of-the-world expression, ‘the abominable imitation of humanity’ of these old local celebrities seemed, somehow or other, in keeping with the place. The expression of the features is the expression of the mind: that, sometimes perhaps its absence, is what they express. But the generations of worthies, who had successively vegetated in this then both unvisited, and imprisoning, valley, which had neither ingress nor egress, could have had but little mind to express in their features. Some of them, methought, looked, what at the best they could have been only a remove or two from, like cowherds who had prospered in their world, and after a life spent on the mountains in summer, and in the stables in winter, waiting on their cows, had arrived at last at the happiness of being able to eat as much cheese as they pleased, without the trouble of making it: and so had grown fat. But this only puffed out, and so made more obtrusive, the indelible cowherd expression. Perhaps, too, their portraits would have been more pleasing, and more indicative of mind, if the worthies, and their fathers before them, had not been taught to believe in their troglodyte saint; and, as another perhaps, we will hope that the railway, by bringing the world to the rising generation, and taking them into the world, may do something to make their features and expression an improvement on those of their ancestors. At all events it will, I think, have the effect of lowering the place of the saint’s coat in the therapeutics of the valley.

August 5.—Left Sarnen at 6 A.M., and in little more than an hour reached Alpnach, where I breakfasted while waiting for the steamer, that was to take me to Stanzstad. Alpnach is a populous village at the head of the Alpnach See, a branch of the lake of the four Cantons, which from this point stretches away to the north-east. It stands at the bottom of the south-east slope of Pilatus, the well wooded flank of which here comes down to the lake. The walk had been through a broad grassy valley, thickly planted, in some parts, with fruit trees. Perhaps the walk on the eastern side of the valley, through Kerns, to Stanz, my immediate destination, would have been over more diversified, as it would have been over higher, ground. And this, I believe, would have brought me to Stanz sooner than the route I took, for I lost at Alpnach an hour in waiting for the steamer. The water was the attraction, and the view, I should have from the water, of Pilatus. But I was satisfied with the way I went, and that was enough.

The steamer was not long in reaching Stanzstad, where we again got on our legs, and in a little more than half an hour were in the Angel of Stanz—a quiet inn, about the centre of the place, facing the church. As the Commune of Stanz possesses an unusual amount of cultivable land, so much as to enable it to give to each of its numerous burgers an unusual amount of garden-ground, I spent the rest of the day here in looking into the working of the system. And again the next morning on the way to Buochs, where I was to take the steamer for the Canton of Uri, I inspected a large part of the Almend ground of Stanz. Each burger peasant is allowed 1,400 klafters, which is about equal to an English acre. Of this amount I found 800 in garden-ground, and the rest in marshy grass. Switzerland, speaking generally, has very little straw for foddering cattle, but a great many cattle to fodder. The rushes, sedges, and young reeds cut from such land, and dried, go some way towards supplying this want. This difficulty is so great that I have seen horse-keepers resort for bedding to a mixture of sawdust, and of leaves and weeds that had been collected in the woods, and then dried and stored away.

August 6.—While waiting for the steamer at Buochs, there was time to contemplate a charming piece of Swiss life, which is held up for you, to take your fill of looking at it, on the long slant of the opposite mountain, beyond the blue lake. It is on the broad south-eastern slope of the mountainous promontory called Obburgen, that runs out into the lake, midway between the Rigiberg and Pilatus, and would, but for two narrow straits, join on to the former on the right, and to the latter on the left. I see in Dufour’s map the place is called Ennetburgen. I did not set foot in it myself, nor am I acquainted with any one who has, but if the working of inner causes may, sometimes, be read on the outside of things, then, industrious, frugal, contented, happy Ennetburgen! that has neither riches, nor poverty; that knows neither waste nor want; and where every man feels that he is a man, because a portion of the earth, the common and ennobling inheritance of all, is his! For two thirds, or so, up the mountain, its gentle ascent is almost all in small prairies, very green, and thickly planted with fruit trees, with just here and there, as at Sacheln, small patches of, at this season, golden grain, to enrich the tender green of the grass, and the darker green of the fruit trees. The upper third of the mountain is in forests for fuel, and in summer grazing ground for cows. But the characteristic feature is the houses. There is no town. That has, as it were, been taken to pieces, and evenly dispersed, house by house, over the whole space of some thousands of acres. Each house is a modest carefully kept home.

This is a scene that tells its own tale. The properties must be small, because the owners of these dispersed houses must possess, each, the land immediately around his house; for, of course, in such a place there can hardly be any other means of living than that derived from the land. And nothing, but the fact that, here, each man cultivates with his own hands his own land, can account for the completeness with which the rocks have been quarried, and removed; and for the loving care with which the grass, and fruit trees, are tended. How unlike was this to the aspect of the Almend lands of Stanz I had just been looking at. There the plan is to do as little as possible for the land, and to get as much as possible out of it this current year. Next year, or at all events in a year or two, some other transitory occupant will be treating it with the same thoughts, and in the same fashion. Here the heart of the owner is in his land, as, for many generations, the hearts of his forefathers have been. We can show nothing of this kind in England. With us there is not the relation of man to the land which can alone produce such a scene. But I believe that in old, almost prehistoric Italy, before it was devastated, and ruined, by the greed, and brutality, of Rome, many such scenes might have been looked upon. The same careful culture of small properties was, probably, in very many places there the rule then; with the addition, in harmony with the circumstances of those times, of some loftily walled place of refuge, seen from far, on its coign of vantage: as Virgil describes them, ‘Towns perched on precipices of rock, with rivers gliding by beneath their antique walls.’

CHAPTER IV.

BUOCHS—GERSAU—THE BAY OF URI—ALTORF—AM STAG—WASEN—GÖSCHENEN—SCHÖLLINEN—THE DEVIL’S BRIDGE—THE URSEREN THAL—ST. GOTHARD.

Oh! how I love with thee to walk,

And listen to thy whispered talk!—Thomson.

As you leave the bay of Buochs you find that the mountains on all sides show well from the lake. Behind is Obburgen, at which we have just now been looking. On your immediate right is Buochserhorn. Beyond it is Seelisberg, though not yet itself visible, but only the way to it by Beckenried, on the east face of which is the Sonnenberg Hotel, a head-quarters for much that is good and interesting. On your left is the Rigiberg. Before you, in sight of which you soon come, is Brunnen, the port of Schwyz, which is seen three miles back, at the foot of the rocky and precipitous Mythen. A fair expanse, how fair! of bluest crystal, set in a glorious frame of multiform mountains, superficially more or less subdued by long ages of human industry: this, however, being possible only to such a degree as to diversify, and enrich the interest of the scene. In itself a glorious scene! but there is, besides, all about it the glamour of the memory that it was the cradle of Swiss liberty.

Along the beach at Buochs I had seen several peasant women, turning over in the bright sun to dry, as if it were so much wet hay, the roots and fragments of wood they had collected from what the storm of Friday night last had swept from the mountains into the Engelberg Aa, which had brought them down to the lake. This was to be added to their store of winter fuel. Fuel has now become very dear in Switzerland, not only from its participation in the general rise of prices—that affects everything—but also from an exceptional cause. The recent increase of population has led to a corresponding increase of cultivation; and this has been effected chiefly at the expense of the forests, which are here the only source of fuel. While, therefore, the number of consumers has increased the supply of fuel has diminished. On reaching Gersau I came on further evidence of the violence of that great storm.

But first a word about Gersau itself. Its history is interesting. Its territory is a little valley in the Rigiberg, every rood, tree, and house of which is taken in at a glance from the deck of the steamer. Its population may now number about 2,000 souls. The increase this implies is due to the advantages of its situation, and to the industry of its inhabitants, having enabled it to keep abreast of the general advance of the whole of this much-frequented region. To it belonged, for many centuries, during which its population was much less than at present, the distinction of being the smallest independent sovereign state in Europe. San Marino was four times as populous, and had a proportionately larger area. Its valley, which looks to the south, is about three miles in length. It rapidly descends from the top of the col to the lake. Its sides, east and west, with far more rapid descents, are about a mile, each, in width. The whole of this area is covered with little green prairies, studded thickly with fruit trees, and with dispersed houses. The toy capital is at the bottom of the valley, on the margin of the lake. All the water that flows from natural springs, or that, in heavy rains, runs off its surface, will evidently reach the lake by the central trunk-channel that passes through the little town. This flow of water is sufficient in ordinary times for the machinery of a silk-mill, which has been placed at its mouth.

Against such a storm as that of Friday no adequate precautions had, or probably could have, been taken. As the steamer approached the pier, we saw heaps of fresh rocky débris piled up on the beach, and observed that the main street had been cut up, and the materials of the road partly carried away, by the torrent that had swept over it. The silk-mill had been pretty well wrecked, and a great many houses, and much land injured. Some of the rocks brought down into the town were so large that they had to be broken up by blasting, before they could be removed. I, afterwards, saw in the Swiss papers that a collection was being made to assist those of the humbler classes here, who had suffered by the storm. I heard also that the new road that passes along the margin of the lake, from Brunnen to Flüelen, had, like that through the valley of Unterwalden, in some places been blocked with débris, and in some cut through. As to the poorer sufferers at Gersau, we may be sure that, whether aided from without, or not, by the proposed subscription, the long tradition of self-help is not yet forgotten in this little community; and that it will soon repair the damages it has sustained, as effectually as a hive of bees would an injury done to their comb.

As far as Brunnen, which is about four miles beyond Gersau, our steamer’s course had been due east. Her head was now put due south, down the bay of Uri, which is the southern branch of this tortuous lake. The character of the scene changed as rapidly and completely as the direction of our course. The mountains no longer, as at Buochs, Ennetburgen, Beckenried, Gersau, and Brunnen, gradually shelve down to the water, offering space for little communities, whose successful industry, and careful thrift, it is so pleasing to contemplate. Their sides are now mostly naked precipitous rock; in some places rising a thousand feet, sheer above the glassy water, which, in its turn, is another thousand feet deep. But even on these mountains, which like some old-fashioned fish, wear bones on the outside, and, going further, are bone to the heart, the industry of the people, which will take no denial, has set its mark. Wherever a little space could be found for grass, there its emerald green gems the rocks, just as some bright parasite might the ganoid fish. So, too, wherever a little wood, or even a tree, or two, could be made to grow, there it springs from the mountain side. On the left you face the line of the new road to Flüelen, with the Axenstein Hotel above it; on the right, two or three thousand feet above the water, you look up to the Sonnenberg Hotel. Above and beyond the latter, reaching on for some distance in front, a combination of snow-fields, and of naked peaks, appropriately completes a scene, which once beheld is for ever remembered.

In some places you see sections of rock, exposing strata that have been contorted into zigzags. This convolution of the rock, the mountain high precipices, and the depth of the water, indicate how great were the forces that have been at work here, and with what mighty throes they worked, or through how long a range of ages.

I reached Altorf, in time for the 12 o’clock dinner, at the Golden Key. There were twenty-five people at table, among whom I was, I believe, the only Englishman; the rest being Germans, or Swiss. English people, however, do not like these hours; but I had breakfasted early. Altorf, though the capital, is not itself a Commune, but belongs to the quasi-Commune of Attinghausen, as Am Stag does to that of Silenen. I use the word quasi-Commune, because politically all the Communes of northern Uri, speaking roundly, and subject to some qualifications and explanations, form one body; each being a distinct body, again with qualifications and exceptions, only for economical purposes. This is the case also with the Communes of Southern Uri, or the Urseren Thal.

After dinner I walked over the whole capital in a vain search for a shop, in which I might get some statistical account of the Canton. Not one was to be found in which printed matter of any, even the humblest, kind was sold. Ammer laughed at my simplicity. ‘In Uri people do not spend money on books. But if I were to go to the Hotel de Ville, where the authorities were then holding a sitting, I might find the Archivar, or some such officer, who possibly might be of use to me.’ I acted on the suggestion; and brought away with me an abstract of the last census of Uri. But I found that in the capital of Uri printed matter, in accordance with the general rule in all matters, was dear in proportion to its scarcity. For a few figures—for the population of the Canton is only 16,095—printed on a small square of coarse spungy paper, not good enough to wrap up grocery in, I had to pay a franc. But I hold that the franc was not ill spent, as I found that, under the head of ‘Confession,’ of the above given number 16,025 were ‘Catholics;’ 60 ‘Protestants,’ 1 (with commendable precision) of ‘other Christian professions,’ and 3 ‘Israelites, and of other non-Christian professions.’ Considering the relation of Israelitism to Christianity it is not quite right to class it with all kinds of heathenism; though perhaps this heading may be defended by our own ‘Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics.’ But what a Priest’s Paradise must Uri be! Only 4 per thousand, not nearly a half per cent., of heretics and misbelievers of all kinds; and then not a book to be bought! How long will it be before these one-minded and unreading folk reach the debate of the old question What is truth; and come to understand that demonstrable fact is an alternative answer to the thimblerig of authority?

In the afternoon, having left my malle in charge of the landlord of the Golden Key, I went on to Am Stag. So far there is bottom land in the valley; broad at Altorf, and narrowing all the way to Am Stag, where it ends. The bounding ranges are always interesting, as seen from the road, which runs pretty straight, and pretty much on a level, for the intervening nine miles, among meadows, in which numerous fruit trees, as elsewhere in Switzerland, appear to be of little, or no, detriment to the grass.

Am Stag was reached at 6 o’clock. This gave time enough to look at the village, and its entourage. It is a small place created by the traffic through the valley, to which it is a kind of half-way house, where voituriers bait their horses, and the diligences take fresh teams. The mountains close in above and below it, forming a deep hollow of about a third of a mile in diameter. The environing mountains look unusually hard and pitiless; in part of naked rock, in part clothed with stunted woods. On the west side of the village the Reuss races by, being joined in the village by the stream of the Maderaner Thal, of about the same volume, and quite as noisy. These, with the breadth of sky above, are all the objects in nature the peasants of Am Stag have to contemplate. And in winter everything is buried in snow. And, then, the capital, for the dissemination of ideas, is Altorf. The time must be still distant when the coming bookseller of Altorf will have a customer from Am Stag.

From several conversations I had, during this excursion, with young women in these Catholic cantons, I came to think that they are not so keen and hard as, more gentle, artless, and pleasant to talk with than—to make the comparison as personal as possible—they would have been, had they been brought up under a different system. They seemed to wish to be friendly, and not to be afraid of being so; and not to have des arrière-pensées, nor to suspect other people of having them; and to be taking life as it came, as if it were not they who were responsible for what it brought. This may be a mere fancy of my own; but, because I think it something more, I set it down here.

What is the intellectual life of the peasants of Am Stag? If even in a broad country-side, where a bookseller can live, and the world is not quite unknown, the one subject of conversation that interests all, and alone never flags, is one’s neighbours, and their affairs; and if, even in its larger atmosphere, petty jealousies and heart-burnings abound; and often grow, for the soil and atmosphere have some qualities that stimulate such growths, to not insignificant dimensions, from beginnings no bigger than, and as unsubstantial as, the midge’s wing; what, in these matters, must be the state of this little community, when imprisoned for the winter in its mountain cage? How A. manages, now that he no longer has a cow; or how B. managed to get one, are fruitful topics, that will not be dropped till next summer. That C. has, or is supposed to have, beaten her cat, that D.’s hen is reported to have laid an egg, will not be without interest, though the former particular, however long and sedulously nursed, may never get beyond the stage of inference. This, however, will not unfit it for many improvements; which, perhaps, the intervention of the Priest, in his capacity of moral policeman, may sometimes prevent being carried too far. For, though his authority may not now be always quite unquestioned, he still wields a machinery which, under the circumstances of the valley, leaves him master of the situation.

As to A.’s not having any longer a cow to send up to the common pasture—poor fellow! he does not see exactly how this came about. But it is not inexplicable. He is a peasant burger, with a pedigree as old as that of the Hapsburgs. His ancestors, each in his day, to a time back beyond history, had a cow or two to send in the summer. He does what he can; and yet, though still a co-proprietor of the old pastures, just as his ancestors were, he has no cow to send. That is the puzzle. His voice is as potent as that of any of his fellow-burgers in the management of those pastures. He is as much co-owner of them as they. Nothing can divest him of his right in their common use. It is a personal right inherent in his blood. But now he can turn it to no account. He looks on as the rich Innkeeper sends up his dozen, or score of cows, while he has himself none to send. As the herd is driven by, through the village, with bells tinkling, and joyous at the prospect of returning at last to the fresh, thymy, mountain herbage, he looks on in silence, with his mouth open, as if his hopes, and his wits, too, were departing from him, through the passage he is providing for their exit.

He cannot understand how things have come to be as they are. He worked hard all the summer. But, then, he worked for wages: and that is the key to the puzzle. The valley is now advancing into the condition in which, on account of the traffic and business it supports, there will be some who will have to employ others; and many, as population is increasing, who will have no means of living except that of being employed by others. Those who employ others will have cows, some of them many, to send up to the common pastures; some very many more than any had in old times. Of those who are employed by others, many, having necessarily been otherwise occupied, were not able in the foregoing summer to collect food for keeping a cow through last winter, and so this summer, and among these is our poor friend, have not one cow to add to the herd, that is now being collected from the village for their three months’ sojourn on the mountain pastures. These he can no longer turn to account. And he will not emigrate to a new world, where there are openings for his industry and thrift to make him a richer man than anyone in his Canton will ever be; nor will he even leave his Canton for another. And all this for the sake of his long line of burger ancestors, and for the sake of his common rights in the land, which—as far as pasturage go—are of no manner of use to him. It is the sentiments, so lovely and so human, of home, of kindred, of the accustomed locality, of country, that have fastened themselves to, and fed on, the now valueless corporeal hereditament, that bind him to the spot with a chain he has no power to break. The hopes and chances of the distant world do not allure him. For them he will not sell the inheritance, nor leave the graves, of his Fathers.

And as it is, here, with the common pasturage, so is it in some degree with the produce of the common forests. In conformity with immemorial usage, the fuel, and timber for repair of houses, are distributed in proportion to the size of the house. A large house, in which many fires are needed, and which will require more timber for repairs, will receive its proportion. So will also the poor man’s humble tenement. To him this will perhaps give for fuel one klafter, which will not be enough for his wants. But to his rich neighbour, who could well afford to pay for his fuel, it will give four or five klafters. A klafter of wood is a solid measure, six feet long, wide, and high, and three feet deep. This method of distribution, which worked fairly enough under the old condition of things, when none were rich, and none were poor, works unfairly now, when there are opportunities, of which some will be able to avail themselves, for getting rich. A man may now prosper at home in ways unknown formerly; or he may go out into the world, and make several thousand francs, as my Am Stag informant had done, and then come back, and resume his rights, none of which absence forfeits; and he will be rich, and will, therefore, build, and live in, a large house; and this will entitle him to a large proportion of the common fuel and timber. There will, therefore, be so much the less to divide among his poorer fellow-burgers.

August 7.—Had breakfasted at the Croix Blanche, and cleared out of Am Stag, by 6 A.M. I was never in bed after 5. The bottom land having now completely thinned out, you here enter on the ascent of the St. Gothard Pass. Henceforth the road is cut in, or built upon, the mountain side, and frequently changes from side to side of the Reuss.

