Chapter XVII Natural Beauties and Attractions
“A wilderness of sweets: for nature here
Wanton’d as in her prime, and play’d at will,
Her virgin fancies pouring forth more sweet,
While above rule of art, enormous bliss.”
No spot in Europe can compare with Switzerland in loveliness and rural charms; in variety, boldness, and sublimity of scenery; in tonic, steel-strong air, a fine intoxicant of mental and physical joy and power. It is a land of valleys, exquisite in their loveliness, enriched by numberless streams, lakes, mountains, peak, and pass:
“Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise.”
Nowhere else, in one quarter of the globe, has nature laid her hand on the face of the earth with the same majesty; no other division of it presents the same contrasts in a panorama so astonishing; no other exhibits so surprising a diversity of landscapes, caverns and waterfalls, fields of ice and cascades, green and broad mountain-sides, pastoral abodes and smiling vales, winding and rocky paths, aerial bridges and infernal glens, eternal snows and luxuriant pastures, forests of dark larches and congress of hoary mountains, austere loveliness and lofty nobleness:
“Ever charming, ever new,
When will the landscape tire the view?
The mountain’s fall, the river’s flow,
The wooded valleys, warm and low;
The windy summits wild and high,
Roughly rushing on the sky;
Town and village, tower and farm,
Each give to each a double charm.”
If the Neapolitan be moved to call the environments of his capital “un pezzo del cielo caduto in terra” (“a bit of heaven fallen upon the earth”), the Swiss may more modestly claim that they have that piece of the Garden of Eden only which the angels of the legend lost on their way. It is impossible to convey a vivid, and at the same time an accurate, impression of grand scenery by the use of words. Written accounts, when they come near their climax, fall as much below the intention as words are less substantial than things.
The mountains come first in the glory and charm of Switzerland’s natural beauties and attractions. They encompass us on every hand; fill our eyes when we are walking and haunt our dreams during sleep,—so beautiful, so majestic, and yet so lovely. Grandeur of bulk and mass is conjoined with splendor and fulness of detail; form and shape are crowned with soaring peak and matchless line; and the summits mingle with that sky which seems to be the only fitting background for the eternal hills. On the face of a topographical map Switzerland appears to consist chiefly of mountains lying near together, or piled one upon another, as if the story of the Titans was realized, and with narrow valleys between them. Of the western, central, and eastern Alps, constituting the whole Alpine system, a part of the first, the whole of the second, and none of the third division belong to Switzerland. The entire giant fabric, rising concentrically and almost abruptly from the surrounding plains, offers its grandest development in Switzerland and Savoy. There are points of view in Switzerland whence the array of Alpine peaks, semicircular in form, presented at once to the eye, extends for more than one hundred and twenty miles, and comprises from two hundred to three hundred distinct summits, capped with snow or bristling with bare rocks. The Swiss Alps are divided into several sections,—the Pennine Alps, the Helvetian Alps, the Rhetian Alps, and the Bernese Alps; all radiate from a central group, the St. Gothard being the key of the entire system, and all converge upon it. The Pennine are the loftiest, including Mont Blanc,—
“the monarch of mountains:
They crown’d him long ago,
On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,
With a diadem of snow.”
It is true that Mont Blanc is in Upper Savoy, just across the Swiss frontier, but it is a part of the same wonderful formation, and few people think of it without passing it incontinently to the credit of Switzerland.
Then come the Finsteraarhorn and Monte Rosa, being, next after Mont Blanc, the two highest mountains in Europe. The most important ranges are the Alps, which run along the Italian frontier, the Bernese Oberland, and the Juras, which separate Switzerland on the west from France. Of the Bernese Alps the Finsteraarhorn, Jungfrau, Eiger, and Schreckhorn are the most conspicuous. As to height, the Alps are divided into the High Alps, rising from eight thousand to fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, and covered with perpetual snow and ice; the Middle Alps, beginning at about five thousand five hundred feet above the sea and rising to the point of perpetual congelation; and the Low Alps, commencing with an elevation of about two thousand feet. The actual height of the Swiss mountain fluctuates as much as twenty-five feet, owing to the varying thickness of the stratum of snow that covers the summit. Some present pure white peaks; some are black and riven under the frown of imperious cumuli; some have cornices, bosses, and amphitheatres; others have blue rifts, snow precipices, and glaciers issuing from their hollows,—“a chaos of metamorphic confusion, paradoxical conglomerates, strata twisted, pitched vertically or upside-down, levels changed by upheavals or depression.”
“As Atlas fix’d, each hoary pile appears
The gather’d winter of a thousand years.”
A mountain guide will enumerate for you the names of the celebrated summits, as a cicerone points out the most illustrious figures in a museum of sculpture. Each of these mountains has its biography,—its history,—which the guide will be sure to relate. One takes life, it is a sanguinary homicidal Alp; another, on the contrary, is humane, hospitable, it offers safe sheltering-places to strayed travellers. The Matterhorn is a great storm-breeder.93 The Schreckhorn is a peak of terror, the grimmest fiend of the Oberland; the Finsteraarhorn is a black peak of the Aar; Diablerets (Devil’s Strokes) is a name given to another in consequence of its terrible landslips, which have caused a popular superstition that, like Avernus, it is the portal of hell, and haunted by evil spirits. Differing in form, altitude, and color, each of them has its physiognomy and its character, and even “its soul,” as Michelet says.
“Veil’d from eternity, the Jungfrau soars,”
not a single massive pyramid, but a series of crests rising terrace-fashion above each other, with a zone of névés and glaciers. The pure, unsullied snow which always covers this mountain, it is supposed, gave occasion to its name, which signifies “the virgin.” It is a prime favorite with the Swiss,—the great Diana of the Oberland range. There is some spell, some mysterious potency in it. A sight never to be forgotten, is to behold the marble dome of this stately temple of nature, kindling in the fire of the setting sun, or silvering in the light of a full moon, with the gold-fringed clouds playing wantonly about,—
“To bathe the virgin’s marble brow,
Or crown her head with evening gold.”
On the Wengern Mountain, in full view of the Jungfrau, in 1816, Byron composed three of his noblest poems,—“The Prisoner of Chillon,” the third canto of “Childe Harold,” and “Manfred,” in the latter of which he describes the Jungfrau as
“This most steep, fantastic pinnacle,
The fretwork of some earthquake,—where the clouds
Pause to repose themselves in passing by.”
All the Alps have, more or less, naked excrescences, which rise above the crest of the range, and which, in the language of the country, are not inaptly termed “dents,” from some fancied and plausible resemblance to human teeth.
Professor Tyndall, writing of the wondrous scene presented by the Swiss mountains, says: “I asked myself, how was this colossal work performed? Who chiselled these mighty and picturesque masses out of a mere protuberance of the earth? And the answer was at hand. Ever young, ever mighty, with the vigor of a thousand years still within him, the real sculptor was even then climbing up the eastern sky. It was he who raised aloft the waters which cut out the ravines; it was he who planted the glaciers on the mountain slopes, thus giving gravity a plough to open up the valleys; and it is he who, acting through the ages, will finally lay low these mighty mountains, rolling them gradually seaward, sowing the seeds of continents to be, so that the people of another earth may see mould spread and corn wave over the hidden rocks which at this moment bear the weight of the Jungfrau.”
