ascent of the Simplon by a gray summer's dawn, before which the last
bright star had not yet faded. From Domo d'Ossola we rose directly
into the mountains, and soon wound into the wildest glens by a road
which was flung along precipices and over chasms and waterfalls like a
waving riband. The horses went on at a round trot, and so skilfully
are the difficulties of the ascent surmounted, that we could not
believe we had passed the spot that from below hung above us so
appallingly. The route follows the foaming river Vedro, which frets
and plunges along at its side or beneath its hanging bridges, with the
impetuosity of a mountain torrent, where the stream is swollen at
every short distance with pretty waterfalls, messengers from the
melting snows on the summits. There was one, a water-_slide_ rather
than a fall, which I stopped long to admire. It came from near the
peak of the mountain, leaping at first from a green clump of firs,
and descending a smooth inclined plane, of perhaps two hundred feet.
The effect was like drapery of the most delicate lace, dropping into
festoons from the hand. The slight waves overtook each other and
mingled and separated, always preserving their elliptical and foaming
curves, till, in a smooth scoop near the bottom, they gathered into a
snowy mass, and leaped into the Vedro in the shape of a twisted shell.
If wishing could have witched it into Mr. Cole's sketch-book, he would
have a new variety of water for his next composition.
After seven hours' driving, which scarce seemed ascending but for the
snow and ice and the clear air it brought us into, we stopped to
breakfast at the village of Simplon, "three thousand, two hundred and
sixteen feet above the sea level." Here we first realized that we had
left Italy. The landlady spoke French and the postillions German! My
sentiment has grown threadbare with travel, but I don't mind
confessing that the circumstance gave me an unpleasant thickness in
the throat. I threw open the southern window, and looked back toward
the marshes of Lombardy, and if I did not say the poetical thing, it
was because
"It is the silent grief that cuts the heart-strings."
In sober sadness, one may well regret any country where his life has
been filled fuller than elsewhere of sunshine and gladness; and such,
by a thousand enchantments, has Italy been to me. Its climate is life
in my nostrils, its hills and valleys are the poetry of such things,
and its marbles, pictures, and palaces, beset the soul like the very
necessities of existence. You can exist elsewhere, but oh! you _live_
in Italy!
I was sitting by my English companion on a sledge in front of the
hotel, enjoying the sunshine, when the diligence drove up, and six or
eight young men alighted. One of them, walking up and down the road to
get the cramp of a confined seat out of his legs, addressed a remark
to us in English. We had neither of us seen him before, but we
exclaimed simultaneously, as he turned away, "That's an American."
"How did you know he was not an Englishman?" I asked. "Because," said
my friend, "he spoke to us without an introduction and without a
reason, as Englishmen are not in the habit of doing, and because he
ended his sentence with 'sir,' as no Englishman does except he is
talking to an inferior, or wishes to insult you. And how did you know
it?" asked he. "Partly by instinct," I answered, "but more, because
though a traveller, he wears a new hat that cost him ten dollars, and
a new cloak that cost him fifty, (a peculiarly American extravagance,)
because he made no inclination of his body either in addressing or
leaving us, though his intention was to be civil, and because he used
fine dictionary words to express a common idea, which, by the way,
too, betrays his southern breeding. And if you want other evidence, he
has just asked the gentleman near him to ask the conducteur something
about his breakfast, and an American is the only man in the world who
ventures to come abroad without at least French enough to keep himself
from starving." It may appear ill-natured to write down such
criticisms on one's own countryman; but the national peculiarities by
which we are distinguished from foreigners, seemed so well defined in
this instance, that I thought it worth mentioning. We found afterward
that our conjecture was right. His name and country were on the brass
plate of his portmanteau in most legible letters, and I recognized it
directly as the address of an amiable and excellent man, of whom I
had once or twice heard in Italy, though I had never before happened
to meet him. Three of the faults oftenest charged upon our countrymen,
are _over-fine clothes_, _over fine-words_, and _over-fine_, or
_over-free manners_!