At the last bridge before you enter Wasen, the Reuss flows below in a channel it has excavated for itself, so deep, dark, and narrow, that you cannot make out where the water is, till you have looked for it. On the left of the bridge, the eastern bank of the torrent is much higher than the opposite side. The place is called the Priest’s Leap—Pfaffensprung. Here Ammer repeated the legend, you will find in the books, of the enamoured Priest, who baffled his pursuers, in the days before the bridge, which were also the days of faith, by leaping across the stream, with the cause of his lapse in his arms. He concluded the story with the comment, that, ‘if the Priest did it, the devil must have helped him;’ then adding, as a comment on his comment, that ‘in these days the Devil has become inattentive to his friends, and does not aid them as he did of yore.’ This legend will help us to understand how it came about, that, in order to promote morality, the people of these Cantons persuaded their priests to keep concubines.

I was at Wasen, seven and a half miles, by 8 o’clock. The road, all the way, was at this time of the morning, in the shadow of the eastern mountains. Yesterday evening at Am Stag, I had debated with myself the question, whether it was better to have, or not to have, an object. I had walked a little way up the Maderaner Thal, under the influence of a growing desire to give up my pre-arranged route—arranged because I had an object—and to take to the mountains. There was before me an inviting opportunity, the charming Maderaner Thal, by which I might find a way to Dissentis. But virtue triumphed. And now that I was at Wasen, and saw a party starting for the Meien Thal, the same question recurred. I had had enough of carriage-road valley-work for the present, and wished for something rougher and harder. Having, however, once entered on the path of virtue, you keep it, if only for the sake of consistency. This was the first time I had ever travelled, when on my own hook, along a prescribed route. In former excursions, I had always left the route throughout, from day to day, an open question. It is very pleasant, so unlike staying quietly at home, to be going you do not at any time know exactly where, and you do not at all care where. An object, which requires a plan, makes this impossible, and substitutes bondage for what the recollection of former excursions tells you would be freedom. An object is not bad, still no object may be better. But I had also another reason for adhering to my pre-arranged plan, which was, that it would bring me to Andermatt, where I was to meet my wife, and the blue boy of last year’s excursion; and some mountain work with them was part of this pre-arranged plan. But still I said to myself this morning, It is all pre-arranged, and that excludes liberty.

Above Wasen the road, having crossed to the eastern side of the valley, passes through a pine forest. The trees are well grown, and the roadside is full of ferns. The Reuss below is unusually noisy. In places the lofty mountains ahead are in sight, and through openings in the forest, occasionally, the mountains on the opposite side of the valley, with here and there on their flanks a little prairie; on some of these a small summer châlet, or hay-grange. As I walked on alone, a little ahead of Ammer, the feeling came over me that I was advancing into one of Nature’s sanctuaries, one of her great laboratories. It was as if I was being admitted to see the anatomy and mechanism of nature, the rocky skeleton, the mountain-ribs of the solid earth. ‘And here too,’ I said to myself, ‘she is busy making the rivers, and’ (as the dinning noise of the Reuss reminded me of the hundreds of glacier-fed rills out of which it was formed) ‘she is making them out of the glaciers; and the glaciers she had made by lifting up the mountains to attract the clouds, the vapour of distant oceans; and then causing its precipitation from their cold and rarefied atmosphere. So is she forming rivers. And these mountain Reusses are grinding down rocks and pebbles, and floating off the vegetable mould, to become the particles of the soil, that is, down below, to form broad green meadows and fruitful golden cornfields. The skittish, noisy stream is young and playful now, and leaps from rock to rock like a young lion. When it has attained to its maturity it will move majestically. Cities will then be built on its banks, and commerce will make a highway of its surface. Up here man has but very slight hold on the scene. In this workshop of Nature her work almost excludes his. He is not the master here. His business and gain here are to understand nature.’ My reverie was suddenly interrupted by the apparition, at the wayside, of a woman on her knees, breaking stones for metalling the road. I could not pass her without a word: even a word would be in some sort a recognition of our common humanity. Poor soul! In a life of 57 years she had seen no more of the wide, rich, busy world than may be seen at Wasen, and a few miles above and below it. Her days were now spent in quarrying pieces of rock above the road, bringing them down to the road, and breaking them in heaps by the roadside. It was with her a good day, a very good one, when she could earn sixty cents. But she was well satisfied with a day that gave her fifty cents, just fivepence. Hard work, and exposure in all kinds of weather, hot and cold, wet and dry, early and late, had scored her face with many wrinkles, long and deep; had enlarged her mouth, and had widened her nostrils, for she had to breathe hard; and by making her eyelids swollen and pendulous, had more than half-buried her eyes. All this had given her somewhat of the features and expression of an ape. I wondered whether in her long solitary days she ever compared her life with that of the gay and prosperous thousands coming and going in carriages, in making a road for whom her life was expended. And I wondered how many of them compared their lot with hers.

On returning the following week, this way, I found her again, at the same place, in the same attitude, engaged in the same work. For a few years longer, perhaps, she will be able to continue it; and then she will have sunk, out of sight of the folk who pass in carriages, to something lower and harder, and will be looking back regretfully to the better times, when between sunrise and sunset, she could earn fivepence.

In an hour from Wasen I reached Göschenen. Here the aspect of things becomes what you might have been expecting in a great and famous pass. All the way up from Am Stag the valley of the Reuss had been narrowing and hardening: and now a break in its western wall forms the Göschenen Thal. You see the snow-field of the Damma, and the eastern glacier-shed of the Damma, of the Galen, and of the Rhone-Stock; on the other or western side of which is the vast Rhone glacier. Here, as in Alpine, and as indeed in all scenes, thought aids in deepening the interest of what is at the moment before your eyes. As I looked around I felt as the spider feels in the centre of its web. Along one thread, sensitive to thought, I passed by the arrowy Rhone to the sunny Middle sea, through thrifty Switzers, and light-hearted Frenchmen. Along another by the vine-clad Rhine to the stormy North Sea, through studious Germans and plodding Hollanders. Along a third attached to the next mountain a few miles further on, by the way of the Ticino, Lago Maggiore, and the Po, through many cities of the quickwitted Italian, cities of ancient renown in the wealthy field of teeming Lombardy, to the gusty Adriatic, and its lovely Queen, whose glories have not yet all departed.

No sooner have you passed through Göschenen than Schöllinen takes up, and advances, the interest of the spectacle. The gorge now becomes narrower, more precipitous, more iron-faced. Here it is that you come upon the mouth of the tunnel that is being bored beneath St. Gothard for fifteen miles, from Schöllinen to Airolo, all in granite, with Andermatt and St. Gothard above it. You are walking on the carriage road, a grand work completed thirty years back. The old horse-road it superseded is close on your right. On its margin, on your left, is the long line of iron tubing, of sufficient diameter for a man to crawl through, which brings from a higher level the water power that is being used in the excavation of the tunnel for the modern railway, that will supersede the carriage-road, as that in its turn had superseded the horse-road. Our world is large and busy, but the world in which our children will play their part will be larger and busier.

You cut off a few zigzags. The way becomes more precipitous, narrower, more iron-faced; and you find yourself, a few minutes beyond Schöllinen, on the Devil’s bridge. Black granite rises in sheer cliffs, mountain-high above you. The Reuss thunders seventy-five feet below the arch on which you are standing. You are wet with the spray. A sense of personal nothingness, of annihilation, comes over you. You feel as a shrimp might between the jaws of a whale.

The granite appears absolutely naked; but a closer inspection shows you a few humble Alpine plants in such crannies and crevices as their roots could find a hold in, together with a little mould from decayed lichens to feed upon. And, here and there, but never rising more than a few inches above the storm-swept surface, you will make out a Pinus pumilio, or two, but of so weather-worn, and weather-stained, and snow-crushed an aspect as to be thoroughly toned-down to the dark granite. How bravely and obstinately does life struggle to maintain itself amidst all this wrath and desolation! It will have the whole world. It will not submit to exclusion anywhere. Even up here, though so nipped, and starved, and frozen; so snow-smothered, and storm-torn, it will not shrink for asserting its universal right.

You pass through a tunnel, excavated in the perpendicular granite, which here overhangs the dashing, dinning Reuss on your right. As you step out of the tunnel the broad grass-clad expanse of Urseren Thal is before you: Andermatt at the near side; Hospenthal, two miles off, on the far side. All grass between. The mountain slopes, too, around are all in this livery of soft green. Where else did one ever see such a contrast, and so unexpected! Behind you the ruthless granite and eternal snow: before you the sheen of a smooth lawn, with these busy little communities nestling in its bosom. No one, who comes along this way, on foot, on a bright sunny day, as this was, will ever forget this contrast.

At the St. Gothard Hotel, at Andermatt, I came up with my sac, which I had sent on in the morning from Am Stag by an empty return carriage. I here also found a telegram from my wife—she was at Pontresina—which told me that she could not be at Andermatt till the evening of the twelfth. To-day was the seventh. Nothing, therefore, could be clearer—it was obvious in a moment—that the best thing for me to do was to go on at once to Como, to breathe for some hours the air of Italy, and to gladden my eyes with an Italian scene; returning early on the eleventh, so that I might devote a part of that day, and the whole of the next, to such inquiries as I might wish to make at Andermatt and Hospenthal. I had left Ammer behind at Schöllinen, where he had fallen in with an old friend. On his arrival, about half an hour after mine, I announced to him my resolve; and told him we should be off at 4 o’clock. It was now 1. This would give him time to get his dinner, visit his acquaintances in the place, and consume as many pipes, and thin, long, black, Swiss cigars as he pleased; for it appeared to be his custom when tired of the one to take to the other. Being of that conservative turn of mind which is averse to changes of plan, as well as of anything else; and, too, being now of the age, when exertion begins to be no longer pleasing for its own sake, he seemed to think that it was hardly worth while to leave Switzerland for so short a time. At the appointed hour, however, we were again under weigh; and at 6h. 40m. had reached the Hotel on the summit of the Pass. The books give 24 miles for this day’s tramp: but this, from the time we took to do it, and the ease with which it was done, I think beyond the true distance.

From Andermatt you walk through the level mead of Urseren to Hospenthal, 2¼ miles. The grass of course is carefully cultivated, for the whole dependence of the people is on their cows and horses. Andermatt and Hospenthal are towns of horses rather than of men, for here the two great trunk lines of communication from east, along the Alps, to west, and from north, across the Alps, to south, bisect each other at right angles. It is a central point for much traffic, and so a great many horses are needed. It is fortunate that there is so much grass here, for one cannot tell what would be done without it. With the exception of some patches of potatoes, chiefly on the sunny foot of the mountain on the opposite side of this great Alpine prairie, everything that you see is grass. At Hospenthal you cross the Reuss, and again begin to ascend. The mountains are not precipitous and craggy, but somewhat rounded, as if their asperities had been planed off in the glacial epoch. On them are no trees; only Alpine pasture all the way, gradually deteriorating as you ascend. To one fresh from the Devil’s bridge (I wish it had a better name), and the Urseren Thal, these mountains are full of contrast and interest. Three such scenes in a single walk make it a memorable one. Sometimes you are far above the Reuss, sometimes it is close alongside of you. Sometimes the cows are below you in a deep valley, sometimes above you on a mountain flank. At last, not very far from the summit, you cross the Reuss for the last time, by a bridge which is the boundary, on the road, between the Cantons of Uri and Ticino. It is, hereabouts, a small stream, not far from its source in a small mountain lake hard by; but what would not one give to have such a small stream passing one’s door at home—so clear, so pebbly, so cool, so lively, so murmurous. For the latter part of the way the snow was often, in large masses, by the roadside. There was more of it still lingering on the mountains this year than usual, because there had been a late spring with heavy snow storms. The Hotel, nearly 7,000 feet above the sea, is on the summit of the col, in a deep depression, surrounded by blackish-gray, jagged, naked peaks, with snow in the interstices and ravines. But even here animal life is far from wanting; for in the dark tarn, on the edge of which the Hotel stands, and which is sufficiently deep not to be frozen to the bottom, fish are to be found. There is another and shallower tarn close by without fish. In front of the Hotel is some expanse of grass, a part of the summer pasture of the summit, which maintains for two months 200 cows.

CHAPTER V.

VAL TREMOLA—AIROLO—DAZIO GRANDE—FAIDO—BODIO—BELLINZONA—LOCARNO—LUGANO—BELLAGGIO—COMO.

O Italy, how beautiful thou art!—Rogers.

August 8.—‘Now, Ammer, for a glimpse of Italy;’ as, at 6 A.M., starting from the almost undistinguishable watershed that divides the head-stream of the Reuss from that of the Ticino—an affluent of the Rhine from an affluent of the Po—we began to cut off the many zigzags of the Vale of Trembling, at a good pace, as became the frosty morning—frosty at that altitude—and our inspiriting destination. In just half an hour the zigzags of this once alarming descent, whence its name, were all behind, or rather above us, and we turned to the straight road along the gorge. Here we passed the still very considerable remains of two avalanches, which in the spring had fallen from the heights, one from the right, and one from the left, and were, but now some way below the road, blocking the valley. One was of clean snow; the other was largely compounded of stones, and sods, and earth, which it had swept off the mountain side in its long glissade. This latter one was of such mass, that if it had encountered York Minster on its way, York Minster would either have been buried beneath it, or would have had to accompany it to the bottom of the valley.

A little beyond the remains of this great avalanche we left the carriage-road, and took pretty nearly a straight line all the way to Airolo; at first through alpes, that is mountain pastures, then through prairies, that is grass land for mowing: sometimes at very steep inclines. When we entered Airolo we had been out one hour and fifty minutes from St. Gothard. Here, as at Göschenen, the commencement of the great tunnel had caused a great deal of building. Beyond Airolo the valley often has a flat bottom; and the near scenery, at times, is tamer than you might have expected to find it in the immediate neighbourhood of a great and famous Pass. But whatever there may be of this kind, for some little distance below Airolo, is completely compensated for by the gorge of Dazio Grande.

Here the Ticino descends rapidly, broken and blustering, through a deep defile it has cut out for itself. In the cliffs above the present channel man, too, has cut out for himself his path. The best part of the gorge begins, and ends, with a bridge; and is about three quarters of a mile in length. The channel, worn by the stream through the tough rock, is narrow, perpendicular, rugged, and tortuous. The water, from variations in its depth, and in the speed at which it is moving, and from the varying effects of the light in which it is seen, is, when looked at from the upper bridge, of a brownish bottle green: while in the gorge itself it is of a clear whitish green. In several places the foam is so touched by the light as to present a pale tint of pink, which still more softens it. This softness of its colour you contrast with the force it is exerting to cut away the rock, and with the aspect of the hard dark rock itself, but which you see, notwithstanding its hardness, is being ground down, and excavated, often on the sides into little rounded holes, by what appears to be only soft, feathery, almost downy, white foam, touched with this faint tint of pink.

As I was loitering through the gorge, noting what nature had done, and was doing—the din of the water, and the engineering boldness of the zigzags, gouged out of the perpendicular cliffs, awakened and enforced attention—a party of travellers in a four-horse carriage passed down: two ladies, and two gentlemen. Of the latter one was asleep, and the other seemed completely absorbed in watching the familiar sight of the smoke of his cigar. The party were not conversing, and no notice was being taken, certainly by the gentlemen, of the scene they were passing through. Let us hope that they did not hail from England. One could not but speculate a little on the cause of such strange insouciance to striking and interesting natural objects as the occupants of this carriage exhibited. Was it a result, if they had come from beyond the Channel, of that estimate of all knowledge (of course, with the exception of what we call practical knowledge, that is to say knowledge that will enable one to make money) which a man’s having been kept, grinding, through all his blessed youth, at that instrument of torture, our ‘Public School Latin Grammar,’ must, in most minds, give rise to? Here we have a not unlikely source. An affluent to this may, perhaps, be found in the ideas of what is desirable in life, which must to some extent be engendered by our English form of society: the most conspicuous exponents of which are our English dinner-parties. I do not mean to imply that our dinner-party-engendered ideas are like those of an old Squire I used to hear of—his day was a little before mine—who was in the habit of affirming that ‘conversation spoilt society:’ by society he meant the animal enjoyment of venison, and the port wine of his day. Still I think it may be held, and not without some show of reason, that there is a sense in which half of his idea is not far from the mark, for that society, as perhaps it would be better to have it, has in this country been spoilt to some extent; and, too, at the dinner-table; but that, as respects conversation, it is rather that society has spoilt it, than that it has spoilt society.

Beyond Airolo, the road is straight, and there can be no short cuts. We reached Faido, seventeen miles by road, at 11.30. We now encountered a great deal of dust, for the heavy storm of Friday, a week back, had been confined to the north of the St. Gothard mountains; I, therefore—and also because I had but little time for this little piece of by-work—gave up walking for the present, and engaged a four-horse return carriage for Bodio, which Ammer had heard of while I was taking an early dinner at the Prince of Wales. After an hour’s halt we were again en route. The road was straight; and the wind, from behind, was moving at about the same rate as the carriage. This kept us for the ten miles to Bodio in the centre of the cloud of dust our four horses and wheels were raising. On descending from the carriage, Ammer’s first thought was to get a clothes-brush. The landlord brought it himself, presenting it with the remark, that ‘a dusty road with the wind behind was the devil.’ ‘Yes:’ I replied, ‘it is often so on the road. But within the Hotels he not unfrequently assumes the form of flies, accompanied with a bad smell.’ I had been tormented with flies at Faido, while at dinner, and had unpleasant recollections of the stenches I had met with in many Swiss Hotels. This little sally at once placed us on an easy conversational footing. He told me that he was the physician of the place; that land in his Canton was too much divided to be of much use to anybody; that this kept everybody poor; that all their best young men were emigrating to the United States, chiefly to California; and that emigration was winnowing the population, sending away all the good grain, and leaving at home only the dross. This was during the half-hour while the carriage for Bellinzona, which he had ordered for me, was being got ready. At parting he expressed a hope that I might return the same way, in order that we might continue our conversation on the condition of the people, &c.

The merits of this valley are underrated: there is much in it worthy of notice. Its character is manifestly Italian, as is that of the people, who in all probability would feel irresistibly attracted towards the Kingdom of Italy, if only (but this is an if of the kind that interposes, in the case of such lovers of money, an impassable gulf) the taxation of the Kingdom were as light as that of the Republic. The regular increase in the variety and richness of the vegetation must strike even a somewhat unobservant traveller, as he rapidly makes the descent. The contour, too, and colouring of the mountains are somewhat distinctive. Those just below Faido had, this year, their barren tops in August flecked with snow. This attracts your eye as you are passing through fields of luxuriant maize, and trellised vineyards at their feet. You see how vegetation has struggled to ascend them. It begins by having it all its own way. Down below it covers all the ground. After a time it finds the struggle harder, and fails in places. Then comes a zone in which bare rock predominates. One step more, and to the eye vegetation dies out altogether; and cold and nakedness are supreme. All this you here take in at a glance.