Mountains at once excite and satisfy an ideal in the soul, which holds kin with the divine in nature. They ennoble life by their majesty and fortify it by their stately beauty. The human mind thirsts after immensity and immutability, and duration without bounds; but it needs some tangible object from which to take its flight, something present to lead to futurity, something bounded from whence to rise to the infinite. “Earth has built the great watch-towers of the mountains, and they lift their heads far up into the sky and gaze ever upward and around to see if the judge of the world comes not.”94 Their cloud-capped summits are awful in their mysterious shrouds of darkness, and their sudden thunder crashing amid overhanging precipices is often terrible in its shock. With many their gloomy sublimity, hard, jagged, and torn, produces an uncomfortable feeling: Goethe wrote, “Switzerland with its mountains at first made so great an impression upon me that it disturbed and confused me, only after repeated visits did I feel at my ease among them.” There is something inexpressibly interesting in their society, their age, their duration without change, and their majestic repose; their fixed, frozen, changeless glory. The sun rolls his purple tides of light through the air that surrounds their summits, but his beams wake no seed-time and ripen no harvest. The moon and the stars rise and move, and decline along the horizon, century after century, but the sweet vicissitudes of the season and of time move not the sympathies of these pale, stern peaks, over which broods one eternal winter. Upon them the vivifying and ordering syllables of creation seem never to have passed; a realm of chaos reserved to the primeval empire of the formless and the void; where there is brilliance without warmth, summer without foliage, and days but no duties. Beneath the overwhelming radiance of a world of light, whose reflection makes every valley beneath them rejoice, these giants flaunt their crowns of snow everlastingly in the very face of the sun. They are so sharply defined and distinct that they seem to be within arm’s reach; apparent nearness, yet a sense of untraversable remoteness, like heaven itself, at once the most distant from us and the nearest. Their angle of elevation, seen from a distance, is very small indeed. Faithfully represented in a drawing, the effect would be insignificant; but their aerial perspective amply restores the proportions lost in the mathematical perspective. “Mountains are the beginning and end of all natural scenery,” and there is no Landseer for Alpine pictures. They are too vast and too simple; and the scene, though its objects are so few, is too expanded for the canvas.
The Glaciers of the Alps, frozen streams of ice, are remarkable phenomena of nature, and possess the greatest interest for geologists. The name Glacier is French; the German word is Gletscher, and the Italian Ghiacciaio. Ruskin calls them “silent and solemn causeways, broad enough for the march of an army in a line of battle, and quiet as a street of tombs in a buried city;” Longfellow describes them as “resembling a vast gauntlet, of which the gorge represents the wrist, while the lower glacier, cleft by its fissures into fingers, like ridges, is typified by the hand.” With the exception of the Engadine, where the limits do not begin below ten thousand and seventy feet, in the other parts of Switzerland the limit of the glaciers and of the eternal snow is met with at eight thousand seven hundred and forty to nine thousand one hundred and eighty feet. The average height of the snow-line fluctuates according to north or south aspect, and greater or less exposure to the south wind, but in exceptionally warm summers, the snow completely melts away on summits having an altitude of over eleven thousand feet. The common expression, the “line of perpetual snow,” is misleading; it is only correctly used to indicate the altitude above which the mountains always appear white, because at that height it is merely the surface which at times thus gets partially melted. These masses of ice or glaciers are called streams, because, though imperceptibly, they really move along; they are continually descending towards the valley from the mountain-tops:
“The glacier’s cold and restless mass
Moves onward day by day.”
Their immobility is only apparent, they move and advance without ceasing. Careful investigation has ascertained the rate of motion of a glacier to be as much as two feet in twenty-four hours; but it is a curious fact that the whole stream does not move at the same rate; the centre moves quicker than the sides and drags them after it. Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist, began in 1842 a series of careful observations on the Aar glacier, taking up his abode in a little hut constructed on purpose, and called the “Hôtel des Neuchâtelois.” Men mocked at him when he set up his stakes on the glacier to discover the rate of the invisible motion, but he persisted in his minute, painstaking labors, futile and inconsequential as they seemed to the unscientific mind, till he plucked out from every glacier in Switzerland the heart of its mysterious movement. He held that the differences in speed between different and sundry parts of the same glacier were the results of unequal density and of unequal declivity. Savants differ as to the causes which set the glacier in motion. Schaelzer holds that its expansion arises from thaw; Professor Hugi is of the same opinion, that the glacier, like an enormous sponge filled with aqueous particles, expands and grows larger when it freezes. Of all the theories that of De Saussure is the most generally accepted. He attributes the forward movement of a glacier to gravitation,—that is to say, to the pressure of the superior masses on the inferior. Certain naturalists affirm that the glaciers add to their power by their own cold, and that in time, without the intervention of some new natural phenomenon, they will eventually extend themselves downward into the valleys that lie on the next level beneath, overcoming vegetation and destroying life. There must be a limit somewhere to the increase of the ice, and it is almost certain that these limits have been attained during the centuries that the present physical formation of Switzerland is known to have existed. As a whole, the contest between heat and cold ought to be set down as producing equal effects.
The constant heavy pressure on the glacial ice, and the tension resulting from obstacles in the channel followed by it, cause splits of large masses to occur, and force them so far to separate that there is no chance of regelation. These splits are the crevasses met with in many glaciers, and one of the most dangerous features to climbers, especially when they are concealed by a treacherous coating of snow. The transverse crevasses are so close together and form such a bewildering labyrinth that it requires a good pilot and experienced guide to steer clear of their difficulties. In proportion as the glacier develops, these crevasses or fissures enlarge. Some of them form into deep valleys, abysses, and unfathomable gulfs. If one falls into a crevasse, it is alleged he hears everything that is said above him, but cannot make himself heard. The ice of these fissures has tints of extraordinary fineness and delicacy; it is of a pale and tender blue, but if you detach a piece to examine it in full light, its beautiful ideal blue color disappears, and you have nothing in your hand but a pale, colorless block. The crevasses, at times all lined with the purest, smoothest snow, open up like great alcoves, hung in clouds of ice with delicate ornaments thrown on them by the wind. They modify and change every spring, when the winter’s accumulation of snow melts under the action of the heat, and the frost of the nights incorporates it with the glacier. The guides, therefore, before conducting parties at the beginning of the season, sound the old crevasses, and study the new features of the glacier, its curves, its bridges of snow suspended in the air, its abysses covered with a frail surface, its fantastic architecture of staircases and terraces of ice. The glacier ice, made of annual beds disposed in vertical bands of white and blue, does not resemble ordinary ice, which is homogeneous throughout; it is granular, traversed by a multitude of small canals, by a net-work of veins in which a bluish water circulates, and which penetrates the whole thickness of the ice. The water that escapes from a glacier is either black, like ink, or green, like absinthe, or white, like milk; it is always troubled, and charged with mud or earth full of fertilizing matter. So, while the glaciers make the higher valleys into a land of desolation and misery, lower down on the slopes that drink life from its flood, it is a garden, an orchard, a rich vine country, smiling hill-sides, shaded with trees and crowned with flowers. While a glacier is a stream of ice, it is not formed of frozen water, but of frozen snow. The snow of the mountain-top is a fine dry powder, which is formed into a granular mass by the action of the sun shining on it in the middle of the day; what is thus partially melted quickly freezes again each evening into globular forms, consequently a glacier is not slipping like ordinary ice. This process has gone on for unknown ages. Geologists think that the glaciers of the present day are “mere pigmies as compared to the giants of the glacial epoch;” and that their action has had much to do with the architecture of the Alps; that the ice exerts a crushing force on every point of its bed which bears its weight, and the glaciers would naturally scoop out and carve the mountains and valleys into the slopes which we now see; and that the plains of Italy and Switzerland are covered with débris of the Alps. These geologists are pretty well agreed that the Lake of Geneva was excavated by a glacier. Whatever may be thought of the erosive theory, there is no doubt that these dreary wastes of ice are of great use in the economy of nature. They are the locked-up reservoirs, the sealed fountains which immediately fertilize the plains of Lombardy, the valley of the Rhone, and of Southern Germany, and from which the vast rivers traversing the great continents of our globe are sustained. The summer heat, which dries up sources of water, first opens out their bountiful supplies. When the rivers of the plain begin to shrink and dwindle within their parched beds, the torrents of the Alps, fed by the melting snow and glaciers, rush down from the mountains and supply the deficiency. Professor Hugi’s hypothesis, that the glacier is alive, is often suggested by the singular noises produced by the forcing of air and water through passages in the body of the glacier. In the eyes of the credulous mountaineers who live in the silence which broods over the sombre cliffs, the glacier is a place of grief and exile, of penance and punishment, of expiation and tears, such a place as described by Dante in his “Inferno,” where
“... various tongues,
Horrible languages, outcries of woe,
Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse,
With hands together smote, that swelled the sounds,
Made a tumult that forever whirls
Round through that air, with solid darkness stained,
Like to the sand that in the whirlwind flies.”