From Simplon we drove two or three miles between heaps of snow, lying
in some places from ten to six feet deep. Seven hours before, we had
ridden through fields of grain almost ready for the harvest. After
passing one or two galleries built over the road to protect it from
the avalanches where it ran beneath the loftier precipices, we got out
of the snow, and saw Brig, the small town at the foot of the Simplon,
on the other side, lying almost directly beneath us. It looked as if
one might toss his cap down into its pretty gardens. Yet we were four
or five hours in reaching it, by a road that seemed in most parts
scarcely to descend at all. The views down the valley of the Rhone,
which opened continually before us, were of exquisite beauty, The
river itself, which is here near its source, looked like a meadow
rivulet in its silver windings, and the gigantic Helvetian Alps which
rose in their snow on the other side of the valley, were glittering in
the slant rays of a declining sun, and of a grandeur of size and
outline which diminished, even more than distance, the river and the
clusters of villages at their feet.
LETTER LXIV.
SWITZERLAND--LA VALAIS--THE CRETINS AND THE GOITRES--A
FRENCHMAN'S OPINION OF NIAGARA--LAKE LEMAN--CASTLE OF
CHILLON--ROCKS OF MEILLERIE--REPUBLICAN AIR--MONT
BLANC--GENEVA--THE STEAMER--PARTING SORROW.
We have been two days and a half loitering down through the Swiss
canton of Valais, and admiring every hour the magnificence of these
snow-capped and green-footed Alps. The little chalets seem just lodged
by accident on the crags, or stuck against slopes so steep, that the
mowers of the mountain-grass are literally let down by ropes to their
dizzy occupation. The goats alone seem to have an exemption from all
ordinary laws of gravitation, feeding against cliffs which it makes
one giddy to look on only; and the short-waisted girls dropping a
courtesy and blushing as they pass the stranger, emerge from the
little mountain-paths, and stop by the first spring, to put on their
shoes and arrange their ribands coquetishly, before entering the
village.
The two dreadful curses of these valleys meet one at every step--the
_cretins_, or natural fools, of which there is at least one in every
family; and the _goitre_ or swelled throat, to which there is hardly
an exception among the women. It really makes travelling in
Switzerland a melancholy business, with all its beauty; at every turn
in the road, a gibbering and moaning idiot, and in every group of
females, a disgusting array of excrescences too common even to be
concealed. Really, to see girls that else were beautiful, arrayed in
all their holyday finery, but with a defect that makes them monsters
to the unaccustomed eye, their throats swollen to the size of their
heads, seems to me one of the most curious and pitiable things I have
met in my wanderings. Many attempts have been made to account for the
growth of the _goitre_, but it is yet unexplained. The men are not so
subject to it as the women, though among them, even, it is frightfully
common. But how account for the continual production by ordinary
parents of this brute race of _cretins_? They all look alike,
dwarfish, large-mouthed, grinning, and of hideous features and
expression. It is said that the children of strangers, born in the
valley, are very likely to be idiots, resembling the cretin exactly.
It seems a supernatural curse upon the land. The Valaisians, however,
consider it a blessing to have one in the family.
The dress of the women of La Valais is excessively unbecoming, and a
pretty face is rare. Their manners are kind and polite, and at the
little _auberges_, where we have stopped on the road, there has been a
cleanliness and a generosity in the supply of the table, which prove
virtues among them, not found in Italy.
At Turtmann, we made a little excursion into the mountains to see a
cascade. It falls about a hundred feet, and has just now more water
than usual from the melting of the snows. It is a pretty fall. A
Frenchman writes in the book of the hotel, that he has seen Niagara
and Trenton Falls, in America, and that they do not compare with the
cascade of Turtmann!
From Martigny the scenery began to grow richer, and after passing the
celebrated Fall of the Pissevache (which springs from the top of a
high Alp almost into the road, and is really a splendid cascade), we
approached Lake Leman in a gorgeous sunset. We rose a slight hill, and
over the broad sheet of water on the opposite shore, reflected with
all its towers in a mirror of gold, lay the _castle of Chillon_. A
bold green mountain, rose steeply behind, the sparkling village of
Vevey lay farther down on the water's edge; and away toward the
sinking sun, stretched the long chain of the Jura, teinted with all
the hues of a dolphin. Never was such a lake of beauty--or it never
sat so pointedly for its picture. Mountains and water, chateaux and
shallops, vineyards and verdure, could do no more. We left the
carriage and walked three or four miles along the southern bank, under
the "Rocks of Meillerie," and the spirit of St. Preux's Julie, if she
haunt the scene where she caught her death, of a sunset in May, is the
most enviable of ghosts. I do not wonder at the prating in albums of
Lake Leman. For me, it is (after Val d'Arno from Fiesoli) the _ne plus
ultra_ of a scenery Paradise.