Further on you pass along the foot of a long mountain range, in which the rock, wherever it is exposed, as high up as you can make it out, has evidently been smoothed, and rounded off by glacier action, or that of running water, for either could have set that kind of face upon it. I am, however, disposed to think that some, at all events, of the effects you may here observe, are due to the action of the stream of the Ticino in some remote past; for I saw little polished excavations in the otherwise smooth and even face of the rock, of precisely the same kind as those I had seen in the gorge of Dazio Grande, where there could never have been moving ice. These excavations exactly resembled the half of a reversed basin, and could have been formed by running water only. Of course they were produced by pebbles and grit being thrown by the stream against, and gradually working into, accidentally soft spots.

Was jolting over the pavement of Bellinzona a little after 4 P.M. Ordered supper at 8. Engaged the carriage and pair of my talkative acquaintance, the landlord of the Hotel de la Poste at Bodio, that had brought me to Bellinzona, to take me on to Lugano early the next morning; and there to wait for my return from Como. By the way, I observed here as in the other towns of this valley—it is the same at Andermatt—that the main streets have granite tramways, which wear the appearance of being old institutions. I suppose their object is to lessen not so much friction, which is our object, as noise; and to keep carriages in the middle of the roadway: both desirable objects where the streets are very narrow.

I had some hours to walk about the place, and note the aspect of things. Judging from the size of the old houses with their colonnades, and the number of churches, Bellinzona must have been formerly a place of more importance than it is at present; or perhaps, which may be the true explanation, wealth, may have been more unequally distributed then than it is now. For it is impossible to suppose but that the produce of the district is worth, at the present day, a great deal more than it was in the church-building age here; and that it can support now a great many more mouths than it could when those old mansions were built. More land has been reclaimed; the culture of the vine—which pays the best of all the plants cultivated here—has been much extended; potatoes and maize have been introduced, which, by reason of their greater productiveness, have almost superseded the old cereals; silk-culture has been superadded without displacing anything else; and then the great modern stream of travellers brings, every year, into the valley, and leaves in it, a great many nuggets of refined gold. There can, therefore, be no question about there being in these days, a great deal more wealth. The only questions are what becomes of it? By whom, and how, is it held? And how is it used?

I will suggest two answers. Suppose there are a score, or so, of proprietors, who have, each of them, five or six hundred acres of land. They will be able to live in such houses as surround the old Place of Bellinzona. But divide these estates among five score proprietors, and not one will be able to live in such houses. And this process you may carry on, till they have all become peasant proprietors. And, then, one step more, and these landed proprietors will all be landed in semi-starvation. This I take to be an answer that accounts for a great part of the change. The other answer is, that formerly people lived in towns, because it was not safe to live in the country; but that, in these quiet and peaceable days, people live just where they find it pleasantest to live. What well-to-do people, therefore, there may still be in the neighbourhood of Bellinzona now probably live on their properties. So far Bellinzona has gone out of town.

My Hotel, judging from the position of the town as respects the river, was on the north side of the modern Place. There was, as far as I observed, no one staying in it but myself. At all events I was shown to what I took to be the best room in the house; it was large and lofty, and led me to suppose, that the house, which had an old fashioned air about it, dated from the time of the old mansions just referred to, and might be numbered among them. On the opposite side of the Place was a new-looking Hotel, which I did not see anyone enter, or leave. On the east side was a chapel—though that may not be the correct word—over the door of which was the inscription ‘Divo Rocho.’ I saw the congregation, that had attended Vespers, leaving it. They were all women. In the Place itself there were never wanting several little groups of people—these were all men—flâneurs—standing about, apparently for the accustomed purpose of seeing, and commenting on, perhaps of getting a little something out of, the arrivals and departures of travellers. But, this afternoon, there was not much of this kind to suggest either hope, or conversation; and so there was nothing to interrupt their combustion of the leaf that should be fragrant. In the centre of the older part of the town, in the small old Place, surrounded by the above-mentioned goodly old houses, fronted with colonnades, I found a tree of Liberty surmounted by the cap of Liberty. This took me rather by surprise. What can stir the mind of Bellinzona so deeply as to prompt such an erection? And why should these republicans be fussy about what they have, and with which there is no one to interfere? Or was it a demonstration of that portion of the townsfolk, who are for the regeneration of society, against the richer sort, who live in country houses? I cannot answer these questions I can only say that the tree had the appearance of age; and so possibly may have been set up during the excitement of ‘48, a wave of which may have reached, and transiently stirred, the stagnancy of Bellinzona.

August 9.—As I had much before me I was up at 4.30 A.M. On looking out of the window, to ascertain what kind of morning I had for the day that was to take me to Como, I saw a woman, on the opposite side of the street, seated in front of her house, busily plying her needle. It will be some time yet I thought before her little ones begin their day. When, an hour later, I left the Hotel, she was still there at work. I was reminded of Virgil’s touching picture of what I was looking on. I was sure that he had often looked upon, and read aright, such sights in the northern Italy of his day. He describes the picture as it might have been seen not at midsummer, but in winter, and, therefore, as within the house.

The middle course of night was run, when men

Wake from their first sleep; and the good housewife,

Whose distaff is her slender livelihood,

Gets her from bed, and stirs th’ ash-buried fire,

Robbing sweet rest for work; and at first dawn

Rouses her women to their long-tasked day:

For ’twere not life to her to live, if drawn

To shame her husband’s bed, or should in vain

Her little darlings crave their daily bread.[1]

Morality is the soul of poetry, because we are still conscious—though theology and the pulpit have done much to deaden our consciousness of this—that it is the life of life. It inspires the poet, and hallows his pictures. This was of old ‘the piety of the poets, who spoke words worthy of Phœbus.’ At all events there were in that old world good wives, the charm of whose goodness was felt; and so there must have been good husbands, too, whose goodness was honoured. I believe then, as the Mantuan would have believed, that my opposite neighbour of this morning was good in heart as well as in deed; and, for her sake, I hope her husband was good. If not, she was by so much the better in heart and in deed.

The road to Lugano begins on a rich and well-cultivated level. The broad, highly varnished leaf of the maize, and the more sober green of the vine, are side by side everywhere. Some country houses are passed. After five miles of this rich cultivation, grass becoming more common, and country houses less so, at Cadenazzo, you leave the valley, and begin the ascent of the Monte Cenere, by which you cross the range that separates the valley of the Ticino from the basin of Lugano. We had been for some little time slowly toiling up the zigzags; and I was at the moment noting the heath in flower, and the stunted russet brake (for there had been a long spell of dry weather) with rock everywhere protruding; and all beneath the old gnarled chesnuts; when, on coming to a masonry-supported angle of the road, projected on the mountain side, almost as if for a look out, there burst on my sight, beyond and below, at perhaps a distance of two miles, the head of Lago Maggiore, and the town, on its margin, of Locarno. I was not expecting anything of the kind; and was indeed, at the moment, intent on the heath and brake, when they abruptly vanished, and this glorious prospect took their place.

At my feet, for the foreground, was the broad, richly cultivated valley, partitioned into innumerable bright green prairies, and grain fields yellow for harvest; all full of fruit trees. Beyond were mountains of very varied outline and colour, scarred with rocky ravines of varying size, which the melting snow, and the storm torrents of ages, had cut from their naked summits down along their forest-clad sides. Snow still, here and there, spotted their summits, in consequence of the cold late spring of this year. Along the margin of the glass-smooth, green-blue lake were the white houses of the long straggling town. Above the town, scattered in woods, at wider intervals up the mountain, and for some distance from the town along the margin of the lake, were innumerable white villas. It being early morning the bright sun was full on the town, and mountains, bringing out clearly every white wall, every dark roof, every green field, every patch of wood, almost every individual tree, and every dark gray rock. It was a scene of surprising variety, interest, and beauty, that had come suddenly before me without any preparation. I was reminded that I had felt, when staying at Jerusalem, some years back, just the same kind of surprise. I had been riding up Mount Scopas, and had been occupied, as I ascended the crest, in looking at the broken pieces of red pottery which strewed the ground, and thinking that they might have been left there by the army of Titus, who, during the siege of Jerusalem, had held this summit, for it commanded a complete view of every house in the Holy City; when, on lifting my eyes from the ground, they were filled with the sight of the twenty miles of white sandy desert, in which had once been Jericho, and on the further side of this white desert was the black line of the Jordan, leading straight to the light blue of the Dead Sea; and beyond all this, the long, wall-like line, ablaze with purple, for it was verging towards evening, of the mountains of Moab, closing the scene, like a barrier of ruby and amethyst, to give promise of some brighter world beyond. The suddenness of the change, and the gloriousness of the new scene, in both cases affected the nerves of the mind with a sensation which can never be forgotten. But, however, in one case it was absolute desolation; not a tree, not a human dwelling-place in sight; all rock and sand; and the complete absence of man from a scene where of old he had often been busy: in the other case it was the complete present subjection and subserviency of the scene to man, and his busy presence everywhere, which were, respectively, the predominant elements of interest. In both scenes nature was grand; but in one grand in desolation, and in the other grand in combination with widely expanded and well-requited human effort.

As you pass on to Lugano, though you are still on high ground, there is something that tells you that you are on the south side of the mountains. It may be hard to say precisely what this something is, but it is in the vegetation, in the people, in the air. There is more of the chesnut, and less of the fir tribe. The oak is more spreading. The undergrowth in the copses, and the plants by the roadside, are more varied. The people are gayer, and more light-hearted. The air is more stimulative of life. At Lugano, as might be expected from its contiguity to the lake, the aspect of things is very different from what it is at Bellinzona. Many appear to be in easy circumstances, and at ease in their minds. This they show by the care they bestow on the exterior of their houses, and on the ground around them.

As to the lake. As far as I saw of it, its distinguishing feature appears to be the abruptness with which the environing mountains descend into the water. In many places they dip into it without any preparation at all, with no final talus. The deep water breaks on the clean upright rock. Still the mountains are pretty well clothed with wood. The trees, however, are much detached, and very scrubby, as if on these dry, sunburnt, rocky mountain sides, they needed a century, as probably they do, to grow into scrub. Still wherever on the margin of the lake, and a little higher up, soil could be collected for a few vines, or for a little garden, there you will see the few vines, or the little garden. One is astonished at the number of small towns on the margin. They are very conspicuous from the walls of all the houses being white. I suppose they are built of rough stone, which is then plastered, and lime-washed. An American on board the steamer, and who was acquainted only with the large way in which things are done in his own country, and with the large rewards of industry there, told me he had been fairly beaten by the puzzle, how the people in these towns could live. There was no land to cultivate. There were no factories to work in. No business. Nothing to trade with. Nothing to get a living out of.

Somewhere between Lugano and the eastern extremity of the lake, we were boarded by a custom house officer, and entered the kingdom of Italy. At the eastern extremity—the place is called Porlezza—we took the diligence for Menaggio, on the lake of Como. The road lies along a depression in the ridge that separates the two lakes. From its being much lower than the ground which separates the head of Lago Maggiore from Lugano, it presents a much more advanced stage of the idea of Italy, and of the sense of being in Italy. There is cultivation all the way. Maize, mulberries, vines everywhere. La petite culture only. In a little more than an hour we were going down the zigzags to Menaggio. The long expanse of Como was at our feet, backed by lofty mountains, on which snow still lingered. Everywhere on the terraced slopes, in which not a square foot of ground was anywhere lost, were not only maize, and mulberries, and vines, but also figs, almonds, and olives; and oleanders, myrtles, and magnolias. Another world with a richer life was around us; a brighter sun, and a bluer vault were above us—a glorious bit of quick-pulsed Italy! It is good for a man that his mind can be moved in response to such a scene.

At Menaggio I took a boat to cross the lake to Bellaggio—the fac-simile of the boat in which I had gone from Sacheln to Sarnen. It was propelled also in the same fashion by two men, who stood up to their work. Of course they demanded at first twice as much for their services as they were glad to accept eventually. As we got afloat the sun was shining brightly, as it had been since we left Bellinzona in the early morning; and there was just enough air to be pleasantly perceptible. At the head of the lake, however, far away to the north, we saw that a storm was raging. There all was black, and distant thunder was at times heard. When we had got about half-way across the lake, the surface being still unruffled where we were, we descried a line of broken water reaching across the lake, rapidly advancing upon us from the north. Our boatmen made all the haste they could, and succeeded not quite, but almost, in escaping the squall: for it struck us when we were but little more than 200 yards from the beach.

We had to wait at Bellaggio about an hour for as it was to go to Como I suppose I must say, the up steamer. If I had remained at Menaggio I should have gone on by the same boat, but I was glad that I had not done so, not merely because crossing in the boat was an additional small incident in the day’s work, but also because it enabled me to see the finest, I might say perhaps the grandest, display of flowers I have ever looked upon. In going down to the new pier, to the left of the road, or rather of the street, for it was still in the town, there is a long wall about 10 or 12 feet high; evidently the boundary of the grounds of a house situated somewhere behind it. I infer from the lay of the land that the grounds, immediately behind the wall, must be 6 or 7 feet higher than the roadway. Over the top of this wall, rising several feet above it, and bending down 4 or 5 feet from the top, was one thick, bushy, unbroken line of oleanders, every spray of which ended in a large truss of freshly expanded rose-red blossoms. I paced the wall, and, if I remember rightly, its length was 62 yards. The stems of the plants were invisible, being behind the wall. Crowning then this lofty gray stone wall, and hanging down over its side was a long, broad, even, unbroken line of bright blazing colour. The eye fed upon it, and was more than satisfied with the feast.

The streets of Bellaggio were sheltered from the squall. In crossing the lake to Cadenabbia it was on our starboard beam. The little wet it made on deck was sufficient to drive pretty nearly all the native below. A little further down, on rounding the point, which opens the long reach, at the bottom of which stands Como, there was no more wind: either the interposing mountain acted as a screen to keep it off; or, as is common in mountain lakes and valleys, it was a local affair along a single reach. As we neared Como, at about 6 P.M., we saw that a heavy storm was gathering at that end of the lake, and just as we were leaving the boat for the pier, the rain came down in earnest; and lasted for two hours, accompanied with much thunder and lightning.

On seeing, this evening, in the reading-room of the Volta, a file of the ‘Times’ down to the 6th, I was amused at recalling that for some days I had been suffering under a complete deprivation of this necessary of English life, without having once given the loss a thought.

August 10.—At 7. A.M. attended mass at the Cathedral. The service reminded me of a question, which some years ago occurred to me in the Cathedral of Montreal—What is there in this service which can lead any one to suppose that it is edifying to man, or pleasing to the Almighty? The men of Como, we may infer, are of opinion that it is not edifying, or they have some reason for refusing to be edified by it, for certainly there were not half-a-dozen of them in the Cathedral. The women, too, of whom almost exclusively the congregation was formed, were, again almost exclusively, from the lower classes. I was on this occasion horrified (for I offer to the reader everything at all worthy of notice, but this incident very unwillingly) at seeing the officiating priest, in the midst of the service, expectorate on the floor, and a few minutes afterwards repeat the offensive act. The assistant priest took the contagion, and followed his example. As, however, in matters of this kind, practice and feeling are conventional, I, probably, was the only person present whom the act shocked.

After the storm of last night the day was bright and fresh. I was due at Andermatt to-morrow; and, as we have so often heard with respect to political questions, there were three courses open to me. I might return to Bellinzona by Lago Maggiore, which would so far have been new ground. This, however, I rejected, because I wished to see Lago Maggiore in a more leisurely manner. Or I might, by way of the Splugen, reach Andermatt late on Monday night. This also I rejected, because the Splugen appeared to belong to a district I wished to reserve intact for another day. Or, finally, I might, throughout, retrace my steps: and this was what I did. Nor was I dissatisfied with my decision; for I found that a second sight of the lake of Como, and of its lovely shores, was almost as pleasing and interesting as the first had been, though the two were separated by the interval but of a single night. It is a sight of which you feel that you can hardly have enough. The surprising number of towns that embroider the margin, and which are almost everywhere, all along, connected by villas, is in itself a pleasing sight. They show how near you are to Milan, and to many other wealthy cities, the dwellers in which are glad to exchange for a time the dust and dirt, the heat, the moil and toil, of city life for some months of quiet in a scene where Nature has done all she could to make quiet soothing, and remedial for damages and overstrains of either body or mind. It is a sanitarium, provided by kindly and provident Nature, for the exhausted and injured powers of the mental workers of Europe. Here is space enough for all; and all the space good, for the direction of the lake is mainly from north to south; every part, therefore, of each shore gets daily enough light and warmth, and not too much; one side being cool in the morning, and the other in the evening. The lake, too, being 30 miles in length, has, with the addition of the branch to Lecco, more than a hundred miles of shore: a hundred miles of its embroidered border of towns and villas; and of gardens, terraces, and pleasure grounds. The water, also, being only between one and two miles across, your opposite neighbours are within visiting distance by row-boat. And, now, steam has brought within visiting distance the inhabitants of all the towns, and of all the villas, throughout the whole hundred miles. And, then, this blue highway, and its charming margin, are set in a frame of most varied and picturesque mountains, with the purest and freshest air for you to breathe; with the richest vegetation to delight your eyes; and all canopied by the clearest and brightest azure. And this within an hour of Milan; and no city of northern Italy, if distance be measured by time, far off; and, when the tunnel under St. Gothard shall be completed, northern Europe brought close: and the sojourner, though on the shore of Como, yet, all the while, by the aid of the telegraph, at home.

As I descended Monte Cenere I was on the look out for the glimpse I had had, yesterday morning, of the head of Maggiore. But in these matters there is often a wide difference between evening and morning. The sun was now to the west of the mountains, behind Locarno. The lake was no longer blue, but hazy. The same haze shrouded Locarno, and its environs. Everything that had given life and interest to the scene then, was veiled from sight now. Its present aspect was too dull and dead even for imagination to work upon. The disappointment was just that so common in human lives, when, where we look for a garden of roses, we find desolation.

CHAPTER VI.

BELLINZONA—AIROLO—ST. GOTHARD—ANDERMATT—THE OBERALP ALPE.

Thought is the slave of life, and life time’s fool. Shakespeare.

At Bellinzona I wished to take a carriage and pair to Airolo, but in this extortionate place I could not hear of one for less than 75 francs. Probably 50 would have been gladly taken; but I was not in the humour for higgling, and so I went by diligence for 9 francs, 50 centimes, with the same for Ammer. As I got a place in the coupé, the diligence was as comfortable as, perhaps more so than, a private carriage would have been at night. I was saved, too, the possible troubles of long unnecessary halts, and overcharged bonne-main. We left Bellinzona at 10 P.M.

August 11.—I knew nothing of what passed from that time, till I was woke in the gray dawn, some way above Faido, just below the lower bridge of Dazio Grande, by a shock, which shivered the glass before me. This was caused by our diligence having come into collision with the down one from Flüelen over the Pass. The two diligences had got locked together; and it was some time before they could be disengaged, as the wheelers were unable to back such lumbering machines. The collision had been the doing of a young gray in our team, the off-horse of our three leaders. Though the middle horse of the three was an old hand, and—like the trained elephant, harnessed with the wild one, to teach him how to be tame, and to do his work quietly—did all he could to keep our unruly youngster straight, one of his jibs, just at the moment of crossing, diverted the vehicle an inch or two from its course: hence the mishap. He was punished quite enough for this escapade; for as soon as the diligences were got clear of each other, we were put into a gallop, and the offender was flogged all the way up the gorge: he resenting the whip with kicking and jibbing, always to the near side; and his tutor and trainer always steadily pushing him back. When we had got above the ravine, on to the level ground, the flogging and galloping was kept up pretty well all the way to Airolo. This I suppose is the fashion in which refractory young blood is tamed for Alpine roads. The diligence horses are strong bony animals, and are well kept; but they must have a hard and dreary life of it. One sympathized with the objections of young blood to begin such a life: but, then, the choice is between it and, perhaps, something worse.