The peasants tell old stories of ice-gods ruling and thundering with strange sounds, and the “lamentations and loud moans” of prisoners in these frozen caves. The legends people the glaciers only with gloomy, unhappy beings, trembling with fear, weighed down by some malediction. Professor Helm has made a careful survey of the Alpine glaciers, and reckons them at eleven hundred and fifty-five, of which Swiss territory includes four hundred and seventy-one. He estimates the total superficial area of these glaciers between three thousand and four thousand square kilometres; the area of the Swiss glaciers is put down as eighteen hundred and thirty-nine square kilometres. They begin in the Canton of Glarus, extend to the Grisons, thence to the Canton of Uri, and finally down to Bern. Of these Swiss glaciers, one hundred and thirty-eight are of the first rank,—that is, over four and three-quarters of a mile long. Eight glaciers unite at the foot of Monte Rosa, seven at the foot of the Matterhorn, and five at the foot of the Finsteraarhorn. The Mer de Glace, which surrounds the Bernina, is more than sixteen leagues in circumference. Its tempestuous waves, with azure reflections like lava, pile themselves in the defiles, precipitate themselves into the gorges, or run by a rapid descent into the depths of the valleys; sometimes they leap up between two points of rocks, dart into space, and remain suspended above the abyss till the day when their frozen sheet is broken up and hurled into its depths. There are few grander sights than the Bernina, with its boldly contoured granitic rocks and its glaciers creeping low down into the valleys. The Canton of Grisons, of which the Engadine forms a part, counts more than one hundred and fifty glaciers. The great ice-fields of the Bernese Oberland consist of one hundred and eight to one hundred and twenty square miles in extent, and are the most extensive in Europe. The boundaries are the Valais, the Grimsel, the valley of the Aar, and the Gemmi, and spread over more than two hundred and thirty thousand acres. The longest glacier is the Gross Aletsch of the Bernese Oberland; it is fifteen miles long, and has a basin forty-nine and eight-tenths square miles, and a maximum breadth of nineteen hundred and sixty-eight yards. The Rhone glacier is admired for its natural beauties, more especially on account of its terminal face, furrowed by huge crevasses. The lowest point to which a Swiss glacier is known to have descended is three thousand two hundred and twenty-five feet, attained by the Lower Grindelwald glacier in 1818. As to the thickness of the glaciers there exist no reliable data. In the series of investigations and measurements made by Professor Agassiz on the Aar glacier, fifty years ago, he excavated to a depth of two hundred and sixty metres (over eight hundred and thirty feet), and did not get to the bottom. He estimated the depth of the Aar glacier, at a point below the junction of the Finsteraarhorn and Lauter-Aar glaciers, at four hundred and sixty metres, or about fifteen hundred and ten feet. In viewing these glaciers no one, however sceptical, however unimaginative, can doubt the honesty of the great fiery Swiss naturalist’s belief in the historical reality of a glacial epoch, that this part of Switzerland is the natural result of the terrific orgy and dynamic force of profound glaciation, and that
“Yon towers of ice
Since the creation’s dawn have known no thaw.”
The upper part of the glacier is known as the Névé or Firn, and it is the lower part alone which is designated among the Swiss as the glacier. The névés are those fields of dazzling snow which extend above the zone of the glaciers, and their incessant transformation produces the glaciers. This snow of the névés does not resemble that lower down; it is harder, colder, and has the appearance of needles of pounded ice or little crystallized stars, and the alternations from frost to thaw give to this snow the brilliance of metal and a consistency approaching that of ice. The name Moraine is given to those piles of stones, pebbles, blocks of rock, débris of all sorts that the glacier brings down with it in its course, and which it gets rid of as soon as possible. “The glacier is always cleansing itself,” and if it expands, it breaks up and disperses its moraine; it pushes it, throwing out and piling on the sides even the largest blocks of stone. If, on the contrary, it contracts, part of this chaos of débris, left in its place, becomes covered by degrees with a carpet of turf. When two glaciers descend by opposite valleys, abutting on the same bed, and meet, their moraines mingle with one another, and are sometimes piled up till they attain a width of almost a thousand feet and a height of about seventy. The Moulins form conduits for the surface-water, to carry it to the under-ground streams flowing beneath the glacier.
Enormous masses of snow accumulate in some angle or on some ledge of the mountains until they either fall by their own weight or are broken off by oscillations of the air, or the warm ground thaws the lower stratum, and then the mass begins to slide, gaining in bulk and speed in its course. This is the terrible avalanche, and dwellings and even entire villages are buried from thirty to fifty feet deep. It sometimes descends with a force which causes it to rebound up the side of the opposite mountain. The avalanche produces a prodigious roar, not a reverberation of sound, but a prolongation of sound more metallic and musical than thunder, and may be heard at a great distance. An avalanche may be set in motion by a very trifling disturbance of the air: the flight of a bird, the cracking of a whip, the conversation of persons going along, sometimes suffices to shake and loosen it from the vertical face of the cliffs to which it is clinging:
“Ye toppling crags of ice,
Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down
In mountainous o’erwhelming.”
The cutting away of trees, at one time a common cause of avalanches, is forbidden by a federal law:
“Altdorf long ago had been
Submerged beneath the avalanches’ weight,
Did not the forest there above the town
Stand like a bulwark to arrest their fall.”
There is a distinction between summer and winter avalanches. The former are solid avalanches formed of old snow that has acquired almost the solidity of ice. The warmth of spring softens it, loosens it from the rocks, and it slides down into the valleys; these are called “melting avalanches,” and they regularly follow certain tracks which are embanked like the course of a river with wood or bundles of branches. The most dreaded and terrible avalanches—those of dry powdery snow—occur only in winter, when sudden squalls and hurricanes of snow throw the whole atmosphere into chaos. They come down in sudden whirlwinds, with the violence of a waterspout, and in a few minutes work great destruction.