We are stopping for the night at St. Gingoulf, on a swelling bank of
the lake, and we have been lying under the trees in front of the hotel
till the last perceptible teint is gone from the sky over Jura. Two
pedestrian gentlemen, with knapsacks and dogs, have just arrived, and
a whole family of French people, including parrots and monkeys, came
in before us, and are deafening the house with their chattering. A cup
of coffee, and then good night!
My companion, who has travelled all over Europe on foot, confirms my
opinion that there is no drive on the continent, equal to the forty
miles between the rocks of Meillerie and Geneva, on the southern bank
of the Leman. The lake is not often much broader than the Hudson, the
shores are the noble mountains sung so gloriously by Childe Harold;
Vevey, Lausanne, Copet, and a string of smaller villages, all famous
in poetry and story, fringe the opposite water's edge with cottages
and villages, while you wind for ever along a green lane following the
bend of the shore, the road as level as your hall pavement, and green
hills massed up with trees and verdure, overshadowing you continually.
The world has a great many sweet spots in it, and I have found many a
one which would make fitting scenery for the brightest act of life's
changeful drama--but here is one, where it seems to me as difficult
not to feel genial and kindly, as for Taglioni to keep from floating
away like a smoke-curl when she is dancing in La Bayadere.
We passed a bridge and drew in a long breath to try the difference in
the air--we were in the _republic_ of Geneva. It smelt very much as it
did in the dominions of his majesty of Sardinia--sweet-briar,
hawthorn, violets and all. I used to think when I first came from
America, that the flowers (republicans by nature as well as birds)
were less fragrant under a monarchy.
Mont Blanc loomed up very white in the south, but like other
distinguished persons of whom we form an opinion from the description
of poets, the "monarch of mountains" did not seem to me so _very_
superior to his fellows. After a look or two at him as we approached
Geneva, I ceased straining my head out of the cabriolet, and devoted
my eyes to things more within the scale of my affections--the scores
of lovely villas sprinkling the hills and valleys by which we
approached the city. Sweet--sweet places they are to be sure! And
then the month is May, and the straw-bonneted and white-aproned girls,
ladies and peasants alike, were all out at their porches and
balconies, lover-like couples were sauntering down the park-lanes,
_one_ servant passed us with a tri-cornered blue billet-doux between
his thumb and finger, the nightingales were singing their very hearts
away to the new-blown roses, and a sense of summer and seventeen, days
of sunshine and sonnet-making, came over me irresistibly. I should
like to see June out in Geneva.
The little steamer that makes the tour of Lake Leman, began to "phiz"
by sunrise directly under the windows of our hotel. We were soon on
the pier, where our entrance into the boat was obstructed by a weeping
cluster of girls, embracing and parting very unwillingly with a young
lady of some eighteen years, who was lovely enough to have been wept
for by as many grown-up gentlemen. Her own tears were under better
government, though her sealed lips showed that she dared not trust
herself with her voice. After another and another lingering kiss, the
boatman expressed some impatience, and she tore herself from their
arms and stepped into the waiting batteau. We were soon along side the
steamer, and sooner under way, and then, having given one wave of her
handkerchief to the pretty and sad group on the shore, our fair
fellow-passenger gave way to her feelings, and sinking upon a seat,
burst into a passionate flood of tears. There was no obtruding on such
sorrow, and the next hour or two were employed by my imagination in
filling up the little drama, of which we had seen but the touching
conclusion.
I was pleased to find the boat (a new one) called the "Winkelreid," in
compliment to the vessel which makes the same voyage in Cooper's
"Headsman of Berne." The day altogether had begun like a chapter in a
romance.