It was just 6 A.M. when we reached Airolo. Here we left the diligence, and were glad to get once more upon our legs. By taking a highly speculative way over the steep grassy hill above Airolo, which proved a successful speculation, and by cutting off, as we had done in the descent, all the zigzags of the Val Tremola, we reached the Hotel on the summit of the Pass at 8. Here we breakfasted. At 9 we were again on the road. At 11.30 we were again at Andermatt, in our former quarters at the St. Gothard Hotel. Here I found a letter awaiting my return, in which I was given to understand that my wife and step-son would arrive from Pontresina to-morrow evening; that the following day would be spent in rest, and in such selection and condensation of the baggage of the trio, as the light marching order of an expeditionary party would require, and which might make it, should that be possible, not too much for a single porter; and that on the next, that is to say Thursday, morning, tents would be struck, and the march commenced. This gave to Andermatt an afternoon and two days. As I replaced the letter in its envelope, I said to myself, ‘If I had known this when at Como, I should not have left the Splugen for another day. Still it will stand over very well; and there is abundance here, at nearly 5,000 feet above the sea, to occupy one for twice two days and a half.’

The morning had been bright and cheery; but in the afternoon a cold, wet, leaden mist, sometimes worsening into a shower, rolled over the mountains from the direction of the Devil’s Bridge, and settled down doggedly on the broad deep depression of our valley of Urseren. There was no breeze to sweep it away, even to give it the slightest movement. On the side of the mountain to the south of the village, just about the height of the little wood, which partially shelters it from avalanches, that is to say a few hundred feet above our heads, patches of dense cloud hung for hours together in the somewhat less dense mist, without moving, without even any alteration of shape. The mist was in the Hotel. It was everywhere. It penetrated to one’s bones. In the reading-room men buttoned their coats, and lighted their cigars, wishing that the stove, too, were lighted. Last week, when passing through Andermatt, on my way to St. Gothard, I had sat for half an hour in the shade of the Hotel, on the bench in front of it; and had thought that nothing in the way of climate could be more freshening and delightful than the shade, on an August day, at such an altitude, with the flood of pure sunlight poured on every object around. But, now, the difference was cruel to those whose bodies, as well as minds, respond with too sensitive a readiness to the skyey influences of such altitudes. A fine, bright day quickens them into unwonted life; they feel as if they had been bathed in, and were breathing an exhalation of, champagne. And even mortals whose fibres are of the ordinary callousness, find it hard to be jolly, when for the exhalation of champagne has been substituted a cold vapour bath.

When Andermatt is in the clouds, the only local resources are the streams of carriages, and the arrival and departure of the diligences. The rolling rattle of the carriages, the jingling of the horses’ bells, and the clatter of their feet on the granite pavement, are incessant. The new monster Hotel, the Belle Vue, being a little to the north of the new road from the Rhone valley to the Grisons, sees and knows nothing of the up and down traffic on this line. The Old Hotel, however, the St. Gothard, in the main street of the village, is in the way both of this traffic, and of that which passes, to and fro, over the St. Gothard Pass, wherewith, in such weather, to divert the thoughts of its prisoners from themselves. It all passes in front of the reading-room, within arm’s length of the window. This advantage was not, this afternoon, thrown away; for some found, or endeavoured to find, a grain of comfort in the remark that the occupants of the carriages, at all events the gentleman who is generally seen seated on the box, by the side of the driver, must be very wet and cold. One, however, of the party, who appeared to have a scientific turn of mind, refused to be comforted by a comparison which might soon be to our disadvantage; and therefore remarked, unfeelingly, that such weather was generally very local, and that the occupants of the carriage would, probably, soon be in sunshine, in the Rhone valley. The majority at once saw the advantage of adopting his view; as it would give an additional justification for their discontent, and so aggravate their discomfort.

The well of conversation appeared to have been pumped dry. Fortunately, however, an opposite neighbour, some few paces lower down the road, who had a little piece of grass a few square yards in extent, kept geese. And these sagacious birds, having found that the road was no longer dusty, had sallied out in quest of a puddle, in which they might wade at least foot-deep. Their advent was hailed by those at the window as an event worthy of notice. This opened a new fountain for conversation; and it turned out to be one that for a time appeared inexhaustible. The first observation made was the most obvious one, that these Andermatt specimens were not much more than half the size of our English geese. The gentleman with scientific proclivities immediately suggested the effects of a cold climate in stunting animals, with a reference to Shetland ponies, as an illustrative instance. He was met with the remark that the Arctic bear is larger than the Westphalian. The last speaker for a moment appeared to have received a check by the observation that they do not belong to the same species. From this momentary check, however, he recovered by requesting his interlocutor to define species. The interlocutor being unwilling to lose his supposed advantage, retorted by the announcement that to ask for a definition of what all the world had always understood very well, implied belief in Darwinism, which was the demonstration of the absurdity that there was no difference between a man and a monkey. This, having been delivered with a show of denunciatory earnestness, was followed, as might have been expected, by a pause. But in the now ascertained dearth of subjects for conversation, one in which many were looking forward to taking a part, was not to be put aside in this way; and so there now commenced a recital, by several of the party in turn, of what each had observed, or heard, or read of geese. One prefaced what he was about to narrate by announcing that it was extremely curious. This was injudicious, for it excited more expectation than what he had to tell could satisfy. He thought it a proof of the justice of common opinion in regarding the goose as a stolid bird, that it always, as it crosses the sill of a barn door, cranes out its neck, and lowers its head, for fear of striking the lintel, generally some 10 or 12 feet above. There was nothing curious in this but the speaker’s mistake; for the goose cranes out its neck, and lowers its head, because it very sagaciously supposes that it is not improbable that the barn, it is entering, may contain some enemy; and this is its attitude of cautious observation, and of defiance. A second, who appeared to have had some experience of the fallibility of testimony, or of the incredulity of mankind, acknowledged that what he was about to narrate had in it something marvellous. It was a story of a goose having contracted so devoted a friendship for a horse, that fed in the same paddock as itself, that it was never easy except in the society of the horse. There was, however, nothing very marvellous in a highly gregarious animal attaching itself to the only other animal with which it could associate, notwithstanding that that other animal belonged to a different natural order. Talking of geese reminded a third—it must have been on the principle of the game of dominoes—that he had once bought his Michaelmas goose at a poulterer’s, four of whose children, he afterwards heard, were laid up at the time with small pox. This was evidence that the subject of geese was worn out. And, as no successor for it could be found, the party dispersed; some to their rooms to attend to any small matters they were so fortunate as to think required attention, and some to the post office, to see the arrival and departure of the afternoon diligences.

The number of diligences, that pass through Andermatt, surprises one, who does not consider that they not only carry the letters between northern Germany and Italy, and between southern Germany and France, but also a large proportion of those who travel in Switzerland, and no small amount of goods; for both the latter fall within the purview of the Swiss Post Office. You may twice a day, at the hours in the forenoon and afternoon when the diligences are timed to meet here, from north, south, east, and west, see as many as half-a-dozen together in front of the post office; which, by the way, is kept by a woman, and, in her absence, by a boy. As to the diligences, the driver is the servant of the conductor, who is the responsible official, and wears a kind of uniform. The conductors are, generally, very civil and obliging. They are well paid by ascending salaries, which at last reach 3,000 francs, besides the bonne-main they get from travellers.

At dinner I was placed next to a party of five young men. At a glance I inferred that they were Americans. I was sure, however, that they were not Yankees, for they had neither the features, nor the bearing of the men of the hub of the world, nor of anywhere in that neighbourhood. Judging in the same way I concluded that they were not western men. I was not, therefore, surprised—it was only what I had expected to hear—when they told me that they were from Baltimore; the city of the United States in which I had found the American most like the European in manner, and tone of thought. They were of varying ages between the limits of twenty and thirty; and had formed a party, as they informed me, to complete their professional education—they were all aspirants for the faculty—by visiting, and studying for two years in, and acquainting themselves with the practice of, the chief medical schools of Germany, France, and England. This reminded me of an observation I had made while travelling in the United States, that, there, in some matters, especially practical ones, larger and more complete views are taken than with us: at all events, it would be well if a like desire for study and culture were common among the medical students of the old country.

August 12.—On the following morning the fortunes of the weather-battle were evidently inclining to the side of the Sun. It had broken the ranks of the clouds, which yesterday were in complete possession of the field. They were now retreating in scattered detachments. As each trailed over the scene of their late victory, it discharged a parting volley, in the form of a smart shower. The Sun, having been forced back for a few minutes, then returned, and re-occupied the ground. By the exercise of his evaporating powers, he effaced, with marvellous rapidity, the traces of his enemy’s recent work. A few moments after his rays struck the wooden roofs of the village, steam was curling up from every part of them—as much as if the interior of each house had been on fire, and the smoke was pouring up through the joints of the shingles. This was repeated several times, at lengthening intervals. At last the valley was completely cleared of the enemy, of whom nothing remained in sight, with the exception of a few small outposts high up on the mountain sides.

Ammer was now summoned, and we started for the inspection of the alpe of Oberalp. A line or two will suffice for the statistical account of this alpe, as it is given in the Economie Alpestre de la Suisse, which was issued in 1868 by the Bureau de Statistique du Département fédéral de l’Intérieur. The alpe of Oberalp is situated in the Commune of Andermatt. It is the property of the Commune. Its acreage is not ascertained. It was assessed formerly at 350 Kuh-essen (the extent of pasture required for the keep of a cow), now at 290. At present there are summered on the alpe 175 cows in milk, 140 young neat stock, 250 goats, and 40 pigs: in all equal to the keep of 328⅓ cows. It is 4,400 feet above the sea. (It must be 1,000 feet higher). It is grazed for 97 days, between June 24, and September 28. For each cow 3fr. 50 cents. are paid. Each cow gives 144 livres of cheese (a Swiss livre is equal to nearly 17 oz. English), worth 50 cents. a livre; and 64 pots of whey worth 20 cents. each. The return for each cow is 85·20. The outgoings for each 5fr. The net return for each 79fr. 20 cents. The total net income from the alpe is 17,885fr. Of this 13,860fr. is from cows; 4,025 from other stock. This will give a general idea of the nature, uses, and value of Swiss mountain pastures, which are not cut for hay (if they are cut for hay they are prairies and not alpes) but depastured during the late summer and early autumn; being for the rest of the year either too cold and wet for stock, or actually buried beneath the snow.

To reach this alpe you leave the village either by the old mule-path, or by the new carriage-road, and are immediately on the skirts of the mountain, which is here quite devoid of trees, and all in grass. You do not ascend the zigzags, by which the road climbs the mountain, but cut them all off by going over the grass, straight up the mountain side. As long as you are cutting off the zigzags, and till you come out on the straight road, you will be going up, and through, about a mile and a half of prairie, where the grass is cut for hay. This is kept clean, all noxious weeds being eradicated, and, as I saw, is pretty well manured. Upon this you will see no stock in August. They will take whatever parts of it are ever fed, in their way down from the upper pastures. When you get to the road, it has become straight and level, and remains so, with only a very gradual ascent, till it gets beyond the Oberalpsee, that is to say, for something more than two miles further. It then rises, and turns to the right. But if you go straight up the mountain that is before you, facing you as you walk up to the lake, you will come, on the summit, to the end of the Oberalp alpe, and will be on the Tiarms Pass, by which you may leave Uri, and enter the Grisons.

As soon as we had reached the road, we were upon the unmown alpe, and among the stock. At its near, or lower, end were the pigs and calves. The pigs are never very far from the châlet, in which the cheese is made, for they get a good part of the whey. The châlet, of course, is placed in as low and sheltered a spot as it can be conveniently. But, wherever it is placed, you will see smoke issuing from its chimney, for at these altitudes it is too cold to make cheese without some artificial heat. We next came up with the goats. For, as they must be brought twice a day to the châlet to be milked, it is as well to have them pretty handy. After the goats, in the broadest grassy bottom of the alpe—for they are entitled to, and have, the best pasture—a herd of cows—I counted somewhat over 100 of them—put in their appearance. They were below the road, beside the stream which discharges the Oberalpsee, and which was, just where they were, fringed with patches of the rose of the Alps, then in flower. Last of all, on the flank of the ascent to the Tiarms Pass, at the greatest distance of all from the châlet, were the sheep; for they have not to be brought home to be milked. As to the pasture itself we will put it at three miles in length, and we will call the road its axis, though I do not know how far it extends laterally, beyond the two ranges of mountains that bound the view. The sward is generally clean and good. The road is on the flank of the mountain on the left to one going from Andermatt. There is a good breadth of grass above the road in most places, bounded by a ridge of rocky summits. On the right there is the descent to the stream in the valley, and the rise, beyond, of the opposite mountains. The sward here, too, is good till it begins to get threadbare as it approaches, and at last becomes quite out at elbows on, the summits.

While I was counting the cows, I saw Ammer among them, picking his way across the stream from rock to rock. On his return he had in his hand a bouquet—by no means a small one—of the rose of the Alps. This he informed me was for Madame on her arrival.

Turfy mountain slopes, and cattle, are not much to go to see. You may find at home, in Wales, or Scotland, just as good combinations of these objects as at Andermatt; possibly even better, for the actually subaerial mountains here are no great height above the elevated plateau from which they spring. But, then, these turfy slopes, and these cattle, belong to the peasants of Andermatt; and that to the thought, whatever may be the case with respect to the eye, makes a world of difference. The peasants of Andermatt are a very old community. They are as little changed from what their fathers were many centuries ago, as the mountains that stand round about Andermatt. While the outside world, north, south, east, west, has been changing from century to century, they, from century to century, have continued the same. They have had neither a governing class, nor a destitute class. All the while they have, themselves, managed their own affairs. Among them there have been neither governors, nor governed; neither rich, nor poor. These alpes, as far back as their history goes, have been held in common; and by the line of ancestors of those who hold them now. They have been held, generation after generation, down to the generation whose cattle are now upon them, in precisely the same fashion. Land, elsewhere, has ever been changing hands; been held by different tenures; been turned to account in different ways; and given rise to different political constitutions. Here it has never changed hands. It has passed from the father’s to the son’s by an unbroken lineal succession. It has all along been held by the same tenure; been turned to account in the same way; and maintained the same political constitution. This is what gives to the sight its interest.

And now a change is coming over their little world. The great world, and its influences, are encroaching upon them. The causes, which have brought about changes elsewhere, are beginning to bring about changes among them. Some are getting rich, and some are getting poor. Some are amassing capital; some are working for wages. Oberalp alpe is already let, that is to say, its proprietors pay for sending their cows on to their own property; and the rent is wanted to defray the growing expenses of the old village, which has now become a modern town. If they did not turn it to account in this way, they would have to pay road-rates, and fountain-rates, and antiavalanche-rates. Perhaps the day is not very distant, when this alpe will be sold to a joint-stock company, who will supply with milk, butter, and cheese the two railway towns that are now springing up at Göschenen and Airolo, and the town in the high vale of Urseren, to which the pleasure-worn and business-beaten inhabitants of the cities of the plains will come to summer. And then the long communal history of the Oberalp will have ended; and those who walk through it will no longer be able to read in it the life of the past: for that will be found then only in books. This enhances the interest, with which the beholder now contemplates it. It is one of the last pictures, and a fading one, of a form of human life that will soon have completely vanished for ever. But for the present there it stands, exactly where it ought to stand. It has, as it were, taken refuge; and been able down to our own times to maintain itself, in this lofty, inaccessible, central nucleus of our Continent. But the flood of change has at last come near to it, has risen high upon its sides, is still rising rapidly, and must soon sweep over it.

CHAPTER VII

AM STAG—KLUS—THE SURENEN—ENGELBERG.

Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows, and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye and ear—both what they half create,

And what perceive: well pleased to recognize

In nature, and the language of the sense,

The Author of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.—Wordsworth.

August 13.—Madame and the little boy arrived, from Pontresina, yesterday evening, as expected, at five o’clock. This morning, after breakfast, he and I walked to the Devil’s Bridge, and a little way below it, for I wished to see how strong he was upon his legs, and to hear his own account of what he had seen and done during the last year, which he had spent in Switzerland, at school at Aigle during the winter, and in the hot weather at Pontresina with a German tutor. In the afternoon we all went to Hospenthal. These are small matters; but not to mention them would be to exclude the reader for a whole day from our society, which would be a violation of the understanding implied on our title-page. This is the record of a month; and an uneventful day must not be dropped out of the record, but shown to have been uneventful. What, however, was uneventful so far as matter worthy of record goes, must be taken as a part, which, though small, has its place and purpose in the sketch of the whole. The reader, too, will understand that even in a Swiss excursion an uneventful day is not necessarily an unsatisfactory one; for just as peace has its triumphs as well as war, so has repose its charms as well as exertion, and the more so if the repose comes in the midst of the exertion.

August 14.—At 6 A.M. with, figuratively, bands playing and banners waving, that is to say with a fine morning, light hearts, and the good wishes of our host and his wife, we commenced our march. Both the heavy, and the expeditionary baggage was left in charge of my wife’s maid, who was now included in the former. By the diligence that left Andermatt at 10.30 A.M. she was to bring it all on to Am Stag, where she would leave what we were to take with us, take the rest on to Lausanne, and there await our arrival, whenever that might be.

Our first object was Engelberg by the Surenen Pass. With this in view we were to walk to-day to Klus, a little village about four miles beyond Am Stag. The way was all down hill, and the Devil’s Bridge, Göschenen, Wasen, the Priest’s Leap were in succession rapidly left behind and a few minutes after 10 A.M. we had reached Am Stag, somewhat over fourteen miles. For old acquaintance’ sake I was for stopping at La Croix Blanche. My recollections of the good-natured, burly landlord, and his neat-handed, pleasant-mannered manageress, were obligatory. There was too—it was a warm sunny day—a most umbrageous walnut-tree alongside his house, with seats and tables beneath it, just at the foot of the eastern mountain. Only a few paces below the tree was the high road of the valley; beyond that, a few paces more, the murmurous Reuss; and then the opposite western mountain. As it was here that our baggage was to be given up to us, we had to wait for the arrival of the diligence, which would be for two hours. We decided, however, as the day was warm, and our halting place had attractions, and also claims upon us, to stay here till late in the afternoon, and then do the remaining four miles of our day’s work. Having had an early dinner, we took up a position under the umbrageous walnut-tree, and whiled away the time with coffee and ices, which we found were to be had at Am Stag, and with looking at the opposite streams of carriages, from the north, and from the south, which are incessantly passing along this arterial line of road.