The most memorable avalanche in Switzerland occurred in 1806, when one of the strata of Mount Rossberg, composed of limestone and flint pebbles, nearly three miles long, one thousand feet broad, and one hundred feet thick, precipitated from a height of three thousand feet and annihilated the three prosperous villages of Goldau, Busingen, and Lowerz, and killed four hundred persons. Enormous blocks, some of them still covered with trees, shot through the air as if sent from a projectile or tossed about like grains of dust. In 1501 a company of soldiers were swallowed up by an avalanche near the St. Bernard. At Fontana, in the Canton of Ticino, in 1879, the church and town-hall were destroyed and many lives lost. On this occasion, within a space of five minutes, no less than three hundred and fifty thousand cubic metres of earth and rock came down from a height of four thousand three hundred feet. In the same year an avalanche came rushing down the westerly slope of the Jungfrau into Lauterbrunnen valley, a distance of about seven thousand feet. Its peculiar feature was that, not only along its course, but even on the opposite side of the valley, twelve hundred feet away, the atmospheric pressure, which its rapid movement generated, was so great as to level entire forests. In the Rhone valley, in 1720, a single avalanche destroyed one hundred and twenty houses at Ober-Gestalen, killing eighty-eight persons and four hundred head of cattle. The victims were buried in a trench in the churchyard, where an inscription, still existing, records the event in these words: “God! what a grief, eight and eighty in one grave!” In the Grisons, the whole village of Selva was buried, nothing remained visible but the top of the church-steeple, and Val Vergasca was covered for several months by an avalanche one thousand feet in length and fifty in depth. The extraordinary power of the wind, which at times accompanies an avalanche, is well known and dreaded. A case is recorded in which a woman, walking to church, was lifted up into the air and carried to the top of a lofty pine, in which position she remained lodged until discovered and rescued by the returning congregation. The avalanche exhibits a striking picture of ruin which nature inflicts upon her own creations; she buildeth up and taketh down; she lifts the mountains by her subterranean energies, and then blasts them by her lightnings, frosts, thaws, and avalanches:
“As where, by age, or rains, or tempests torn,
A rock from some high precipice is borne;
Trees, herds, and swains involving in the sweep,
The mass flies furious from the aerial steep,
Leaps down the mountain’s side, with many a bound,
In fiery whirls, and smokes along the ground.”95
Every movement that is grand or beautiful in the course of rushing waters seems to be the mission of mountain streams to illustrate. The fierce rivers rush over rocks with such aimless force that the violence of the torrent creates a back sweep of the overdriven, mad waves; here and there in the bed of these rivers are seen blocks of stone, many of them as large as a good-sized house, heaped up most strangely, jammed in by their angles, in equilibrium on a point, or forming perilous bridges over which you may with proper precaution pick your way to the other side. The quarry from which the materials of this bridge came is just above your head, and the miners are still at work,—air, water, frost, weight, and time. Other blocks are only waiting for the last moment of the great lever of nature to take the horrid leap, and bury under some hundred feet of new chaotic ruins the trees and the verdant lawn below. All round is the sound of water, the beat of the waves on the shore, the onward flowing of the river, the rush of the torrent, the splash of the waterfall, or the bubbling of some little stream; everywhere the music of a hurrying stream accompanies you. Every valley has its roar and rush of water and cataracts leaping to join the chorus of torrents below, making one appreciate Wordsworth’s line,—
“The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep.”
There is something which fascinates more in the free life, the young energy, the sparkling transparency, and merry music of the smaller streams. The upper Swiss valleys are sweet with perpetual streamlets, that seem always to have “chosen the steepest places to come down for the sake of the leaps, scattering their handfuls of crystals this way and that, as the wind takes them, with all the grace, but with none of the formalism of fountains, until at last they find their way down to the turf, and lose themselves in that, silently; with quiet depth of clear water furrowing among the grass-blades and looking only like their shadows, but presently emerging again in little startled gushes and laughing hurries, as if they had remembered suddenly that the day was too short for them to get down the hill.” On summer days even the glaciers are furrowed with thousands of threads of water; innumerable little rills, which run and sparkle over its sides like streams of quicksilver, and which disappear suddenly in the moulins, at the bottom of which invisible canals join the extremity of the glacier. At night all these brooklets are silent, and stopped; the cold congeals and imprisons them in a thin coating of ice, which evaporates again the next day. Of these mountain streams our own poet Bryant writes,—
“Thy springs are in the cloud; thy stream
Begins to move and murmur first
Where ice-peaks feed the noonday beam,
Or rain-storms on the glacier burst.”
It is easy to have cascades in Switzerland, with its vast bodies of snow at an elevation which does not preclude melting in summer, and from which the water has to find its way down rocky precipices, sometimes thousands of feet. The most noted of these cascades are the Giessbach and the Staubbach. The first consists of a succession of seven cascades, embowered in foliage, leaping from a height of eleven hundred feet, and finally losing themselves in the waters of the Lake of Brienz; the soft winds swing the spray as light as a mist of the sunrise or the gentle sway of a bridal veil, while the rainbow hues rest like kisses on its silver threads. The Falls of Staubbach, or Fall of Dust, is well named; it is so ethereal, or dust-like, that it appears at times about to sail away like a cloud on the wings of the wind; it apparently creeps down from its lofty rock, a thousand feet on high, and seems to throw itself timidly into the abyss, and to win slowly against the mass of air. This retarded appearance in the fall is caused by its being broken into mist soon after it leaves the shelf over which it is precipitated. In its centre the fall is purely vapor; but the rock advancing somewhat towards the base, it collects again into water as it strikes it and forms a stream at the bottom. It has been compared by poets to “the tail of the white horse on which death was mounted,” and called a “sky-born waterfall,” and Goethe describes it,—
“Streams from the high,
Steep, rocky wall,
The purest fount;
In clouds of spray,
Like silver dust,
It veils the rock
In rainbow hues
And, dancing down,
With music soft,
Is lost in air.”
Wherever the sun can get at the naked rock of the mountain, from July to September, and find an open fissure, there vegetation climbs, and clinging, establishes itself, and flourishes, and blooms. Charming colonies of little flowers seem to have emigrated from the valleys, and come to hide themselves in the cold deserts, where the brevity of their life appears to enhance the beauty of their color. To better resist the hoar-frost, they grow in thick tufts closely pressed against each other. The rocks are velvet with lichens and mosses, that anchor their roots into a mass of granite, grappling with a substance which, when struck with steel, tears up its tempered grain and dashes out the spark. There are familiar pinks, blue-bells, a species of forget-me-not, a small star-shaped flower of a deep metallic blue shading upon green, that flashes through the grass with a moist, lustrous softness,—it is the smaller gentian, so dear to the poet’s heart and verse. Then great rose-colored beds of rhododendrons; azaleas of vivid carmine; golden arnicas, with their stately bearing, like rays of sunshine turned into flowers; in every direction, orchids, diffusing a strong odor of vanilla; and the narcissi, which are visible a great distance, and their odor wafted by the wind, is no less penetrating than that of an orange grove; the Alpine rose, of which Ruskin says, “when the traveller finds himself physically exhausted by the pomp of landscape, let him sink down on his knees and concentrate his attention on the petals of a rock-rose.” Against the cliffs are rich clumps of the peerless, delicately-cut Edelweiss; called by the botanists “Gnaphalium alpinum.” It is a peculiar plant of delicate construction that grows under the snow; containing very little sap, so that it can be preserved a long time; the blossom is surrounded by white velvety leaves, and even the stem has a down upon it. The possession of one is proof of unusual daring, and to gather it, the hunter, tempted by its beauty and by his love (for it is immensely valued by the Swiss maidens) climbs the most inaccessible cliffs on which it grows, and is sometimes found dead at the foot with the flower in his hand. No art can simulate its beautiful, ermine-like bloom, and experiments have been made to cultivate it in other places, but it changes its character and becomes transformed into a new species; in its Alpine home alone will it flourish, and there must it be sought, and adorn the hat as the badge of triumph for the Alpine climber. The mountain is really a botanical garden; the Swiss flora is the largest on the European continent, in proportion to the area it covers. The varied local influences and conditions resulting from such a broken surface, and differences of altitude concur in producing the graduation and unbounded variety of botanical specimens.
