I
If Lucerne is the most widely advertised lake in the world—if its name, in recent years, has come to be associated, less with ancient gallant exploits of half-legendary William Tells than with cheap Polytechnic Tours and hordes of personally conducted trippers, it has luckily forfeited singularly little of its ancient charm and character, and remains, if you visit it at the right moment—or at any moment, if you are not too fastidious in your claims for solitude and æsthetic exclusiveness—possibly the most beautiful and unquestionably the most dramatic and striking of all the half-dozen or so greater lakes, Swiss or Italian, that cluster round the outskirts of the great central knot of Alps. "Cluster round the outskirts," for it is characteristic of all these lakes, just as it is characteristic of most of our greater English meres at home—of Windermere, for example, or Bassenthwaite, or Ullswater—that, though their upper ends penetrate more or less deeply (and Lucerne and Ullswater more deeply than any) among the bases of the hills, yet their lower reaches, whence discharge the mighty rivers, invariably trail away into open plain, or terminate among mere gentle undulations. Of all this class of lake, then—lakes of the transition—Lucerne is at once the most complex in shape, the least comprehensible in bulk, and the most immediately mountainous in character. The most complex in shape, because, though it is usual to describe this as a cross, yet the cross is so distorted in its lower and major member as practically to lose all really cross-like character, and to remind one rather of a wriggling viper. The least comprehensible in bulk, because there is actually no point on its surface, or on its immediate margin, or perhaps indeed anywhere, whence it is possible to grasp its basin as a whole, as it is possible, for example, in a rough kind of way, to grasp the shape and dimension of such a much larger lake as Geneva from the vineyards in the neighbourhood of Aubonne. The most immediately mountainous in character, because no other big Swiss lake, as already intimated, extends itself so deeply into the heart of giant hills, or is bordered so immediately by steep and rugged mountains. Thus Lucerne gains in surprise and mystery what it loses in simple graciousness; is dramatic and startling where other lakes are tranquil and merely soothing; and is certainly, to sum up, the most splendid and magnificent lake in the Alps, if not the most dignified and beautiful.