As each carriage stopped before the house, down the long flight of steps would waddle the good-natured, burly landlord, to receive his visitors, in gait, bearing, and bulk not unlike a young hippopotamus going down stairs. The parties in the successive carriages had each its own idiosyncrasy, and was a distinct study. Before a word was spoken by the occupants of a carriage, the experienced landlord—for many years he had been a courier—divined at a glance whether he should welcome the new arrival in French, or German, or English. Some had a blasé look. They had had enough of everything, and especially of this kind of thing. They knew very well what it all meant, and just what it was all worth. Others were riant, and reciprocated the host’s politeness. Others had a helpless expression, as if they mistrusted the French of the spokesman of the party, but brightened up when addressed in the familiar accents of the Island tongue. In one of the carriages that stopped before us was an American, as burly as the young hippopotamus, and a head taller. His carriage wheels had hardly ceased to revolve, before he was on the road; and having given an order that the fresh horses were not to be put to for a quarter of an hour, walked off, at a quick pace, to the Reuss, throwing out, as he went, the joints of a telescope fishing-rod. There was a grain of the comical in a big man, in the prime of life, who had crossed the broad Atlantic to see Switzerland, here at Am Stag, with the mountains all around him, entirely absorbed in the hope (it proved fallacious) of being able to beguile, with an artificial fly, to an untimely end, an unwary little trout.

I was reminded of an Englishman, of much the same build, I had met some years ago in Italy. He, too, was a sportsman, and had his gun with him, in expectation of falling in with some quail, or a woodcock or two. That was what, in his way of looking at the world, and all that therein is, Italy might be good for. We were at the time passing through the highly cultivated neighbourhood of Bologna, and were occupying opposite seats, next the same window, in a railway carriage. As far as the eye could reach, the rich level, we were traversing, was all in corn, planted, at regular intervals, with lines of mulberry trees, to which were trained luxuriant vines. It was thus yielding, simultaneously, the three valuable crops of maize or wheat, silk, and wine. My fellow traveller, for some time, contemplated the scene in silence; at last, when he had, with due deliberation, formed his ideas, he gave me the benefit of them. ‘Did you ever see such farming as this? These people here pretend to be growing corn. Just look at their land. Every few yards they have got a hedge of miserable pollards, that will never be worth a shilling a-piece, and of old brambles.’ I afterwards met the same gentleman at Venice; and asked him, if he had seen St. Mark’s, and the pictures at the Accademia? ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘I have been to see them; and all that sort of thing may do very well for the sort of people you have here, but you know I am an Englishman, and can’t take any interest in that sort of thing.’ He had, I thought, hit the nail upon the head. It was because he was an Englishman. He was a public school and University man, and so one of the victims of our public school educational system, which, while undertaking to make classical scholars of the few, who have some taste and capacity for such studies, leaves the minds of all the rest, the great majority, who have no taste or capacity for such studies, utterly blank; and, which is still worse, engenders in most cases an insuperable life-long distaste for every other kind of study. I believe it was the attempt, at the cost of every other kind of knowledge, to force down the throat of my fellow traveller not the Classics, but a grammatical and critical knowledge of Latin and Greek, that must be held answerable for his inability to understand the agriculture of Italy, and to find anything to interest him in Venice.

As soon as Ammer had dined, I sent him on to Altorf to get my malle from the landlord of the Golden Key, in whose charge I had left it, and to post it for Lausanne. He was then to return in the evening to Klus. At 3 P.M. we sent on the little man, in an empty return carriage, in charge of the expeditionary baggage: he had walked 14 miles in the morning. At 4 o’clock my wife and myself followed on foot. We reached Klus a little after 5.

The Inn at Klus is quite of the village kind. The ground and first floor appear to be intended only for the accommodation of peasant visitors. The upper chambers are the guest-chambers. They consist of a small sitting-room, and three good bed-rooms. Everything in this part of the house was clean. The people, too, themselves, we found good-natured and attentive. We had intended to have had a baggage horse for the Surenen, as the distance to Engelberg is great for porters. No horse, however, of any kind, or of any degree of badness, could be had. Anticipating the possibility of this, we had tried to get one at Am Stag; but ineffectually, for every animal that could be brought into the valley, and kept on its legs, was wanted for the traffic of the road. We were, therefore, obliged to have recourse to porters; and having engaged two, ordered coffee for 4.40 A.M. next morning.

August 15.—Were under weigh at 5 A.M. A fine bright morning. At Erstfeld, half a mile from Klus, you cross the Reuss. At Rübshausen, a mile and a half further on, you begin the ascent of the mountain. All mountain ascents are pleasant in the fresh morning. You enter the forest at once, the breadth of the bottom land of the valley being hereabouts on the other bank of the Reuss. We found the forest on the mountain side frequently broken with little prairies, and enlivened here and there with châlets. Occasionally we got a good view down the valley, and of the opposite range.

Having climbed to the upper limits of the forest, you reach a place called Bocketobel. You have now earned something, and will be well paid. You are about to enter the upland valley of Waldnacht: but it is not yet in sight. The path is a mere groove along the top of the precipitous talus of the cliffs that rise on your left. You turn your back on these cliffs to make out the particulars of the scene. It is thoroughly Alpine. If you look first to your left there is before you a very fine rock-bound ravine, into which is falling, in a good cascade, the waters that drain into the Waldnacht valley from the heights around it. The opposite side of this ravine is a sheer wall of rock. This is crowned with an upsloping wood. Then a broad expanse of upsloping prairie. Then wood again to the top of the ridge. You then turn to your right. You there have a long sharply shelving talus from the heights above, in part forest, in part grass. Behind, and above all this, at the point at which you are standing, facing south-east, are the rugged snow-streaked tops of the Uri Rothstock. If you are fortunate, as we were, all these objects, and their minutest details, will meet your eye in full sunlight, through the diaphanous sunlit mountain atmosphere. It will, however, be very different when you look down the mountain, you have been ascending, to the deep broad valley, and to the opposite range. It is still early morning, and there is a light haze in the valley; and the sun, which is all about you, above you, and for some way below you, cannot yet reach the valley, or touch a point on the eastern side. The haze, therefore, that fills the valley below, is equally on the side of the opposite range. This haze is of a pale grey, almost white, with a suspicion of blue. It is of the tint of a glass of water into which has been stirred a drop or two of milk. This is but dimly diaphanous. The opposite mountain, therefore, and the works of man in the valley, in contrast to the clear definition of all that is immediately before you, and on either side, appear to be unsubstantial—like objects in a vision that is fading away—the mere spectres of villages and mountains. It is a scene of much variety, and of good contrasts.

Having given to it sufficient attention, and time, to allow it to form its image in your memory, you turn your back upon it, and enter the valley of Waldnacht. This, as L’Industrie Alpestre de la Suisse tells us, is an alpe lying within the Commune of Attinghausen, in which Altorf is situated. It now grazes 116 cows, and 16 pigs. It is nearly 6,000 feet above the sea; is available for 107 days; is worth 7,324 francs a year; and belongs to six co-proprietors. What is visible of it, as you enter it, is a long grassy oval, bounded on the south by precipitous mountains; on the north by a long grassy mountain slope, with, here and there, tufts of dwarfed alders on its side; on the east it contracts to the narrow passage by which you have just entered it, and on the west to the Surenen Pass. What is visible may be three miles long, and in the best part one mile broad. You will understand from these particulars how completely above, and out of the world it is. The herdsmen who milk the cows, and make the cheese, even with the occasional diversion of the few travellers the Pass brings to them, must have plenty of opportunity for studying each others’ character, and the characters of their 116 cows and 16 pigs.

Here we took on one of the herdsmen to assist the little man up to the top of the Pass, for in the ascent of the mountain from Klus to Waldnacht his strength, for climbing, had begun to fail. The path lies along the bottom of the grassy vale by the side of the flower-margined stream; at the western end of the grassy bottom it crosses the stream; and then the ascent begins again. In the valley you had been on level ground. This second stage of the ascent is without trees; rough and rocky, but full of flowers between the rocks. Here a part of the herd of cows was grazing. Many were on the path in preference to the rugged mountain side, though there was not much to choose between the two. The sun was hot. The way was steep. After a time we came to the end of the first stage. It was a kind of landing place in the mountain staircase we had been toiling up. On this was a field of snow about 100 yards across. The very dog, who had accompanied the herdsman, took a mouthful from it. Then climbing again. In this bit was an ice-cold spring which bursts out from beneath a rock, a yard or so from the path. I might have passed it without observing it, and so lost a rare draught, but Ammer and the porters saved me from that loss. We then came to a second ice-field about 200 yards wide. After this the ascent was sharp and toilsome for a warm day, with the sun—at that hour it is on the face of the mountain—on your back. As you near the top the path is steep, loose, and shingly.

When we had climbed to within three or four hundred feet of the top, vegetation almost entirely died out. The surface was everywhere strewn with small slaty débris, from which uprose, at intervals, large masses of harder rock, not yet disintegrated. Here, between these larger and harder fragments, on the scaly, leaden-coloured ground, which otherwise would have been quite naked, was a natural garden of most charming little Forget-me-nots. They stood an inch, or two, apart, as if the soil were too poor to admit of closer proximity. But, even with this amplitude of space, each plant could form no more than a single stem, without branches, perhaps two inches high, with two or three little lateral leaves. This little stem supported a single truss of pale blue flowers, with pale golden eyes. Such soft tints, and amid such hardness! Like pearls upon an Ethiop’s arm. They can do little at this height, and on such a soil. Nothing else can do anything. But this frail little plant bravely holds up to the light its gem-like flowerets in the midst of cold and barrenness. The little it can do it does passing well. The slender stem is stretched up to you as far as it can reach. The little flowers, too, do not droop, but are erect also; nor are they half-closed, but each is expanded out quite level. It looks up to you with the open eye of confiding innocence, and says, ‘If you are pleased with me, look at me. Take me into your eye. Forget me not.’

‘No! gentle little suppliant, never! No cares, nor pleasures, of the world shall ever dim your image in the eye of memory. To recall it will be always pleasant, and at times may charm away care. May sky and sun, whose liveries you meekly wear, smile on what remains of your short day.’

As is the case with many Swiss Passes, the Surenen, looked at from below, appears to be very much less than it proves to be in the ascent. The eye takes the air line to the top, and because it sees none of the depressions, and few of the windings the path is obliged to make, naturally ignores them, till experience has taught the necessity of making due allowances. While you are in the inexperienced stage you will often mock yourself, you may do it here, with the complaint that you have got a long way from the bottom, without getting any nearer to the top. As you advance, the way only lengthens. The more you do, the more there remains to be done.

At last the summit was reached, and with something akin to disappointment, at finding that what we had been so long in toiling up to, from five in the morning till past eleven, was crossed literally in two steps, for the top is only a hog’s back ridge.

Half a dozen steps beyond the summit, inclining to the left, is a little stream, with its channel cut in the short turf, which you had left behind you a long way down on the other side, but which at once reappears on the western slope. This little stream must take its rise, perhaps by some subterranean duct, from the lower stages of the Schlossberg, which is here on your left. The Blackenstock, a lower stage of the Uri Rothstock, is on your immediate right. The depression between these rugged, craggy mountains forms the Pass. Here, on the grassy marge of the little runnel on the summit, was called a halt. From this point you look down on the Surenen alpe, falling away immediately below your feet, with, on its southern side, the grand summit snow-field of the Titlis, in the distance, full before you. Between it and you are several iron-cased, iron-hearted, inaccessible-looking mountains on each side of the valley. All this will feed the eye, as you lie on the smooth short turf by the side of the glancing blithesome little runnel.

It is pleasant, very pleasant, with so much that is grand and unwonted before you—such huge masses, such dark, unpitying, unchanging hardness, pinnacles, precipices, ravines, and snow-fields—to rest on the smooth turf by the side of the cool sparkling streamlet. Your hard work is now done. The strain of the long climb—and it was sharpest at the last—has come to an end suddenly. You feel that your lungs, your heart, your muscles, are rapidly resuming their normal condition. The cigar you have earned is unusually soothing. You notice that a little puff of white vapour is incessantly curling up from the summit of the Blackenstock, hard by on your right. He, then, too, to keep you in countenance, to associate himself with you, has, by the aid of the sun, lighted his pipe. That ‘chartered libertine, the air’ is quiet, with only just enough movement in it to make its Alpine freshness perceptibly restorative. Your draughts of claret, mixed with the water of the lively streamlet, seem to be replacing the moisture of the bodily organism, which the effort and sun-heat of the climb had abstracted; and the sensation of the replacement is contenting. Your camp-followers, too, a few paces off, are, you notice, rejoicing in the sense of release from their burdens, which they have placed, erect in their wooden back-frames, before them, as if they wished to see, as well as feel, that they are no longer upon their backs. You pass the claret to them. They do not dilute it from the stream. To them, undiluted, it is a thin potation.

Half an hour is soon gone. Another quarter is added. And then the words en route are again heard, and the descent commences. You are fresher than when you rose with the sun, though a life seems to have passed since then; and you can hardly bring yourself to believe that that was the morning of to-day. Le petit Caporal—for the blue boy of last year now wears two stripes in the battalion of the Aigle Cantonal College—takes the lead, and keeps it all the way, till at 4.30 p.m. we enter Engelberg. But that is yet a long way off. The descent has many well-defined stages. First comes the topmost pasture—the most exposed, and with the shortest turf. Here are flocks of sheep, and the cows that are out of milk. They will not stray, for right and left they are walled in with mountainous precipices; and over the Pass they would find nothing to eat. In the next stage is a deeply sunk pasture, protected on the north by a semicircle of mighty precipices. Here are some horses and pigs, and the cows in milk, with a châlet for making cheese, from the chimney of which the blue smoke of the wood fire is rising vertically in the quiet air of the sheltered bottom. The third stage is composed of a long green mountain slope on the north, the successor of the semicircle of precipices, which are now transferred, mountain-high, to the opposite, the south side, but not in a semicircle. At one spot in this southern range you may count as many as six torrents, close together, streaming and tumbling down from the summits, which are needles of granite rising out of ravines of snow. In the fourth stage the valley has become narrow. The mountains on each side are naked cliffs; the only green being the narrow grass-clothed talus at the foot of each range. The last stage, which brings you to Engelberg, is one of woods and mown meadows. Two objects accompany you all the way, the brawling Aa at your feet, and the vast expanse of snow on the summit of the Titlis. To one descending the valley, the distinguishing feature of this grand mountain is that its upper stage rises in sheer black rock above the mountain in front of it; and then on this sheer precipice of rock is superimposed a sheer precipice of snow. It seems as if one might stand on the edge of the snow, and let down a plumb-line against the face of the snow, for some hundreds of feet, and then let it fall for some hundreds of feet more, against the face of the underlying rock. You are able, too, at the same time to see that this is not a mere ridge of snow, but that it is the edge of a vast field of snow on the flat crown of this mountain giant’s head, which only gradually slopes off north, south, and west; and which is, in the fashion just described, cut through perpendicularly on the eastern side, which is the one that faces you as you come down the Pass.

As there is no telegraph over the Surenen, we had, after our halt on the summit, sent on Ammer to engage rooms for us at Engelberg. It was fortunate that we had taken this precaution, for he was only just in time to procure them for us in the last hotel at which he applied—the large new hotel of the Titlis, on the further side of the town. The books say that the Surenen requires nine or ten hours. We were out eleven hours and a half. But then we were a family party, recruited from the drawing-room, the junior department of the schoolroom, and the study; and we did our work in family fashion, which, as far as I know, is, taken in its turn, as good a fashion as any other. At all events it is satisfactory to find that you are disposed to think so; for this will justify you in supposing that you are not one of those impetuous souls who have no idea of any pleasure in a Swiss excursion, except what they can extract from the fact that they got over a certain distance in less time than the books allow for it, or than their friends did it in: as if the merit of a book were to be measured by the rate at which it was written, or of a dinner by the rate at which it was eaten. Fair scenes and wondrous scenes are not to be scampered over, and toiled through. They have to be done with the eye and the mind as well as with the legs. What is fair and wondrous should be noted and understood. These are books which those that run cannot read. And they must be read carefully and rightly in order that they may be understood. Otherwise we cannot make them our own, so as to carry them away with us, and have them to look at (mentally) afterwards, whenever we please.

As we passed through the town we found that Engelberg was that day holding high festival. The bells were ringing; everybody was in the streets. The men were in their holiday costume, and of course the women too: each of the latter, if married, had two spatula-headed silver pins in her back hair—a local fashion, confined to the dames of Unterwalden—or, if unmarried, only one pin, the head of which was sometimes a disk, sometimes a globe about the size of an orange, formed of a kind of open filagree work. I asked one of those who was keeping the day with this festal adornment, what it was all about. The answer I received was, that it was in honour of God’s Mother.

In the evening I went to the church of the Monastery for Evening Song. All the day long I had been looking on the face of nature, one of the aids allowed us for the construction of our idea of God; I would now draw near to Him, as He is presented to us in another fashion—the old accustomed human fashion. The shades of evening were beginning to come down on the valley; and the hour, now that work was over, and the day coming to its close, disposed to quiet reverence, to religious reverie. I would go for a time to the house where the sights and the thoughts of the world are excluded. But I did not find what I went for. The chanting of the monks was loud and harsh; and I could not make out a syllable of what they were chanting. And this was the more forced upon me because, they being behind a screen impervious to sight, the ear only was appealed to. The influence of the hour having been thus dispelled, I looked at the people before me. There were among them three men. All the rest were women. Neither, then, the untutored peasants of Engelberg, nor one of the many hundreds of people from many nations, who had such culture as the world now gives, were there. How did they regard the fête and the occasion of it? Here were the old world and the world of to-day face to face. I remained till the end of the service, and then, returning to the hotel, took a place on the seat in front of it.

The day was now gone by. The last traces of light were fast fading away. Darkness was deepening in the valley. In the west, in which direction I was looking, the black silhouette of the mountains was projected from the now silver-white western evening sky. One bright planet alone was seen overhead. A few remaining flecks of cloud were being fast absorbed, and were soon quite lost. The loiterers from many countries and the mediæval Engelbergers were fast disappearing from the streets. And now the last white traces of the dying day are gone from the western heavens; and unnumbered worlds, gleaming from illimitable space, are discoursing of the glory and of the mystery of the Universe. And nothing else is seen and all is still, that their discourse may be heeded.

CHAPTER VIII.

STANZ-BECKENRIED—SCHWYZ—THE HACKEN PASS—EINSIEDLN.

Silence is only commendable

In a neat’s tongue dried.—Shakespeare.

August 16.—Stayed at Engelberg till 10 P.M. to see something more of the place. The monks declined to show us their library, or anything within their walls. To have admitted us would have been a violation of their rules. I was afterwards told that they do show their library on certain stated days: but as few people would be able, or disposed, to remain at Engelberg some days for the purpose of seeing a library, my inference was that it was not—which may be no fault of theirs—particularly worth seeing; for monks, in this respect like the rest of the world, if they have anything worth showing, are seldom indisposed to show it. In this way you may escape the unpleasant necessity of having to condemn them for churlishness.