Trees are also present in great abundance and variety, increasing the enchantment of the view with their leafy clothing, which, by partly concealing, adds charm of mystery to the prospect. There are specimens of noble chestnuts and walnuts, grand old oaks, larches, and gigantic pines. The walnut-trees disappear at a height of twenty-five hundred feet; chestnuts and beeches cover the slopes a little higher; to these succeed the firs, which seem to have sown themselves in a luxuriant way, some standing alone in green gracefulness, others growing in pretty little miniature groves; then the knotted oaks, holding by their strong roots to the precipitous sides; and the burly pines that flourish at far greater altitudes than either, seeming to require scarcely any earth, but grasping with their strong, rough roots the frozen rock, out of which, somehow, they contrive to draw moisture. Some of the ancient pines on the Jungfrau are supposed to have stood the blasts of winter for a thousand years; they are affirmed to be as high as one hundred and sixty feet, and to measure twenty-four feet in circumference. It is their peculiar conical form which enables them to bow to, and thus resist the force of, the storm. The pine is the king of the mountains; he strikes his club-foot deep into the cleft of the rocks, or grasps its span with conscious power; there he lifts his haughty front, like the warrior monarch that he is,—no flinching about the pine, let the time be ever so stormy. His throne is the crag and his crown is a good way up in the heavens, and as for the clouds, he tears them asunder sometimes and uses them for robes. Then the stern, deep, awfully deep roar that he makes in a storm. When he has aroused his energies to meet the storm, the battle-cry he sends down the wind is heard above all the roar and artillery of thunder, and when the tempest leaves him, how quietly he settles to his repose,—the scented breeze of a soft evening breathes upon him and the grim warrior king wakes his murmuring lute, and through his dusky boughs float sweet and soothing sounds. Higher still than the pine are the larches, a wood highly valued; and at last comes the creeping pine, struggling against the wind and cold: it is the highest climber among Alpine trees, and is the immediate neighbor of the glacier.
The perils of wandering in the high Alps remain terribly real, and are only to be met by knowledge, courage, caution, skill, and strength; for rashness, ignorance, carelessness, the mountains still leave no margin, and to these three-fourths of the catastrophes which shock us are to be traced. Mountaineering without guides is not a thing to be encouraged. The mountaineer’s instinct on rock and ice is an art quite as subtle and complex as the art of the seaman or the horseman. The senses all awake, the eye clear, the heart strong, the limbs steady yet flexible, with power of recovery in store and ready for instant action should the footing give way, such is the discipline which these terrible ascents impose. The mountain guides are not ignorant, they are licensed only after severe examination. They are obliged to take courses of study; they are taught topography, and how to read a map and find their way by it; to use the compass and the other instruments that are indispensable in journeys of exploration; they are also taught how to bind up wounds, so as to be able to do what is necessary at once in case of accident; in a word, they are brave, modest, affable, sunburnt, and scarred men, who have planted a flag on every summit, and who have lent to the stern and awful mountains the romance of mountaineering. It is understood that a true Swiss guide is literally “faithful unto death;” that he does not hesitate to risk his own life for the sake of his charge, and that instances are known in which it has not only been risked but actually sacrificed. Many accidents in mountain-climbing have resulted from an insane effort to dispense with the services of accredited guides, or disregarding their directions. In the short space of not quite a month, in 1887, eighteen tourists lost their lives; one accident on the Jungfrau involving the loss of six. The fate of blind guides and those they lead is set forth in unmistakable terms by the Scriptures. Choose for your guides the hardy men who have learned their business thoroughly, who have been chamois hunters from their youth, who have lived on the mountains from their birth, and to whom the snows and rocks and the clouds speak a language which they can understand, and then accident is almost impossible. Roping is the common and safest precaution, especially for ice traversing. A slip-knot is passed over each climber’s head and shoulders and drawn tight under the arms. It cannot be particularly pleasant, for at times the one in front makes a spring, forgetting others are tied behind him, and takes them unawares, nearly pulling them off their feet; then, on the other hand, oblivious of the person behind you, suddenly you are checked in the middle of your jump, perhaps, over a crevasse, or when standing in a little niche on a steep wall of ice a thousand feet high. The graceful alpenstock, so often seen in the hands of Swiss tourists inscribed with its roll of triumph, must be taken cum grano salis. Many of them have never done service beyond mountain hotel parlors, broad piazzas, and great dining-rooms. They can be bought with “records” complete and shining, and therefore are not as closely related to mountain-climbing as one might suspect them to be. It is refreshing to see young lads stalking about with these alpenstocks and ice-axes, like conquerors amid a subject race. What lofty scorn they have for every man who has not ascended the highest peak, and yet they never dared to try it! They call themselves mountaineers, and at evening and in bad weather stalk and lounge about the hotel, moody, terrible, and statuesque; they speak to none but to other young braves, with whom they perpetually mutter dark things about horrid places and cutting the record. No; good mountaineering is the education of a lifetime begun in childhood, and these pretentious youths are no more mountaineers than their boots are. Under proper precautions, and with an experienced guide, it is glorious and healthful exercise, and for purposes of science has been of incalculable value.