"Lake Leman wooed us with its crystal face,"
but there was the filmiest conceivable veil of mist over its unruffled
mirror, and the green uplands that rose from its edge had a softness
like dreamland upon their verdure. I know not whether the tearful girl
whose head was drooping over the railing felt the sympathy, but I
could not help thanking nature for her, in my heart, the whole scene
was so of the complexion of her own feelings. I could have "thrown my
ring into the sea," like Policrates Samius, "to have cause for sadness
too."
The "Winkelreid" has (for a republican steamer), rather the
aristocratical arrangement of making those who walk _aft_ the funnel
pay twice as much as those who choose to promenade _forward_--for no
earthly reason that I can divine, other than that those who pay
dearest have the full benefit of the oily gases from the machinery,
while the humbler passenger breathes the air of heaven before it has
passed through that improving medium. Our youthful Niobe, two French
ladies not particularly pretty, an Englishman with a fishing-rod and
gun, and a coxcomb of a Swiss artist to whom I had taken a special
aversion at Rome, from a criticism I overheard upon my favorite
picture in the Colonna, my friends and myself, were the exclusive
inhalers of the oleaginous atmosphere of the stern. A crowd of the
ark's own miscellaneousness thronged the forecastle--and so you have
the programme of a day on Lake Leman.
LETTER LXV.
LAKE LEMAN--AMERICAN APPEARANCE OF THE GENEVESE--STEAMBOAT OF
THE RHONE--GIBBON AND ROUSSEAU--ADVENTURE OF THE
LILIES--GENEVESE JEWELLERS--RESIDENCE OF VOLTAIRE--BYRON'S
NIGHT-CAP--VOLTAIRE'S WALKING-STICK AND STOCKINGS.
The water of Lake Leman looks very like other water, though Byron and
Shelley were nearly drowned in it; and Copet, a little village on the
Helvetian side, where we left three women and took up one man (the
village ought to be very much obliged to us), is no Paradise, though
Madame de Stael made it her residence. There _are_ Paradises, however,
with very short distances between, all the way down the northern
shore; and angels in them, if women are angels--a specimen or two of
the sex being visible with the aid of the spyglass, in nearly every
balcony and belvidere, looking upon the water. The taste in
country-houses seems to be here very much the same as in New England,
and quite unlike the half-palace, half-castle style common in Italy
and France. Indeed the dress, physiognomy, and manners of old Geneva
might make an American Genevese fancy himself at home on the Leman.
There is that subdued decency, that grave respectableness, that
black-coated, straight-haired, saint-like kind of look which is
universal in the small towns of our country, and which is as unlike
France and Italy, as a playhouse is unlike a Methodist chapel. You
would know the people of Geneva were Calvinists, whisking through the
town merely in a diligence.
I lost sight of the town of Morges, eating a tete-a-tete breakfast
with my friend in the cabin. Switzerland is the only place out of
America where one gets cream for his coffee. I cry, Morges mercy on
that plea.
We were at Lausanne at eleven, having steamed forty miles in five
hours. This is not quite up to the thirty-milers on the Hudson, of
which I see accounts in the papers, but we had the advantage of not
being blown up, either going or coming, and of looking for a
continuous minute on a given spot in the scenery. Then we had an iron
railing between us and that portion of the passengers who prefer
garlic to lavender-water, and we achieved our breakfast without losing
our tempers or complexions, in a scramble. The question of superiority
between Swiss and American steamers, therefore, depends very much on
the value you set on life, temper, and time. For me, as my time is not
measured in "diamond sparks," and as my life and temper are the only
gifts with which fortune has blessed me, I prefer the Swiss.
Gibbon lived at Lausanne, and wrote here the last chapter of his
History of Rome--a circumstance which he records with affection. It is
a spot of no ordinary beauty, and the public promenade, where we sat
and looked over to Vevey and Chillon, and the Rocks of Meillerie, and
talked of Rousseau, and agreed that it was a scene, "_faite pour une
Julie, pour une Claire, et pour un Saint Preux_," is one of the
places, where, if I were to "play statue," I should like to grow to my
seat, and compromise, merely, for eyesight. We have one thing against
Lausanne, however,--it is up hill and a mile from the water; and if
Gibbon walked often from Ouchet at noon, and "larded the way" as
freely as we, I make myself certain he was not the fat man his
biographers have drawn him.