Engelberg, as the books tell us, is 3,343 feet above the sea level: an elevation which gives it a fine, invigorating air, and a pleasant temperature in August. This, and the mountain excursions that may be made from it, among which is chief the ascent of the grand Titlis, are its attractions in these days; and there are many who feel their force. But of all those who yesterday were coming and going, none excepting ourselves came or went by the Surenen Pass. This appears to be a district that is not greatly in favour with pedestrians; and of those who are attracted to it, but few would wish to undertake so long a day without any snow-work, and even without any hard climbing. The Pass admits of being taken on horseback; but on the eastern side the path would be very rough for riding, and as this would also be a very tedious way of doing it, I, for one, would very much prefer doing it on foot.

Our immediate destination was Beckenried. We went by way of Stanz. The distance is given at thirteen and a half miles. The descent is nearly 2,000 feet, and is made in the first half of the road, much of which is through pleasant woods. The remaining part, that nearer to Stanz, is very much on a level, through meadows and orchards. The valley is not wide; and the mountain-ranges which inclose it are at a distance which enables you to see with distinctness every object on large expanses of their slopes, from the bottom to the top.

At Stanz we stopped for an early dinner. We put up at the Angel. I had spent an afternoon, and slept there, on my outward journey; and, as in the case of La Croix Blanche of Am Stag, had agreeable recollections of a pleasant-mannered and conversible manageress. At her suggestion, almost request, we visited the studio, hard by, of M. Deschwanden, the best known, at all events in his own locality, of living Swiss painters. One is glad to find an artist in Switzerland. Confining my remarks to the specimens of his work I saw in churches, and elsewhere than in his studio, I would hazard the criticism that his figures are not sufficiently suggestive of a substratum of bones and muscles, and that his colouring is too suggestive of lilies and roses. Of course the sacred subjects, in which chiefly he deals, generally require the expression of humble resignation, and of rapt devotion: still it is the resignation and the devotion of men and women, that is of organisms of bones, muscles, and nerves; and furthermore, resignation and devotion are, after their kind, action; and their surface, if one may so put it, presupposes the recognition, and anatomically correct disposition, of the inner mechanism. The external must be built on the internal.

In the afternoon we went on to Beckenried. Here we found that our voiturier and ourselves had formed very dissimilar estimates of the pecuniary value of the services he had rendered us. At Engelberg we had agreed with him for the payment of a certain fixed sum for taking us to Stanz, but had omitted this precaution for the stage from Stanz to Beckenried. For this his demand was unjustifiably extortionate. It was still early in the afternoon, and as I wished to see how matters of this kind are arranged in Switzerland, I was for laying the case before the Landamman. For this purpose I had not far to go; for this functionary was, as it happened, the landlord of the hotel at which we had just engaged apartments. The case was settled then and there, off-hand, as soon as stated, by the Landamman, standing in the middle of the road, without his hat, and with his hands in his pockets. He taxed the demand to the amount of four francs. The deduction should have been greater according to the tariff; but I was satisfied with the exposure of the man’s roguery, and with the expression exhibited in his face of baffled and impotent spite.

Had this voiturier been a good-natured vagabond, who, in making his exorbitant demand had betrayed some consciousness of its character, I should probably have compounded his roguery—and at the same time paid the due penalty for my carelessness in taking an article without asking the price of it—by giving him half the fictitious excess he demanded. I here record his attempted imposition not at all as an instance of what people must expect in Switzerland (though, of course, there, as elsewhere, they ought to be on their guard against the possible occurrence of such cases); for this youth—small-headed, hatchet-faced, low-browed, with small cold gray eyes, meagre bony nose, and thin bloodless lips—would have been as bad anywhere else: nature had gone wrong with him in his original composition, and had denied him all human feeling except that for a franc. My mention of the matter is rather intended as a reply to the loud and frequent charges we have lately heard against the administration of justice in Switzerland. We have been told that it is so tardy as to amount to a denial of justice. This little affair, as far as it goes, points in the opposite direction.

As to the charges, about which, too, one hears much, of greed and roguery in the people one has to deal with while travelling in Switzerland, I for my part am surprised at finding so little of this kind of thing; and that what I do find of it is not carried further. In England—for of course our standard of comparison is ourselves; I say nothing of Scotland, for the Scotch are a peculiar and privileged people, to be judged only by Scotchmen—I believe that innkeepers, lodging-house keepers, horse-jobbers, and porters, are in the matters complained of, a long way ahead of the corresponding classes in Switzerland. Let us, too, make a little allowance for ordinary human nature, when tempted beyond the ordinary human capacity for resisting temptation. Here are people who have been brought up under conditions of life, confirmed by long traditions, which oblige them to believe that there is nothing in the world like francs; and who then have for three or four months in the year such temptations to act on this belief as assail no other people. During these three or four months, mobs of travellers from all parts of the world are bidding against each other for every horse, porter, and apartment in the country. Those who have what is wanted know that many of those who want these things are rich, many in a hurry, and that all must have what they want. My astonishment is that the Swiss who cater for travellers have so much forbearance, so much honesty, are so obliging, and give themselves so much trouble to please. Most people, I think, would be of opinion that in this country, under such circumstances, there would be a general break-down in these virtues. Let any one recall what he has himself experienced at home in matters of this kind. We are a very exemplary people in the knowledge of virtue. In its practice, too, we can resist everything except temptation: but here the Swiss go beyond us, for they can, to some little extent, resist even that.

Our first care on reaching Beckenried had been to telegraph to the Sonnenberg Hotel, on the Seelisberg, for rooms for Saturday. The answer had been immediately returned that we could not be accommodated till Saturday next, the 23rd. In the matter of time we could not afford a week at Beckenried; and so, with regret, we gave up the idea of staying a few days at the Sonnenberg for the purpose of visiting and investigating its interesting neighbourhood. Being, then, obliged to drop this out of our programme, we determined to go on next day to Einsiedln, which stood next after Sonnenberg in our plans.

We spent the remainder of the afternoon and the next morning at Beckenried. It is a pleasant place. There is the lake to be looked at, and to be turned to account for bathing, boating, and fishing. All the hotels have bathing-houses. There is the view across the lake; charming walks up the mountains behind and beyond it; and a great many excursions to be made by steamboat to places on the lake. As to the fishing, as you see people fishing, and as the hotels are supplied with fish, we must infer that there are fish that may be caught. But we have no reason for supposing that any in this part of the lake ever allow themselves to be caught; for all this afternoon, and the following morning, we saw, on the terrace of our hotel, patient Germans watching their floats, but did not see anything come of their patient watching; nor do I suppose that they would have got anything by watching through other afternoons and mornings. As I looked at them I was reminded of the patience with which the same good people had laboured and waited for the resurrection of the Fatherland—patience worthy of the energy and determination they exhibited when the time came for action. I fancied that I saw in the patience of these unrequited anglers some of the honest pride late events had made justifiable. One can understand their feelings. The day many generations had desired to see, but had not seen, had come at last; and when it had come they showed themselves not unequal to the supreme occasion. They had plenty to ruminate upon. At Beckenried, for them the fishing was enough without the fish.

August 17.—When, yesterday, we had telegraphed to Sonnenberg, we had supposed that it was Friday. We had therefore thought that the answer returned, that we could not be accommodated before Saturday next, the 23rd, was wrongly expressed; for was not the next day, the 16th, Saturday? It had never crossed the mind of any one of the party that yesterday was Saturday, the 16th; and so this morning no one was aware that it was Sunday, the 17th. We had lost our time-reckoning; otherwise we should have arranged for staying this day at Beckenried. The first suggestion we had of our mistake was seeing Ammer, on the steamboat pier, in his Sunday attire. We had given up our apartments at Telfer’s, which, indeed, had over night been engaged, by telegraph, over our heads; and as we had on the previous evening been rejected both at the Sun and at the Moon, the two chief hotels of the place, which were full to overflowing, there was now nothing for us to do but to remain where we were, on the pier, for the steamboat. This loss of time-reckoning is a common occurrence in travelling; at least I generally find it to be so. At home every day has its appointed work. The work, therefore, of the day of itself informs you what day of the week it is. You are kept au courant of the almanac by the work you have to do. In travelling you have no work at all except to go on. This is the same for every day. You cannot, therefore, remember the days of the week without a continual effort, which would be disagreeable, and of no advantage.

The steamer in somewhat less than an hour from Beckenried—we wished it had been longer about it—deposited us at Brunnen, having by the way touched at sunny Gersau, and at tiny Trieb—it is but a little châlet, the landing place for the Sonnenberg, adhering to the perpendicular side of the big mountain, where it dips into the lake. In half an hour more the diligence, en correspondance with the steamer, took us on to Schwyz. Here we had an early dinner at the Rössli. At 12.30 my wife and the little man went on by char to Einsiedln. Ammer and I started at the same time, for the same destination, by way of the Hacken Pass.

As to the Hacken Pass, it is a very small affair, but a very pleasant walk. You begin the ascent as soon as you are out of the town of Schwyz. It is over the depression between the Hochstock on the north, and a spur of the Great Mythen on the south. The ascent, from the town to the top, requires two hours. It frequently brings you in sight of the lake of Lowerz, and of the two branches of the lake of the Four Cantons, which at Brunnen make an angle. Grass and woods alternate to the top; the former being in excess of the latter. As you look down, occasionally, on Schwyz, you think of the history of the men, who in old times made it a home for freedom. And, as you note the countless divisions of the plain below, you think that its existing state is not unworthy of attention; for there is evidence before you not only that the old freedom has been maintained, unimpaired, on the two bases of general possessive, and of universal political, equality, but also that unflagging industry, the associate of much manly virtue, has aided in its maintenance. You see that every little plot of prairie, or of corn land, and every fruit tree, you are looking upon, is watched, and tended, with an interest none but small proprietors can feel. You sympathize in the emotions with which the members of the little community below you regard their history, their freedom, and the modest rewards of their unflagging industry.

As you, toilsomely, climb up the mountain, in the bright sunshine, frequently shaking off, with a toss of your head, the briny drops, which are trickling down your face, and finding their way into your eyes, you will perhaps ask yourself, whether this is pleasure. Do you, honestly, like it? That you find it pleasant to be at rest in the cool shade, does not necessarily imply that you do not like exertion in the warm sun, if the exertion neither distress your lungs, nor blister your feet. There is a kind of enjoyment to the mind at all events, if not to the body also, in violent effort, when you find that you can sustain it. It is pleasant to feel that the bodily mechanism is being made to respond to the will. But be this as it may with many, there is no disputing about individual tastes. Each must be allowed his own; with respect to which he is a law to himself, without appeal to any higher tribunal.

There is something almost startling, from its instantaneousness, and completeness, in the change of view on reaching the summit of a col. You have been, for a long time, struggling up against the mountain: that side of it, and the mountains right and left of that side, have all the time been filling your eye. Without giving the matter a thought, you step upon the summit. Every object you have so long been looking at is out of sight; is gone; is down behind you. All that you are now looking upon is new, and generally very different—another valley; other ranges of mountains. That in the twinkling of an eye such vast objects should disappear, and such vast ones take their places, staggers you for the moment that is necessary for the comprehension of the new situation.

Having now accomplished the short, and sharp ascent of the Pass, the long and easy descent lay before me; and easy enough it is at first, being almost level, and over short springy turf. After a time you enter the pine forest, which along the path clothes an underlying ridge of the Hochstock. Here you have a made road; and before the great storm of a fortnight back you would have had a bridge over the torrent—at this time of the year usually little more than a torrent channel—which comes down from the mountain. The storm, however, had not only carried away the bridge, but had also dug out a ravine in the loose rocky débris of the mountain side, to the depth, just about where the bridge had stood, of twenty feet, or more. I had, therefore, to scramble down to the bottom of the ravine, and to scramble up the other side, having in the bottom stepped over the little thread of water, to which the mighty raging torrent of a fortnight back had now shrunk. These excavations are easily formed by unusually heavy storms, because the mountain sides are generally only a talus of loose detrital matter that has, in the course of ages, fallen from the summits, and accumulated at the bottom, and on the flanks of the mountain, and eventually become covered with forests, and turf. This torrent, and many others on each side of the valley, had, on the occasion of the late storm, carried down hundreds of thousands of tons of stones and earth to the valley bottom, and into the Alpbach, the stream that drains the whole valley. Much of this freshly brought down stone had been spread out over the bottom of the broad channel of the Alpbach. In this way the new deposit has for a time raised its bed, that is to say till the pieces of which it is composed shall be ground down, and worn away. But while they, and the additional volume of storm-water, had to be provided with space, the Alpbach had been obliged in many places to widen its channel. This I saw it had done, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, by cutting away its banks. The lighter particles, those which the galloping freshet maintained in a state of suspension, had, of course, been carried down to the lake of Zurich.

Near the village of Alpthal I saw old stumps of alders and firs, that had been disinterred from grips, lately cut for the drainage of some damp prairies. These prairies, then, had been, at no very remote date, forest. In other places I have seen similar evidence of a change, which has of late been largely brought about in Switzerland in the uses to which land is put. As population increases, and, too, as more distant markets, by extended and improved means of communication, are brought within reach, more cows are kept. More milk and cheese are wanted at home; and can, profitably, be disposed of abroad. The forest, therefore, is cleared away; the rocks are quarried; and the land is laid down to grass. In this way more money is made of it. This conversion, however, by diminishing the amount of fuel brought to market, enhances its cost, which had already been enhanced by the increase of population. It is obvious that the poor, or rather those who have no land, are the chief sufferers by this change.

The scarcity, and consequent enhancement of the price of fuel, have now become in many parts of Switzerland, very considerable. In some places this has reached such a point that, as a check on its further progress, the Communes have ceased to supply their burgers with timber for new constructions, obliging them for this purpose to use stone. Great attention is now paid, pretty generally, to the maintenance of existing forests; and the profession of foresting is becoming an important one. The traveller, as he passes through the country, will, often, be struck with the care, he cannot but observe, has been bestowed on arboriculture. He sees that the rocky mountain side is supporting as many trees as could possibly be made to grow together on the space devoted to them; and that each individual tree has been carefully looked after, and scientifically pruned and trained, so that they shall not interfere with each other, but each have its fair share of space and light. In this work nature aids man’s labour and thought by giving to the forests abundance of moisture; and, between the frequent storms and showers, abundant floods of sunlight and warmth. It is this, that, on the mountain sides, enables trees to take root, and grow to considerable size, on what apparently is little more than bare rock. I often observed far from insignificant conifers on the summit of detached blocks of granite—situations which, in this country, could not have kept them alive.

The same cause it is that gives to the Swiss their abundance of grass. Grass, under such conditions of moisture and warmth, will grow anywhere. You see it in Switzerland rapidly establishing itself on the tops of roadside walls. If a heap of stones has been piled up in a field, lichens and moss soon appear upon it; and, by their decay, in time, fill the interstices. Then trees spring up upon it, or a mantle of turf creeps over it. This may be the work of a century, or two. I noted multitudes of instances of every step of the process. And in excavations on hill sides I saw evidence of how the process had been repeated, again and again, as the mountain torrents had brought down successive avalanches of rocky detritus. Each successive layer, in turn, and in time, had become in this way consolidated with mould, and then covered with forest, or turf: only for the steps of the process to be again repeated. Indeed, the greater part of the prairies, and of the workable land in the valleys, consists of nothing but a thin film of soil, superimposed on fragments of rock. If a tree in such situations is blown over, its roots tear up this thin film of soil, and leave the substratum of fragments of rock exposed to view. The industry of petty proprietors, who both have much time at their disposal, and will, themselves, reap the whole benefit of their labour, aided by the climatic conditions of the country, has created the cultivated surface of south-eastern, and no small part of that of north-western, Switzerland.

On the way to Einsiedln I met several parties of pilgrims, almost exclusively Valaisans, it would be more correct to say Valaisannes, returning from their devotions before the shrine of the black-faced Virgin. Ammer recognized them by their costume. The day was warm, and they were going up hill. The women of between fifty and sixty years of age were, I observed, suffering less from their exertions than, and were not looking so much heated as, their younger and more vigorous companions. For the last three, or four, miles the road is very much on a level. I reached Einsiedln at 4.30 P.M.—just four hours out. As the carriage-road from Schwyz makes a large loop, my wife and the little man were about the same time—only ten minutes less—on the way.

CHAPTER IX.

EINSIEDLN.

What is’t t’ us

Whether ’twas said by Trismegistus,

If it be nonsense, false, or mystic,

Or not intelligible, or sophistic?

’Tis not antiquity, nor author,

That makes truth truth.—Hudibras.

As you enter the Place of Einsiedln, there faces you on the east side, if orientation has been observed in the Church, the large and famous monastery of Our Lady of the Hermits. The first impression is good and pleasing. It is even something more: it is striking. There is plenty of space in the foreground; and the whole is well kept. In the centre of the extended front is the entrance to the church. To compare what is small with what is great, it reminds you of St. Peter’s at Rome, and its Piazza. As the Place rises from the point at which you enter it, throughout, up to the monastery, the elevation of the site of the building adds somewhat to its imposing effect. Rows of cell-like stalls, constructed in a stage of the rise, in a curve before the pile, increase its apparent height and size. There is an openness, and a breadth of sky, above, which give a sense of light, and space. As the structure dates from 1719, there is, as might have been expected, nothing in it, architecturally, worthy of notice.

The monastery, and the incidents of the pilgrimage made to its black-faced, and black-handed image of the Virgin, were what we had come to Einsiedln to see; and as there is nothing else in the place to see, we were soon in the church. The interior of the building is less pleasing than the exterior. White-wash, tawdry tinsel, and pictures, inferior even to what you might have expected, do not produce so good an effect as the space, simplicity, and weather-tinted stone of the outside. No service was then going on; but there were about a hundred people in the church, the greater part of whom were before the shrine of the image.

We again returned for vespers. The church, which is large, was then more than half full; and there was some crowding around the shrine.

We were present once more—the next morning, at mass. The celebrants, if that is the correct appellation, were more than gorgeously vestmented, in vestments which appeared stiff with gold embroidery. These vestments, the screen which separated the priests from the profane laity, the incense, the bell-ringing, the lights, transported me in thought to the old heathen world. I felt as if I were witnessing the celebration, in the style of those times, of some of its sacred mysteries. The material means used, and the motives which prompted their use, that is to say the desire to produce a sense of undefined awe, were the same as they might have been then. I do not say this with any thought that it contains a reason why they should not be reverted to by ourselves: it may be right to aim at producing this effect; and these may be the readiest, the most powerful, and the most inoffensive means for producing it. I am only saying that what I was then witnessing carried my thoughts back to the old mysteries, which Christianity, as a matter of fact and of history, abolished; and which it abolished, because they would have served no purpose but that of obscuring the perception of its simple, intelligible, conscience-originated moral aims. I was told, immediately after the service, by a monk, who was showing me over the library, that in the celebration of the mass, at which I had just been present, a part had been taken by M. Dupanloup, the Bishop of Orleans.

The library, as might have been expected, is rich in folios. Folios, as a general rule, belong, like arquebuses, culverins, and coats of mail, to the past. As far as I saw, the contents of these folios, and of the books generally, were either theological, or classical. The Classics may be so made the instrument, and substance of education, and the study of a life, as quite to preoccupy the mind, and not themselves to suggest, or to allow anything else to suggest, any of the questions of modern controversy. Hence, perhaps, the desire and effort of the Church of Rome to confine education to the Classics. There were also in the library an electrical apparatus, and a cabinet of mineralogical specimens. We were, besides, shown the abbot’s private chapel; the guest chambers, most of which make up two beds; and the conference chamber. This last is a large room, on the walls of which, among some other modern portraits, hang those of Napoleon III., and of the Emperor of Germany. If I recollect rightly, these two had been placed where we saw them before the outbreak of the late war.