In the later Middle Ages invalids came to Baden, in the Canton of Aargau, for the sake of the mineral waters; and the springs of Pfäffers were known in 1242, and the waters considered very efficacious, particularly in the case of persons “who had been tortured.” These places are still visited, but the air-cure of the mountain has almost superseded them. Jean Jacques Rousseau expressed surprise that “bathing in the salubrious and beneficial mountain air had not yet become one of the great resources of medical science or of moral education.” There would be no occasion to-day for at least one part of his surprise. The Swiss mountains have developed well-defined and well-known health phases. They have become mediciners, and the snow-clad peaks and the upper snow-clad valleys are being looked to by physicians for the relief of certain ailments not easily remedied by other means. Davos Platz and St. Moritz, in the Engadine, are among the most familiar regions famed for the climatic treatment of disease,—possessing remarkable health-giving properties in lung trouble. It is the exquisite purity of the air, exercise, and especial modes of life which the mountains impose that serve as the chief medicine, and give these heights their beneficial virtues. The rarefaction has its own and special effect. The breathing becomes quicker, deeper, and fuller. One breathes fifteen to twenty-five per cent. less air to produce a given weight of carbonic acid. The action of the air on the blood in the lungs seems to be facilitated with decreasing density; one, however, must ascend over two thousand feet before the lighter air-pressure begins to make itself appreciable, but for every one thousand feet additional the difference in the rarefaction becomes of a very marked character. Here the law of “use and disuse of organs” is illustrated in typical fashion,—parts of the lungs but little used in ordinary life are brought freely into use,—one is forced to breathe deeply, thus the vital capacity is enlarged, and, by favoring exercise of little-used parts banishes the tendency to disease from one of the seats of life. This so-called diaphanous rarefied air is not air, it is a celestial ether; and so with the sun, though it is hot, what you feel is not heat, it is a permeating, invigorating, life-creating warmth. This warmth, then, which the sun imparts to this ether pervades your lungs, your heart, and reaches to your very bones. This virginally pure air makes you conscious of a lighter and of a quicker life, an unknown facility in breathing, and a lightness of body. Its electric freshness is a brilliant vitality,—it is rest, inspiration, resolve. Then you are surrounded with pine forests, and the bright sun is constantly raising into the air from their trunks, branches, and leaves myriad molecules of their resinous exudations. On ascending a mountain the mean annual temperature decreases on an average of one degree Fahrenheit for every three hundred and forty-nine feet. The value of fresh air and exercise is a sentiment possibly as old as humanity itself. It is the same spirit which animated Hippocrates and Galen when those classic worthies discoursed upon the art of nature-cure. We really travel in circles in the case of disease-cure, as in most other things. None the less may we be thankful that, in our circular search after knowledge, we have come upon the beaten track of ancient days, and have enlarged the wisdom which of old showed forth the benefits of a cloudless sky and a pure ether.
There are walks and excursions in the mountains for all, for the invalid as for the cragsman; roads that are marvels of audacity, crossing tremendous gorges, clinging in dizzy places along the precipices at the foot of which is heard the boiling torrent, then sweeping around sudden corners and angles; roads will wind among the hills which rise steep and lofty from the scanty level place that lies between them, whilst the hills seem continually to thrust their great bulk before the wayfarer, as if grimly resolute to forbid his passage, or close abruptly behind him when he still dares to proceed. There are broad avenues overarched with spreading elms and maples, with vistas reminding one of the nave and aisles of a large cathedral. The mountain-paths are so pretty and charming; they wander about so capriciously and fancifully; they run so merrily over the moss in the woods, and beside the murmuring brooks; they climb so cheerfully up the slopes and hill-sides; they lead you through so much of freshness, and perfume, and varied scenery, that the pleasures of sight soon make you oblivious of bodily fatigue. The cemeteries placed among these wooded rocks and pastoral hills recall the wish of Ossian, “Oh, lay me, ye that see the light, near some rock of my hills; let the thick hazels be around, let the rustling oak be near; green be the place of my rest, and let the distant torrent be heard.”
Switzerland is rich in aquatic landscapes; no country except Norway and Sweden has such a number of inland lakes. The Lakes of Geneva, Luzern, Zurich, Thun, Neuchâtel, Bienne, and Zug are all historic, and have been the subject of numerous pen-pictures. The Lake of Geneva is the largest of Western Europe, being fifty-seven miles long, and its greatest width nine miles; it has its storms, its waves, and its surge; now placid as a mirror, now furious as the Atlantic; at times a deep-blue sea curling before the gentle waves, then a turbid ocean dark with the mud and sand from its lowest depths; the peasants on its banks still laugh at the idea of there being sufficient cordage in the world to reach to the bottom of the Genfer-See. It is eleven hundred and fifty-four feet above the sea, and having the same depth, its bottom coincides with the sea-level; the water is of such exceeding purity that when analyzed only 0.157 in 1000 contain foreign elements. The lake lies nearly in the form of a crescent stretching from the southwest towards the northeast. Mountains rise on every side, groups of the Alps of Savoy, Valais, and Jura. The northern or the Swiss shore is chiefly what is known as a côte, or a declivity that admits of cultivation, with spots of verdant pasture scattered at its feet and sometimes on its breast, with a cheery range of garden, chalet, wood, and spire; villas, hamlets, and villages seem to touch each other down by the banks, and to form but one town, whilst higher up, they peep out from among the vineyards or nestle under the shade of walnut-trees. At the foot of the lake is the white city of Geneva, of which Bancroft wrote, “Had their cause been lost, Alexander Hamilton would have retired with his bride to Geneva, where nature and society were in their greatest perfection.” The city is divided into two parts by the Rhone as it glides out of the basin of the lake on its course towards the Mediterranean. The Arve pours its turbid stream into the Rhone soon after that river issues from the lake. The contrast between the two rivers is very striking, the one being as pure and limpid as the other is foul and muddy. The Rhone seems to scorn the alliance and keeps as long as possible unmingled with his dirty spouse; two miles below the place of their junction a difference and opposition between this ill-assorted couple is still observable; these, however, gradually abate by long habit, till at last, yielding to necessity, and to the unrelenting law which joined them together, they mix in perfect union and flow in a common stream to the end of their course.96 At the head of the lake begins the valley of the Rhone, where George Eliot said, “that the very sunshine seemed dreary mid the desolation of ruin and of waste in this long, marshy, squalid valley; and yet, on either side of the weary valley are noble ranges of granite mountains, and hill resorts of charm and health.” At the upper part of the lake are Montreux, Territet, and Vevay, sheltered from the north wind by the western spurs of the Alps, and celebrated for their beauty, and beloved of travellers; places of cure and convalescence for invalids, where the temperature even in winter is of extreme mildness, having a mean during the year of 48° Fahrenheit at seven o’clock in the morning, 57° at one o’clock in the afternoon, and 50° at nine o’clock in the evening; with a barometer register of 28¾ inches at the level of the lake. Standing at almost any point on the Lake of Geneva, to the one side towers Dent-du-Midi, calm, proud, and dazzling, like a queen of brightness; on the other side is seen the Jura through her misty shroud extending in mellow lines, and a cloudless sky vying in depths of color with the azure waters. So graceful the outlines, so varied the details, so imposing the framework in which this lake is set, well might Voltaire exclaim, “Mon lac est le premier,” (my lake is the first). For richness combined with grandeur, for softness around and impressiveness above, for a correspondence of contours on which the eye reposes with unwearied admiration, from the smiling aspect of fertility and cultivation at its lower extremity to the sublimity of a savage nature at its upper, no lake is superior to that of Geneva. Numberless almost are the distinguished men and women who have lived, labored, and died upon the shores of this fair lake; every spot has a tale to tell of genius, or records some history. In the calm retirement of Lausanne, Gibbon contemplated the decay of empires; Rousseau and Byron found inspiration on these shores; there is
“Clarens, sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep love!
Thine air is the young breath of passionate thought;
Thy trees take root in love.”
Here is Chillon, with its great white wall sinking into the deep calm of the water, while its very stones echo memorable events, from the era of barbarism in 830, when Count Wala, who had held command of Charlemagne’s forces, was incarcerated within the tower of this desolate rock during the reign of Louis le Débonnaire, to the imprisonment of the Salvation Army captain.97
“Lake Leman lies by Chillon’s walls;
A thousand feet in depth below,
Its massy waters meet and flow;
Below the surface of the lake
The dark vault lies”
where Bonnivard, the prior of St. Victor and the great asserter of the independence of Geneva, was found when the castle was wrested from the Duke of Savoy by the Bernese.