There were some other circumstances at Lausanne which interested
_us_--but which criticism has decided can not be obtruded upon the
public. We looked about for "Julie" and "Clare," spite of Rousseau's
"_ne les y cherchez pas_," and gave a blind beggar a sous (all he
asked) for a handful of lilies-of-the-valley, pitying him ten times
more than if he had lost his eyes out of Switzerland. To be blind on
Lake Leman! blind within sight of Mont Blanc! We turned back to drop
another sous into his hat, as we reflected upon it.
The return steamer from Vevey (I was sorry not to go to Vevey for
Rousseau's sake, and as much for Cooper's), took us up on its way to
Geneva, and we had the advantage of seeing the same scenery in a
different light. Trees, houses, and mountains, are so much finer seen
_against_ the sun, with the deep shadows toward you!
Sitting by the stern, was a fat and fair Frenchwoman, who, like me,
had bought lilies, and about as many. With a very natural facility of
dramatic position, I imagined it had established a kind of sympathy
between us, and proposed to myself, somewhere in the fair hours, to
make it serve as an introduction. She went into the cabin after a
while, to lunch on cutlets and beer, and returned to the deck without
her lilies. Mine lay beside me, within reach of her four fingers; and,
as I was making up my mind to offer to replace her loss, she coolly
took them up, and without even a French monosyllable, commenced
throwing them overboard, stem by stem. It was very clear she had
mistaken them for her own. As the last one flew over the tafferel, the
gentleman who paid for _la biere et les cottelettes_, husband or
lover, came up with a smile and a flourish, and reminded her that she
had left her bouquet between the mustard and the beer bottle.
_Sequiter_, a scene. The lady apologized, and I disclaimed; and the
more I insisted on the delight she had given me by throwing my pretty
lilies into Lake Leman, the more she made herself unhappy, and
insisted on my being inconsolable. One should come abroad to know how
much may be said upon throwing overboard a bunch of lilies!
The clouds gathered, and we had some hopes of a storm, but the
"darkened Jura" was merely dim, and the "live thunder" waited for
another Childe Harold. We were at Geneva at seven, and had the whole
population to witness our debarkation. The pier where we landed, and
the new bridge across the outlet of the Rhone, are the evening
promenade.
The far-famed jewellers of Geneva are rather an aristocratic class of
merchants. They are to be sought in chambers, and their treasures are
produced box by box, from locked drawers, and bought, if at all,
without the pleasure of "beating down." They are, withal, a
gentlemanly class of men; and, of the principal one, as many stories
are told as of Beau Brummel. He has made a fortune by his shop, and
has the manners of a man who can afford to buy the jewels out of a
king's crown.
We were sitting at the _table d'hote_, with about forty people, on the
first day of our arrival, when the servant brought us each a
gilt-edged note, sealed with an elegant device; invitations, we
presumed, to a ball, at least. Mr. So-and-so (I forget the name),
begged pardon for the liberty he had taken, and requested us to call
at his shop in the Rue de Rhone, and look at his varied assortment of
bijouterie. A card was enclosed, and the letter in courtly English. We
went, of course; as who would not? The cost to him was a sheet of
paper, and the trouble of sending to the hotel for a list of the new
arrivals. I recommend the system to all callow Yankees, commencing a
"pushing business."
Geneva is full of foreigners in the summer, and it has quite the
complexion of an agreeable place. The environs are, of course,
unequalled, and the town itself is a stirring and gay capital, full of
brilliant shops, handsome streets and promenades, where everything is
to be met but pretty women. Female beauty would come to a good market
anywhere in Switzerland. We have seen but one pretty girl (our Niobe
of the steamer), since we lost sight of Lombardy. They dress well
here, and seem modest, and have withal an air of style; but of some
five hundred ladies, whom I may have seen in the valley of the Rhone
and about this neighborhood, it would puzzle a modern Appelles to
compose an endurable Venus. I understand a fair countryman of ours is
about taking up her residence in Geneva; and if Lake Leman does not
"woo her," and the "live thunder" leap down from Jura, the jewellers,
at least, will crown her queen of the Canton, and give her the tiara
at cost.