In the rows of stalls in front of the monastery—there are some of a similar character to the north of the building—and in a great many of the shops of the town, are sold only such objects as pilgrims of the poorest class would purchase, to carry home with them as mementos of their pilgrimage. Among these objects is conspicuous in wood, earthenware, and a variety of other materials, a miniature reproduction of the black-faced image. I thought of the silver shrines of Ephesus; though the precious material of which they were formed, tells us that their purchasers were the wealthy and the educated. The aspect of the locality, in which these mementos are exposed for sale, and the fact that, not the mementos only, but everything else vendible in it, is of the humblest kinds of tinsel, unredeemed by any articles of use or substance, reminded me somewhat of a bazaar, or fair.

What you go to Einsiedln to see is the pilgrims. This is as exclusively the one object there as the Temple of the Sun at Baalbec, or the rock sculptures and excavations at Elephanta. If there were no pilgrims, not only would no one go to see Einsiedln, but there would be no Einsiedln to go to see: for it is supported by pilgrims only, and by nothing else. We are told that about 150,000 visit it yearly. These hosts of pilgrims have built, and maintain, both the monastery and the town. Everything you see of the town shows its origin, purpose, and character. It is a town of pilgrims’ inns, and of pilgrims’ shops. It is quite a mediæval sight. What is presented to you here enables you to form a picture in your mind of what many a town in those days must have been; as, for instance, Bury St. Edmunds, with its great monastery, and its shrine for pilgrims.

Of course a man does not go a long journey to see some object without a wish to know something about it: that were irrational. If he go to Baalbec to see what remains of it, he would be glad to know how Baalbec came to be placed where he finds its remains; what maintained its population; and what was the kind of life of the place. At Elephanta he desires to know what were the ideas in men’s minds, that brought them to expend so much labour on such costly excavations. So at Einsiedln. You may not yourself have come on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the black-faced image: still you are not in every sense an unconcerned outsider. You have come on a pilgrimage of your own sort: its object is to see pilgrims doing a pilgrimage; and to think over the matter with the object, and the doers of the pilgrimage, before your eyes.

Now what is it that brings these tens of thousands of pilgrims here? That is the great question. Several reasons contribute to the explanation of the phenomenon. We will put first the famous Einsiedln inscription, because that is what first meets the eye as we enter the church. This inscription exhibits certain words of Christ’s Vicar upon earth—an infallible Pope of Rome. The words are, ‘Hic est plena remissio peccatorum a culpâ et a pœnâ.’ No words can be more precise and definite. ‘Here,’ in Einsiedln, in this Monastery, before this shrine of the black-faced Virgin, ‘is plenary remission of sins, from their guilt and from their punishment.’ No wonder, then, that the peasants of the Valais, of Bavaria, and of other places, where this statement is known and believed, flock to Einsiedln. This alone would explain their coming. The only wonder is that the whole Romanist world do not make a pilgrimage to Einsiedln the great and paramount object of life. To be sure I had just been told that I had, that morning, seen in the church M. Dupanloup, the Bishop of Orleans. But, during the last five centuries, how many Bishops of Orleans have been there? Was he following the example of his predecessors in being there? or was he there for some other purpose? How many Cardinals have made this pilgrimage? We do not ask how many Popes of Rome have made it; because, if they can give this plenary remission to those who make it, we may suppose that in this matter they do not give away all that they have to give, but reserve of it as much as will be needed for their own requirements.

Another question arises out of this inscription. Who could have expected that this remote, bleak, wild, formerly lonely forest, now open, dank grassland, would have been so highly favoured? Why is this ‘plenary remission of sins both from their guilt, and from their punishment,’ to be secured at this out-of-the-way, unhistorical, little-known spot? We might have supposed that, if at any one particular spot upon earth was to be granted this plenary remission of sins, it would have been at Bethlehem, or at Nazareth, or at Jerusalem. We, who wish to understand matters of this kind, cannot but ask, why they have been passed over, and why, of all places in the world, Einsiedln has thus been made the gate of heaven? But still in the meantime, as it is the gate of heaven, we cannot be surprised that the peasants of the Valais, of Bavaria, and of other like-minded places, are attracted to it. In them it would be wrong, if they were not so attracted. It would however make the matter a little more intelligible, if the Bishops and the educated neighbours, of these poor people came with them; and showed by accompanying them, that they participated with them in the desire to pass through this wide, and smooth-paved gateway. Can the reason of their not coming be, that they know, that of them, to whom so much more has been given, somewhat more will be required? Can it be at all because they cannot but think that plenary remission is not within their reach on such easy terms?

Another reason for the maintenance of this pilgrimage to the black-faced image of Einsiedln may be the offerings of the pilgrims. The surmise that the latter of these facts stands towards the former, in some way and degree, in the relation of cause to effect, receives a colour of probability from this plenary remission of sins not having been accorded to pilgrimages made to Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Jerusalem; and also from the cessation of pilgrimages to some other places, let us say, for instance, to Canterbury. We all know that pilgrimages to Canterbury were, once upon a time, as common in this country as Einsiedln pilgrimages now are in Switzerland. There are still plenty of Romanists in this country; some remains, at all events, of the shrine of St. Thomas are still at Canterbury; and the Dean and Chapter, we may be sure, would put no difficulties in the way of those who might wish to perform this pilgrimage. Why, then, do we see no parties of pilgrims assembling at, and setting out from, some modern Tabard, or, if Chaucer’s shade can forgive the supposition, from Cannon Street Station, for Canterbury? I am afraid we must give as a reason, not that the efficacy of prayers addressed to St. Thomas of Canterbury is less now than it was five centuries ago—any supposition of that kind would be quite inadmissible, for we know of nothing that could have diminished the saint’s power: whatever it was five hundred years ago it must be the same at this day, precisely—but that there are none now who can receive the offerings of pilgrims. There is no body of men on the spot who could receive such offerings. And it would hardly do to say to the faithful, make your pilgrimages to Canterbury first; and then make your offerings to some authorized recipients in London, or else remit them by a bill of exchange, or a post office order, to Rome. As nothing of this kind can be done, it comes about that St. Thomas of Canterbury is no longer an object of pilgrimage. If the fact that there is no longer anyone to receive the offerings of pilgrims to Canterbury is, in some way or other, a reason for the cessation of pilgrimages to Canterbury, the fact that there are people to receive the offerings of pilgrims to Einsiedln may, in some way, be a reason for the maintenance of pilgrimages to Einsiedln. This may also throw some light upon the fact, that though the monastery has seven times been destroyed by fire, the black-faced image has, upon every one of these catastrophes, escaped without injury; and that in 1798, though the French carried it away to Paris, it forthwith re-appeared. In short, we may, I think, infer, with some degree of probability, from the nature of the case, and from what we know of such matters, that there would be no monks, no monastery, no black-faced image at Einsiedln, were there no offerings.

One reason more: the peasant of the Valais goes to Einsiedln, because he has not yet arrived at that stage of knowledge which enables men to distinguish between things material and physical on the one side, and things moral and spiritual on the other; and to assign each to its own realm. To do this readily and habitually implies an advance in knowledge which has not yet been reached by the mass of any people in the world. Just as wit is, mainly, the perception of resemblances, so is knowledge the perception of differences; and the differences, which separate the matters we are now speaking of from each other, and which are of their very essence, the peasant of the Valais has not yet been brought to apprehend. He is still in that stage of the perception, or rather of the non-perception, of the differences of these things, which admits of his supposing that, if he drink water from a fountain from which he is told the Saviour drank, he will be thereby spiritually benefited; and that a carved piece of wood, dressed in tinsel, that can neither hear nor see, as was argued of old, but might help him to make a fire to warm himself, or to cook his dinner, is able to intercede with God on his behalf. Having, then, been taught that there is at Einsiedln such a fountain—it stands in front of the monastery, and has fourteen jets—he goes to Einsiedln, and drinks from each of the fourteen jets; to make sure that he has stood on the right spot, and drank from the right jet: though probably all the jets have been replaced many times since the date of the legend; if it have a date. And, having also been taught that there is there such a figure, he goes on a pilgrimage to it, and prostrates himself before it.

As to the poor peasant pilgrim himself: if the wish of his heart is to become a better man, morally and spiritually, then all right-minded people will regard him with sympathy and respect, notwithstanding his inability to distinguish between things physical and material on the one side and things moral and spiritual on the other. But if the wish of his heart be to purchase, by the means he has been taught to resort to, for the present certain earthly, and for the future certain heavenly advantages, then our sympathy and respect for him will be somewhat diminished. Ammer’s common-sense observation on the pilgrims we saw was in the direction of the mark: ‘If they really wish to become better men,’—of course he meant morally—‘they should try what can be done in that way by honest dealing, industry, and speaking the truth.’

A word or two about the colour of the image of Our Lady of Einsiedln. Was the Virgin black? If not, why is this image black? As no reason is given, except the authority of the Church, which has received it as a true representation, vouched to be true by the miracles it has worked, and is still working, we are left to what light we ourselves may possess for the elucidation of the difficulty. The blackness is intentional, because it is superimposed on the material, and is repeated in every reproduction of the image. Now we are all aware that blackness of complexion, one of the characteristics of the negroid races, results from the presence in the cuticle of the granules of a kind of pigment, which are not found in the cuticle of the European, and which could not have been present, except to a very inconsiderable degree, in that of a Jewess, especially in one of the house and lineage of David. In the days, however, of Charlemagne, when Ste. Hildegarde of Zurich gave the original black image to the anchorite of the House of Hohenzollern, who retired with it to the spot where Einsiedln now stands, to tend and to serve it, matters of this kind were not thought about; such distinctions were not understood: nor are they at this day understood, or thought about, by the peasants of the Valais; though probably a day will come when it will be otherwise even with them. We, however, cannot help noticing them, and adverting to them, when this image is before us.

The Virgin is here represented as by her complexion of the negroid race. In multitudes of other images, the genuineness and authenticity of which is vouched for by the same authority, she is represented by the same token, that of complexion, as a Caucasian. A Jewess of the house and lineage of David might, possibly, have been as fair as a Caucasian: so that may pass. But she could not have been as swart as the negroid race. That would have been impossible. But the greater impossibility—supposing impossibility to admit of degrees—is that which this authority vouches for, that she was both as fair as a Caucasian and as swart as a negro. Under which colour, then? Infallible authority. Speak, or die. It is not possible to ride off on the assertion that this is a matter of no consequence at all. If the peasant of the Valais is to prostrate himself before this image, let it at all events have some verisimilitude. It is, however, true that there are some questions of a graver character, which have to be asked, and for which each will have, himself, to find an answer. If authority betrays ignorance in this particular of colour, what guarantee have we that its ignorance stops here? If it be mistaken in this, how can we be sure that it does not make mistakes in other particulars; for instance, in having any image at all of the Virgin, here, or elsewhere; and in addressing prayer to her as a mediator or intercessor, for we have no authority for putting these words into a feminine form? If, in the matter of colour, the authority we had previously been referring to says that black is white; and that white is black; and that there is no difference between them; why may it not rule, in a similar fashion, in other matters? If it is ignorant, mistaken, and contradictory in that which is least, supposing it to affirm that these points are of that category, we have another authority—this time an authority we all defer to—for believing that it may be ignorant, mistaken, and contradictory in that which is greater. If the abbot and his sixty brethren—to say nothing about the infallible head of the Church—are not themselves at all ignorant, or mistaken, in this matter of the black-faced, and black-handed image, their position is not thereby at all improved. From whatever side, then, we look at it, there is about it something ugly.

The world has lately been startled at the manner in which the Church of Rome, after centuries of indifference to pilgrimages, has, all of a sudden, woke up to a sense of their advantages and necessity. They are now being preached up everywhere; but most loudly in France, Italy, and Romanist Germany. Why particularly just now? Why was not this done equally one, or two, hundred years ago? And why, just at this moment, in these countries? Everything has a cause. There was a reason why they were not preached up one, or two, centuries ago; and there is a reason for their being preached up now. And it requires no great amount of sagacity to make out the reason in each case. They are preached up now, because pilgrimages are supposed to be a very good device for stirring up the fanaticism of the ignorant; and it is hoped that, when fanaticism has been stirred up, it may be directed against the Governments of Italy, Germany, and France. Voila tout. They are not preached up because they may be profitable to the saving of souls: for, if that were the reason, they ought to have been preached up as much a hundred years ago as to-day. They are preached up now, because it is believed that the spirit they engender may be turned to account in the game the Church of Rome is now playing. Its platform, just at present, is to exasperate the ignorant classes, everywhere, against government. Hence its denunciations of Cæsarism, of which nothing was heard as long as Napoleon III. was acting in conformity to the dictation of the priests. Pilgrimages are a plank of this platform.

Those, who come to this conclusion, will go on to ask, whether that Church is likely to win by these means? We may deem the means both dishonest and insufficient: still it would be unwise for that reason, or for any other, to think lightly of our opponents. Your harpoon may be fixed securely in a whale’s vitals; still, if you do not take care what you are about, he may foul your boat with his head, or lash it with his tail, and throw all your hands into the water, and be the death of some of them. He must die: but if you do not keep a good look-out, he will get you into trouble before he dies.

Consider the situation: and you will see that you can afford to wait, and to be calm. Everything in the world that is great, and growing, is on your side: east, north, and west. In the eyes of the great empire of Russia, that will soon number 100,000,000 of subjects, the Church of Rome is regarded, and historically this is not a mistake, as merely an unorthodox and schismatic communion. Germany, the great intellectual and military power of the day, has just crumpled up the political bulwark of the Church of Rome, and is now confronting the machinations of that Church itself; which, by the way, had had no small share in the creation of the animosity that brought its political bulwark to rush upon destruction. Next comes England, the busiest, the wealthiest, and the most prolific of all people, whose empire is greater than that of Rome was of old; and to whom it has been given, as the mother of nations, to occupy the wide waste places of the earth. And then in the New World we have already nearly 50,000,000 of English-speaking people, and these every five-and-twenty years double their numbers. Russia, then, and Germany, and England, and the United States must all be put into the scale which weighs the opponents of Rome. And what is to be put into the scale in which Rome weighs her resources? Chiefly Italy, France, and Spain—the Latin race. And how do they stand affected to the Church of Rome? And what are they doing for her? They know her best. But the truth is that they know her too well to like her, to trust her, to believe in her, or to do anything for her. All, of late years, they have done, that has any bearing on her interests, is against her. And how does she meet all this? By the pronunciamento of Infallibility. And what does that mean? It means, looking back, that all the mistakes, and all the crimes of the past are to be maintained; and just now it means the syllabus, and pilgrimages. We can, then, afford to be calm: but we must take care not to be struck by the flap of the tail of the distracted and dying monster.

It is hard, upon this subject, to find anything to say to those who are incapable of understanding that force of mind is rightfully, and, in the long run, practically the greatest force among men; that force of mind is compounded of moral and of intellectual elements; and that neither individuals, nor, and still less, nations who submit alike understanding and conscience to the dictation of Roman Infallibility, which has ever acted with a view to its own supposed interests, can be morally and intellectually strong. Russia, Germany, England, and the United States are not in subjection to this thraldom; and that is a reason, perhaps the chief reason, of their vigour. France is in the unhappy condition of either submitting to it, or of becoming irreligious. At present, therefore, it would almost seem that she can only be strong in proportion as she becomes irreligious. It is the Church of Rome that has brought her into this dilemma. Irreligion, though stronger than thraldom, is weaker than moral and intellectual power animated by religion.

But to go back to our pilgrimages: that to Paray-le-Monial, we have heard so much of lately, has some bearing on the pilgrimage to Einsiedln. There are multitudes of old familiar places of pilgrimage in Italy, France, and Spain. If pilgrimages are to be made, why not to one of them? The virtue of pilgrimages to them has, in other times, been loudly proclaimed. Why then are they, now, to be set aside, and ignored? And this in favour of a new place? Simply, because the world, including the Romanist world, has advanced. If, therefore, in the face of a world that has advanced, and that discusses everything, pilgrimages are to be preached up, something that has the appearance of being more religious, more reasonable, more spiritual, more Christian than the old objects of pilgrimage must be presented in their stead. We can hardly picture to ourselves even the intrepid Archbishop of Westminster preaching up pilgrimages to the black-faced image of Einsiedln. The commonplace visions of the feazy imagination of the nun of Paray-le-Monial, to some extent, met the difficulty. Here was something that might, in a sense, be preached in Paris and in London. True those visions could not bear examination; but few people are disposed, or, should they be, are able to examine such matters thoroughly. And true, also, that what was selected from those visions, to be presented to the Romanist world as the new object of pilgrimages, involves many assumptions: for instance, it assumes that a conception, which is purely spiritual, has a physical, earthly, material form and substance; and then, furthermore, that the heart is the seat and organ of the affections, and that the brain is not. This may, or it may not, be both good physiology, and good psychology: but, as yet, it requires proof. In the meantime it may be suggested that the heart has evidently another duty to perform, which in itself would go some way towards disproving the supposition which supplied the form of the poor nun’s hallucinations. And with respect to the lower animals, there is nothing to lead us to believe that the heart is the seat and organ of what affections they possess. The assumption, however, of these points would, for the present, be less damaging than that of those involved in the old objects of pilgrimage.

But in forming our opinions on matters of this kind, we must consider not only our own position, and must regard the points in debate not only from our own point of view, but must also endeavour to understand the position, and the point of view, of the Romanist. Pilgrimages must now be preached up, because the Church of Rome supposes that it wants Crusades. It would be impossible to preach up pilgrimages to the black-faced image of Einsiedln. The object now presented to the devout must be something that admits of open advocacy in the face of the world. Everything must be done now, more or less, in the light of day. The visions of the poor nun of Paray-le-Monial supplied, passably, what was required. It would, too, be in these times very desirable that some new object of this kind should be made, if possible, to supersede the old objects: their day was gone by.

We must also, in endeavouring to understand the policy of the Church of Rome, look at things from the point of view of an Infallible Church. Its Infallibility obliges it to accept, and maintain for ever, everything it ever at any time accepted, or maintained. It cannot disclaim the practice, or the principle, of the Inquisition; nor can it acknowledge that the black-faced image was a mistake. It has bound itself, irrevocably, to the maintenance of everything it ever taught or did. Its assumption of Infallibility obliges it to hold that everything it has taught, and is teaching, rests upon precisely the same ground and authority; that all must stand, or that all must fall, together; and that all must stand, or that all must fall, together with its system: the black-faced image, and the plenary remission, of Einsiedln, belief in the being of God, and in the infallibility of the Pope of Rome, truth of every kind, and the practice of every virtue. Arrogance, disregard for, and distrust of truth, worldliness, unbelief, cowardice can go no further. In this statement they all together culminate in one climax.