Along the shores of Lake Geneva the Romans had many stations and posts, vestiges of which are still visible.98 The confusion and the mixture of interests that succeeded the fall of the Empire gave rise in the Middle Ages to various baronial castles, ecclesiastical towns, and towers of defence, the ruins of which still stand on the margin of the lake or on the eminences a little inland,—
“Chiefless castles breathing stern farewells
From gray but leafy walls, where ruin greenly dwells.”
The Lake of Luzern, Vierwaldstätter-See, is hardly a single sheet of water, but is composed of a group of seven basins, some joined to each other by narrow straits, others intersecting each other at right angles, giving extreme variety to its breadth; its extreme length in a diverging line is twenty-four miles; its widest part, taking in the two arms of Küssnacht and Alpnach (southwest to northeast), is twelve miles, but the average breadth is much less. There are repeated eclipses of the landscapes caused by abrupt turnings, bold promontories, and the amphitheatrical closing in of the mountain strips, and again opening up to view. It is scarcely possible to imagine any combination of beautiful water and bold mountains more striking, more effective, and more lovely than the scenes that meet the view in traversing this lake. A dozen different mountains advance into the lake and check themselves suddenly in the depths of the gloomy waters. Bare, steep, turret-like rocks hanging amid the clouds; rich, lawn-like grass in the intervening glades, sparkling with cottages and gardens, succeed and blend with each other in infinite alternation. Pilatus and the Rigi guard the approach to the lake. The former is full of mysterious legendary pools associated with the haunting spirit of Pontius Pilate. No less than thirty-five writers have treated of its supernatural apparitions, but a very natural supposition traces the name to a corruption of pilea or pileatus,—from the cap of clouds always on its summit. The Rigi, the most frequented belvedere in the world, stands between the lakes of Luzern and Zug. It is its situation, rather than its elevation, which renders it famous. Its summit is little less than six thousand feet above the level of the sea, but it stands in the midst of most lovely scenery, and from its top is presented an extensive panoramic view scarcely equalled anywhere in the Alps. The sunrise from the Rigi is a spectacle that every tourist contemplates with eager pleasure. Brilliant in dazzling whiteness stand the mountains under the first light of the morning; it begins to kindle on their tops its glowing beacon; suddenly the sunbeams strike their crowns and convert them into a boss of gold; first the tallest presents a gilded summit while the others wait in silence, then they, in the order of their height, come afterwards, relaxing, as the sunbeams strike each in succession, into a blush and smile. The splendor of the whole spectacle, when the sun streams all the magic of his beams to cast upon the land an enchantment greater than its own, is such as to overwhelm the soul with admiration and astonishment. All who sleep at the Culm, or topmost point, may expect to be awakened by the sound of a wooden horn, about sunrise, when every one gets up with the hope of a splendid prospect—a hope often disappointed:
“Nine weary, up-hill miles we sped,
The setting sun to see;
Sulky and grim he went to bed,
Sulky and grim went we.
“Seven sleepless hours we tossed, and then,
The rising sun to see,
Sulky and grim we rose again,
Sulky and grim rose he.”
The Lake of Zug, or Zuger-See, is set like a fine pearl in a necklace of woods and gardens, fertile fields and hills, over which white houses are scattered like tents. Its banks are graceful, and in its waters are reflected rich and varied vegetation; near by are wide marshes dotted with pools, in the midst of which great water-lilies shine, and a few islets covered with vegetation, looking like baskets of flowers floating in the water.
The Lake of Thun is the golden gate-way to the Bernese Oberland, and its wealth and variety of scenery is the pride of that Canton.
The Lake of Zurich, while not pretending to vie with the others in stern and rugged magnificence, is unsurpassed in pastoral beauty; on either side rise gently-sloping hills of fruitful vineyards, at the foot of which, lining the shores, are prosperous villages. Here have been discovered the earliest traces of human activity, back in the age of Stone and Lake-Dwellers. Excavations from the old basin of the lake have hinted that it has tales to tell and secrets to reveal which for ages on ages may have been safely hidden beneath its deep waters.
The Swiss lakes differ in color; some appear to be green as malachite, and others blue. The water appears commonly of a bluish-green, shading into blue, with a slightly milky hue in the summer, especially when fed by the glacier streams, which bring down a quantity of finely triturated rock. Whenever a lake has high mountains rising from its edge, the hue is a purple-blue. The transparency of the lake waters is quite surprising; in many of them minute objects can be seen at a depth of fifty feet, and even lower down, as clearly as if viewed through a glass. There is a quiet luxury of excitement, without exercise, in voyaging in the well-appointed steamers on calm Swiss lakes, which present a shifting panorama of hill and river scenery.99
There is much difference of opinion as to when the natural beauties and attractions of Switzerland appear to the best advantage. The larger number of strangers see the country only in its summer charms; it is a season when the mountains assume a greater brilliance of color and grandeur of form, the lower atmosphere being cleared of its dark mists as the clouds lift and give an ever-increasing flood of light. This greater altitude of the clouds brings the mountains into fuller sunshine, with their coloring more intense, their forms more massive, and the blue of the sky behind them deeper and clearer.
Those who see the sun rise each morning in glory over the Alps, and glowing all day, set in a flood of crimson over the pines, only to return in the splendor of the after-glow on the glacier and snow, claim that autumn is a better time for realizing this sum of marvellous beauty; that it is the season of crimson and gold, when the landscapes take on incomparable magnificence, when the transformation of the woods is fairy-like, when the oaks are surrounded with a golden aureola, the beeches are dyed in vivid red and yellow, and all the wooded hills, orchards, hedges, and bushes form, as it were, a marvellous symphony of color, of warmer shades, and tints of an infinite tenderness. Then comes the advocate of winter, who says, “You should see the loads of snow, falling almost perpendicularly in thick, heavy flakes, or whirled about by the wild wind; on the calming of the snow-storm, you should see the heavy brown clouds in the south assume a tinge more and more golden and bright, till the first patch of blue sky bursts forth amidst the gigantic masses, and at last permits the winter sun, far down in the south, to gladden the earth with a brief sight of the source of light and life;” and that the trees are more beautiful in the hoar-frost than in summer or autumn glory; the pines, with their branches bent, “stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms,” and the taller trees seem to beckon with their long, white arms, like ghosts.
The snow, which long after it has fallen lies as pure and stainless as the raiment of angels, is the crowning glory of a Swiss winter. It has an intensity of whiteness which gives a new force to “whiter than snow.” St. Matthew describes the Lord’s transfiguration raiment as “white as the light,” but St. Mark as “exceeding white as snow.” This Alpine snow is light materialized, and snow etherealized—solidified light. With the snow nature transfigures all the landscape; at one sweep of her broad brush all the clumsy touches with which man has marred the beauty of the world are effaced, the hills are rounded to a riper beauty, the fields lie smooth and white and fair, an unwritten page waiting as for the bold outlines of some new design.100 The mountain air appears to give additional brilliancy even to the rainbow, as it rests on the turbid blackness of the clouds; it looks so near, and every band of color so broad and distinct, filling the very air with the haze of its colors; seeing a rainbow following an Alpine thunder-storm, one can well conceive how, before it was known what produced the storm and the rainbow, the one was taken for the wrath and the other for the smile of God.
“All things are good, as their Creator made them, but everything degenerates in the hands of man; improving, man makes a general confusion of elements, climates, and seasons; he defaces, he confounds everything, as if he delighted in nothing but monsters and deformity;” these are the first words of the “Æmilius,” and the key-note of the author’s philosophy. Conceding that man’s work does not deserve this unqualified condemnation, and is in many respects most admirable, one must regret to see the work of nature in Switzerland so ruthlessly spoiled and disfigured; to see the telegraph-pole and the factory chimney rear themselves against the horizon of every landscape; mountain fastnesses and remote valleys consecrated to the charms of nature alone, resounding with the whistle of the locomotive and the stroke of the hammer; the iconoclastic hand of material enterprise, divested of all sentiment, reaching out into every nook and corner where the Divine Artist has surpassed himself in his handiwork, to discover and develop new commercial opportunities. One now goes by steam in place of diligence, and the lovers of the characteristic may well regret that the couleur locale, so dear to strangers, is fast disappearing. No more the post-carriage takes you in its moving house, with the sound of jingling bells, the cracking of the driver’s whip, and the notes of the horn waking up the echoes of the woods. No longer the white oxen tug up the steep mountain; no longer the chat with the village gossips at each post-station; the mid-day halt, where one dives into castle, church, or old courtyard; the chaffering for some local trifle; the antique furniture of the salon; the early walk before the coach was ready,—it is all, all, almost gone. In things spiritual and things temporal alike, our modern mania is to carry with us our own life, instead of accepting that which we find on the spot. Alpine touring has become a highly-organized institution, brought to perfection by everything that administrative genius, capital, and science can give. All the inscriptions on the votive offerings discovered around the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter Penninus on the Great St. Bernard, and which come down to the latest periods of the Roman Empire, are filled with warm expression of gratitude for having escaped the extraordinary perils of the passage. Even in the days of Pliny, several hundred years after the first passage of the Alps by the Roman troops, and even after the establishment of a station at Sion, in the Valais, it was spoken of as a “most hidden part of the earth, in the region of perpetual night, amid forests forever inaccessible to human approach.” The courage, skill, and ingenuity of man have overcome all these formidable dangers. Though the mountains are still lofty and precipitous, safe and convenient passes have been found practicable, and paths have been contrived, upon these giddy heights, over which the maiden threads without a thought of danger. The rushing torrents are loud and furious in the descent to the valley; but they have been bridged over by stone and timber, or perhaps by the fallen pine, and the peasant boy sings cheerily, as he strides across the foaming stream. Steam and electricity make the railway train emulate the agility of the chamois, and carry the public across precipices to a height of seven thousand feet. There is scarcely a point of view that attracts tourists, a summit that climbers make fashionable, but at once the mountain is rent and insulted; it is stripped of its beautiful forests, iron rails are screwed to its wounded and bleeding side, and you are carried up like a bundle of luggage, with no roadside halts under the trees, no flowers gathered by the wayside, no rustic inns hidden under the firs, but all along station-masters, ticket-collectors, and stations; or chaises-à-porteur, and long lines of mules file up the Alps, carrying Saratoga trunks and cases of Clicquot to the level of the eternal snows. Mountain summits are no longer reserved for those who arrogantly pride themselves on superior soundness of wind and limb, but are equally accessible to the blind, halt, and lame. The circular-tour ticket has brought these summits within reach of everybody’s purse and everybody’s legs. Greed of gain and competition are rapidly producing the effect of false mountains, sham mountains, built by contractors and shareholders; a mountain at a fair that the people ascend a franc for the round trip; where the tourist is nothing but a number, and is always dining between two trains, at the buffet of an international railway station. There is a tendency all the world over to the loss of the true sense of natural beauty; and forest solitudes and quiet valleys must retreat before the spirit of Mammon, and succumb to factories and foundries. Yet are not the natural beauties of a country an inestimable treasure to it, and, from a business view, is it wise, lightly to give away what money cannot buy, nor modern art create? With commercial and economic disadvantages difficult to overcome, it would appear the wiser policy for Switzerland to check the rapid transformation of the beautiful and the venerable into cheap and tasteless novelties, with their cast-iron uninterestingness. Nature has done all for Switzerland, from its pure and radiant air to its mountains, lakes, and wild flowers, which spring up as though Aphrodite were still there, “to sow them with her odorous feet.” This marvellous and rare beauty of nature is too often taken as a matter of course, and “holy men, in recommending of the love of God to us, refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and immediately shown; though they insist much on His giving of bread and raiment and health, they require us not to thank Him for that glory of His works which He has permitted us alone to perceive; they tell us often to meditate in the closet, but they send us not, like Isaac, into the fields at even.”
Fortunately, the grandeur of Alpine scenery cannot be altogether destroyed, though seriously injured, by the spade, the pickaxe, and the blasting-powder. There is a poetry of science, even of practical science, and the invaluable and ubiquitous engineer cannot after all do much to the everlasting hills, except here and there a simple climb may be made simpler still, and an opening effected through what looks like one of the permanent barriers of the world. The physical geography of Switzerland is still a stupendous unit. Man may enormously modify its surface, but its original conditions remain dominant, forcing a stern recognition of their supremacy; mountain-ranges may be passed or surmounted; they have never yet been lowered or removed; Switzerland will ever be mastered by its sublime physical features. While much of the simplicity which was formerly the attraction of the country has passed away, never to be restored, still it presents an unrivalled scene, in picturesque combination, with advantages of atmospheric relief, and aided by the contributing glories of a luminous and sensitive sky. There is beauty of every sort; beauties to enrapture every sense; beauties to satisfy every taste; forms the grandest and loveliest; colors the most gorgeous and the most delicate; harmonies the most soothing and the most stirring; the sunny glories of the day; the pale grace of moonlight; the silent pinnacles of aged snows; tropical luxuriance; the serenity of peerless sunsets; the sublimity of unchallenged storms; pomp of summits and world of clouds; witchery of water, sky, and mountain; a very cluster of delights and grandeurs, to enchant the vision and animate the spirit,—warming commonplace persons into something approaching to poetic fervor, and persons of genius to pour forth their inspirations in verse or lofty prose. You may have read the most vivid and accurate description, yet the reality will burst upon you like a revelation; a few cherished hallucinations may be uncovered to the raw air of truth, but you will look again and again, day after day, and a perennial glory will surround the kaleidoscopic panorama, “ever charming, ever new,” photographing it in the mind forever. Scarcely a day, or an hour of the day, when there is not being produced, scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon an inexhaustible source of constant and perfect beauty. It is indeed a beautiful land, meriting the words of the Psalmist, “a fair place, the joy of the whole earth.” It is a place where all save the spirit of man seems divine; so fascinating, that, like Virgil, who on his death-bed longed to view once more the nymphs of Bacchus as they danced on the banks of the river of Peloponnesus, one who has visited Switzerland sighs again for its glorious sun, its delicious air with the shivering freshness of the glacier, its magnificent scenery, its gorgeous mountains, its valleys of idyllic beauty, its beautiful roads shaded by hedges, its streams bordered with hazel copses, its forests carpeted with moss, its corners of shade and solitude with freshness and luxurious ease, its happy and tranquil retreats, and its asylums for modest pleasure or for calm repose:
“Who first beholds those everlasting clouds,
Those mighty hills, so shadowy, so sublime,
As rather to belong to heaven than earth,
But instantly receives into his soul
A sense, a feeling, that he loses not;
A something that informs him ’tis an hour
Whence he may date henceforward and forever?”