Morality and religion, however, do not depend for their being on the Church of Rome. They existed before it, and will exist after it, and notwithstanding it. Even its immorality and irreligion will not, we may be sure, permanently be able to injure morality and religion, even in the Romanist world. France, Italy, and Spain will recover. Morality and religion are eternal; for morality, as we now know by an induction from all kindreds of men, through all ages, in every form and stage of barbarism, and in every form and stage of civilization, is the order of the family, and of society: the very word itself indicates this. And religion is morality, practised not merely with reference to the requirements of the family, and of society, but also with reference to what in these, and in all other, domains of morality is required of us by our conceptions of God, and of a future life. The effect of these conceptions on morality is that they enlarge, elevate, and purify it; and give additional motives for its practice. Morality is eternal, because it is inherent in, and inseparable from domestic, social, political, and individual life. And religion, the principle of the spiritual life, which, of course, is still human life in this world, is the same morality, only regulated, so far as present circumstances admit, by a reference to the unseen world. All this has been obscured; and morality and religion have been corrupted and perverted, by the aims and claims, the policy and the developments, of the Church of Rome. Knock away those aims and claims, that policy and those developments, and then the Romanist world will have a chance of seeing morality and religion in their true forms; and will also see—which the teaching of the Church of Rome has done, and is doing, a great deal to prevent it from seeing—that they are the salt, and the light of life; which have been, for they inhere in the nature of human things, from everlasting, and, for the same reason, must continue to everlasting.

Once more: morality is the right ordering of the life of the individual, and of the family, and of society, and of the state; internally, with a view to his, or its own well-being; and externally, with a view to the well-being of all the rest. And it is not looking too far afield to add what even the old heathen world saw, that it is the right ordering of each with a view to the well-being of mankind, generally; this makes its empire universal, for it advances its dominion to the utmost limits of international law. All its forms are both relative, and related. It is the same ideas and principles applied to different natural units from the individual up to mankind. Religion is the ordering of these forms of morality, when weighed in the balance of the sanctuary. Our quarrel with Rome is that it weighs them all in the balance of ecclesiastical domination. It shapes them all in accordance with the requirements of this low, narrow, class interest; and in every Catholic country these have, hitherto, been found inconsistent with the requirements of the state, and of the home, and of the individual. The perversion of that which is best is, proverbially, the worst thing of all; and the perversions of the Church of Rome have ever been a demonstration of the truth of the proverb. From these perversions, for it is built up with them, and they are of its essence, it can never, except accidentally, deviate. If it were to begin to act upon the principle of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and this for all, it would cease to be the Church of Rome. It lowers to the level of its own worldly interests, for everything must be subordinated to them, the life of the individual, of the family, of society, and of the state; in three words, truth, virtue, and religion: that is to say, all that is best among men, all their dearest interests, all that makes life desirable, and even tolerable. This is the interpretation of every manifesto issued from Rome. We honour the devotion to their Church of the poor peasants of the Valais, and of all others who honestly, and in simplicity of mind, believe in it; be they individuals, or be they nations. But, in respect of that which is best, and highest, and truest, there is a wide difference—wide as the poles apart—between what it ought to be, to which these good people know their fealty to be due, and that which is only its corruption and perversion: again, the cause of its corruption and perversion being that those, who lord it over the Church of Rome have, somehow or other, been brought to seek first not that which is truest, and highest, and best, but ecclesiastical domination, and to that to subordinate everything. And hence it is that it has come about, that when men ask for bread the lords of that Church can offer only something very like a stone; when for light, only something very like darkness; when for the highest life, only a low form of life; when for truth, only the infallibility of Mastai Ferretti.

Few things can be more laughable than the threats of social and political cataclysms, the charges of falsehood, unbelief, and other theological abuse, the misrepresentations of facts, of motives, and of history, which are ever on the tongue of the head of the Romanist Church, to be echoed by his subordinate array of Archbishops and Bishops, and their mediæval-minded proselytes, always accompanied, in the name of peace and religion, with earnest deprecations of every kind of controversy, and even of so much as a word in reply: for if a man smite you on the right cheek, ought you not to turn to him the other also? Or if he take away your coat, ought you not to let him have your cloak also? At all events, one profession, and that a legitimate one, would find its occupation gone, and another, but this an illegitimate one, would find its occupation far smoother and more profitable than would be for the general good, were society to allow any such method of proceeding in the management of its worldly affairs, and in the protection of its worldly goods: though, of course, it may be quite different with respect to the higher matters of truth, morality, and religion. The proposal amounts simply to this: ‘Just allow us to make whatever accusations, and whatever claims, may suit our purpose. However false and injurious the accusations, and however groundless and injurious the claims, pray do not say a word in reply. Only be silent, and allow judgment to go against you by default. Nothing can be easier and more reasonable. All will then be well. Should you act otherwise, the whole blame, it is clear, will rest with you.’

CHAPTER X.

THE LAKE OF ZURICH—RAPPERSWYL—GLARUS—THE LINTHTHAL—THE PANTENBRÜCKE.

Sharp-pressing Need, that spurs

The poor man’s wits, and Work that robs from sleep

And pleasure their due hours, outbraves and beats

Hard Nature’s oppositions.—Adapted from Virgil.

August 18.—At mid-day left the mediævalism of Einsiedln to take the rail at Rapperswyl for manufacturing Glarus. Were hardly out of the town when we came upon railway cuttings and viaducts in construction. The iron horse, then, will soon be panting and snorting in, and hurrying into and out of, this great and famous resort of peasant pilgrims. It is not long before you are looking down on the lake of Zurich, and its pleasant, well-peopled shores. At Einsiedln all was damp grass, generally poor enough, with very little wood, and very little variety of outline, and no variety of culture—a dreary, monotonous, saddening scene. But now everything is changed completely. Before us are land and water, mountains and plains, variety of outline, variety of culture, variety of objects, variety of life. You are among orchards and meadows, cornfields and vineyards. You look down over them to the blue lake. Beyond the lake, on its further side, reaching far right and left, is a broad expanse of undulating ground. In this expanse, every here and there, a house is showing, very white and cheery, among the dark green trees and the light green grass—the houses of well-to-do people. You think they have been built, most of them, by professional men, or owners of factories, or shops, in Zurich, Rapperswyl, or some neighbouring town. They are rewards of patient industry, and of well-directed intelligence. All nature is basking in, and absorbing, and being quickened by, the warm sunshine. Grass is growing, grapes are colouring, fruit is ripening, corn maturing. Your mind is stirred. It is full of pictures, and each picture is full of pleasant meanings. But all the meanings of all the pictures, in their simplest expressions, come to this, that, in the charming scene you have before you, there are many indications of much earthly happiness, issuing from the exercise of the earthly virtues of industry, honesty, and frugality; and from the practice of allowing to others what you would wish should be allowed to yourself.

And so you reach the margin of the lake opposite Rapperswyl. Here is a long spit of land projecting into the lake. You drive to the extremity of this, and cross to Rapperswyl by a wooden bridge, three quarters of a mile in length. I do not know whether there is width enough for two carriages to cross each other, but I thought that there was not. It has no side rails to prevent your fancying that you may fall into the water. The planks of the roadway are not fastened; but as they are thick, and set close together, they cannot dance out of their places.

At Rapperswyl took the rail. One does not wish to be much on the rail in Switzerland; and there is not much of it, as yet, in the parts that are worth going to see. But an occasional change in one’s mode of locomotion is pleasant; and so is it at times to do a day’s work in an hour. Pleasant, too, is it, or you fancy it so, as you sit at ease, to have the mountains passing before you in a moving panorama. To be sure, you cannot act upon the inspiration of the moment, which you hold to be one of the merits of walking; but, then, you make answer to yourself that this does not matter, where one is not particularly desirous of making leisurely inspections. This, however, was not precisely the case to-day, for at Wesen, where from the railway carriage you command a view down the lake of Wallenstadt, and see that the mountains enclosing it are very precipitous, and have a curiously brindled appearance from the colour of their strata, and the fashion in which they are streaked with dark woods; and when you hear of interesting communities with large flocks and herds on their summits; you do wish to stop for a little leisurely inspection. And this wish is real, for it gives rise to a sensation in your feet as if they wanted to be climbing, just as your flesh creeps when your mind is scared in looking over a precipice. But you have in your pocket a ticket for Glarus, and your plans were settled to be there this evening; and so you do not stop for the Wallensee, but go on to Glarus. If there was any loss in this, the moral is not that the railway was bad, but that minute plans, and unchangeable plans, are bad; as must be everything, whether in travelling or in anything else, which curtails advantages, and deprives one of a pleasure.

As soon as your back is turned on the Wallensee, and your face set southward for Glarus, you find that the railway is running in a narrow valley, parallel to and below the embankment of the Linth. Unmistakable factories now begin to appear on the scene: large rectangular buildings, of many storeys; all white, for they are built of undressed stone, which is then plastered smooth, and whitewashed; which whitewash there is no smoke here to tarnish, although you will occasionally see the familiar tall chimney-stalk; for some of these Glarus factories use steam as an auxiliary power. These chimney-stalks, with no accessible coal nearer than the mines of Belgium and of the west bank of the Rhine, invite you to think of the moral causes of national and of individual prosperity. The factories become more numerous. The valley narrows. The mountains increase in steepness and in height. The line terminates in a mountain cul de sac; and here is the busy-thriving little town of Glarus, the nucleus of a hive of human industry.

From the station to the Glärner Hof is but a few steps. There are in this manufacturing canton some peculiarities in the administration of the Almends, brought about in the Commune of Glarus by the necessity it was under of raising funds for rebuilding the town, after the great fire, which destroyed it in the year 1861; and still more, both here and elsewhere in the canton, from the large increase of the operative population: and it was for the purpose of enquiring into these peculiarities that I had come to Glarus. I had not far to go for the commencement of the enquiry. In the centre of the town is a large open space of ground, of a rudely triangular shape: it is an acute-angled triangle, with a base of 150 yards, or so. This is on the side of the road opposite to the Glärner Hof. The apex of the triangle is about 300 yards, or more, off. This is one of the Almends of Glarus. Ammer paced for me some of the allotments. These, we found, contained, each, as many klafters as would give to each allottee about the tenth of an acre. Hardly any space is lost for paths, which are reduced to a minimum both of fewness and of width. But a practised eye makes out at a glance the extent of each allotment; and infers from its condition, and the way in which it is cropped, something of the character of its occupant. Some were tidy; some were untidy. The latter preponderated. This proportion would have been reversed, if the allotments, instead of being temporarily occupied, had been the private property of their cultivators. Some of the occupiers were rigidly practical. This might, in some cases, mean that they were indisposed to give themselves the trouble of a little thought and arrangement. These devoted their whole space to potatoes. Others, who regarded the pot au feu with more of science—though, however, science is the ground of the highest form of practice—or, at all events, with more regard for gastronomy—but gastronomy is a science—assigned little spaces to several kinds of herbs and vegetables; onions, cabbages, haricots, beet, turnips, &c. The general look of the thing was not quite the same as in our labourers’ allotments. They run very much on wheat. There was no wheat here. What was most obtruded on the eye, from its height, were the patches of sticked haricots. These our people, not from a difference of climate, but from an ignorance of cookery, know nothing about. Generally there was a far greater variety of cultivation on the land than with us. This indicated a more savant cultivation of the stomach, or, at least, of the palate.

This Almend, in the middle of the town, is interesting, not so much for the sake of such observations as I have just been making, as from its being possible to regard it as an element in the lives of operatives, who are successfully competing, under some disadvantages, with the operatives of Mulhouse, Lille, Manchester, and Lowel. I will not say that, in these days of railways, and of education, which we may hope is becoming general, nothing of the kind is possible in the case of the operatives of Manchester; but will here content myself with the remark, that its effect must be good on these Glarus operatives. They work eleven hours a day, including one for meals; therefore this garden work is not carried on at the expense of their factory work. They are burgers of the commune, and settle for themselves their hours of work, in their yearly assemblies. As, then, the garden work is carried on, with no detriment to the factory work, we may, without having any per contra deductions to make, attempt to estimate its advantages. It is a healthy, pleasing, natural, and profitable employment of their spare time. It is a save-all of their odds and ends of time, in which their wives and children can take a part. It is a mental, as well as a bodily, diversion from the uninteresting and monotonous work of the factory. It varies in-door with out-door work, and so lightens it. It prevents their being cut off from the teachings of Nature. Nature teaches those who solicit her bounty in many ways. They discover on what conditions she rewards those who solicit that bounty with knowledge and importunity. They are brought to conform their practice and their feelings to those conditions; to take into consideration the chances that attend their best directed efforts; and to bear the little disappointments, as well as to rejoice over the little successes, incidental to the cultivation of the soil. It is a corrective, to some extent, of some of the bad teaching, and bad effects, incidental to life in a factory.

The occupation of these tenths of an acre is rent-free, because the land is the common property of the burgers of Glarus, that is to say of the operatives themselves; and this is the way in which they decide on using it. But the produce of this small amount of land cannot be so considerable as to enable them to live on wages lower than would be possible without it. We must not, therefore, look to it as in any degree, directly, affecting wages, and so the price of the muslins of Glarus. Besides, the wages of these garden-cultivating operatives of Glarus are the same as the wages of their fellow-operatives, who, not being descendants of old burgers, but immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, have, of course, no share whatever in the Almends, or common lands. The wages of factory hands range for men from two and a half to five francs a day, and for women from one franc. This, of course, is less than with us. And as to their other advantage, the water power, here chiefly used, it is not so cheap as it might appear, for it has, to some extent, to be supplemented with steam-power, the coal for which is brought from a great distance. While on the other side is to be set the expense of bringing the raw cotton from Havre, Antwerp, or Bremen, and of transporting again, by land carriage, down to the coast, the manufactured goods destined for beyond sea markets in the Levant, and elsewhere. The care I saw the hands bestowing upon what they were engaged on, led me to think that the success of the Glarus manufacturers might in part be attributed to the economical value of moral causes. If so, it might be profitable to enquire how far these moral causes result from these operatives being burgers, and descended from an immemorial line of burgers, that is to say from their having been brought up under the influence of the strongest of all self-acting inducements to self-respect; and also, though in a minor degree, from the habits of thought, as well as of life, the cultivation of their little bits of land engenders.

It was a bright quiet afternoon, as we walked about the town, taking note of how clean and well-constructed it was; and what numbers of houses of well-to-do people, what a goodly town hall, what a fine school, built for 700 scholars, what well-furnished shops it had, for a population of 5,000. All this had been done by the public spirit, intelligence, and industry of the little community. Had it remained the capital of a canton, which, in such a situation, was only agricultural and pastoral, it would have been no more than an untidy and insignificant village. The intelligence of its manufacturers, who have had to turn very slender advantages to what account they could, and who have had to overcome many disadvantages, and who are entertaining relations with so many distant parts of the world, must, of course, in a still greater degree be in advance of what would be the mental condition of the place, if agriculture had remained its only employment. It is manufactures that have rebuilt with stone, in a substantial, even imposing, and well-ordered form, the Glarus of wood that was destroyed by the fire of 1861. This improvement of its exterior indicates, for it is the result of it, a corresponding improvement of the inner Glarus of to-day—of the modern manufacturing and commercial city—to that of the old agricultural and pastoral Glarus.

While we were walking over the town, and noting these matters, the atmosphere was in that condition in which a cloud-banner is formed at the summit of lofty mountains. It appears to be set up upon, and to be flying over, their topmost peaks. Both the Glarnish and the Schilt, which look down on this little hive of industry, had, on this afternoon, their cloud-banners flying in the otherwise clear atmosphere. All was quiet when, towards evening, we returned to our hotel; and so it was when we retired to bed. But, soon after midnight, we were roused from sleep by a violent banging of the outer window-shutters, which we heard going on not only in the hotel, but also in the neighbouring houses, and by the sound from the street of hurrying feet, and by the shouting, I suppose, of the night-watchmen. The Föhn, a violent wind, engendered by local causes, that at times sweeps through the valley of the Linth, was rushing by. The laws of Glarus enact, that, when it blows, every fire in the place, for whatever purpose used, is to be extinguished. I rose, and made fast the outer jealousy shutters of the room I was occupying. In the morning all was quiet again. The wind, however, had been succeeded by, or had brought with it, and left behind it, heavy rain, which continued all that day, and till the morning of the following day, for about thirty-six hours.

I mention these matters, because the reader of the narrative of the daily work of an excursion in Switzerland will not be able to feel, at all, as one of the travelling party, or to form any useful conception of what he must expect, when, in propriâ personâ, he sets out on such an excursion, if, throughout the narrative, the weather does not form one thread of the yarn. It always has to be consulted, and conformed to. It is the weather that makes the doing of what you have to do pleasant, and even possible; or, else, unpleasant, and even impossible.

August 19.—As it was a persistently wet day, there was nothing we could do outside of the hotel, except visiting some of the factories I have already referred to. It happened to be a Glarus festival, and so those in the town proper were closed. We had, therefore, to go for what we wanted to see to Ennenda, a manufacturing suburb of Glarus, though quite a distinct commune, on the other side of the Linth. Within the hotel there were people enough to talk to, and plenty of English papers to put one abreast of what was going on at home. At Glarus, on the east of Switzerland, you have the previous day’s ‘Times’ at 4 P.M. It is despatched from London by the morning train; reaches Paris in time to be forwarded to Bâle, or Neuchâtel, that night; and the next day is brought on to Glarus. During the three days we were here, I was surprised each afternoon at having in this way the London papers of the day before. Here, in the centre of Europe, I was only one day, and in extenso, behind London. This recalled the sensation of carrying the world about with me, which, some years ago, I had become familiar with at New Orleans. There, every morning, I used to find on my breakfast-table, by the side of the hot rolls, telegraphic intelligence, from all parts of Europe, for the previous day. It seemed to take no more time to collect this intelligence from all parts of Europe, to send it, beneath the Atlantic, to New York, and to forward it to New Orleans, and to set it up in type, than to make the rolls. We look upon the rolls without an emotion of surprise, and upon the telegraphic intelligence as a marvel. But the day was, before the invention of wheat, when the roll would have appeared as unintelligible, or, at all events, as impossible, as the telegraphic intelligence. The telegraphic intelligence will some day stand in the same relation to something not yet dreamt of, in which it is now, itself, standing to the roll.

August 20.—Having a letter to the President of Glarus—I take President to be new style, and that, formerly, the title of the chief magistrate of Glarus was Landamman—I had called at his door yesterday, and found that he was out of town, but would return at night, and be visible early to-day. At 8.30, therefore, this morning I again presented myself at his door; and was admitted. I knew that at this time a Swiss man of business—everyone here is, of course, a man of business—would not be found still loitering over his breakfast. An English barrister, whose acquaintance I had been so fortunate as to make at the Glärner Hof, and who was familiar with German, had been so good as to offer to accompany me. As the chief object of my visit was to hear, from another Swiss authority, another account of what is meant in these cantons by the word Corporation, I was glad of the assistance of one whose legal training and acumen would keep the enquiry from becoming unprofitably discursive; and who would be quick in detecting inconsistencies and insufficiencies in the replies that might be given to my questions. We found the President engaged with his clerk, or secretary. He, however, immediately dismissed him with his budget of papers, and with the utmost goodnature assured us that he was at our disposal.