VI

The big central division of the Lake of Lucerne, extending from the intersection of the cross to the great right angle (it is practically a right angle) at Brunnen that marks the commencement of the Urner See, or Bay of Uri, is considerably the largest, and probably in some respects the most beautiful, but otherwise perhaps the least interesting, of all five reaches of the lake. It lacks, indeed, the superlative grandeur of the Bay of Uri, which corresponds, in English Lakeland, to the head of Ullswater, or Wastwater—curiously so, since in all three cases we have, not merely a climax of severe and even savage sterility, but in all the vista up the water is closed chiefly by a single, great, pyramidal hill: at Wastwater by Great Gable, at Ullswater by Caudale Moor, and here, at the Bay of Uri, by the dark outline of the Bristenstock. The Urner See, then, is the grandest and most imposing, and in some lights gloomiest, lake in Switzerland, though the Walenstadtsee, in Glarus and Gallen, will in these respects by some be thought a rival; but the mid-reaches of Lucerne, to the south of the red cliffs and dark woods of Rigi, and contained towards the west by Pilatus, and towards the east by the twin Mythen—the last three nobly peaked—excel, I think, in open sunny beauty. Contrariwise, these reaches have but small historical interest, with the single exception of Gersau, as compared with the other four members: the Tell traditions, as we have seen, or shall see presently, are confined to the Bay of Küssnacht and to the lake of Uri; Arnold von Winkelried and Nicolas von der Flüe belong to Stans, and Stans, though actually set back a couple of miles or so from the margin of the lake, essentially belongs to the Bay of Alpnach; whilst even the little Lucernersee, though so humble in scenic splendour, leads at any rate to the quays of Lucerne itself, with its girdle of towers and ancient bridges, and with the banners in its Rathhaus that were wrested from the Austrian on the field of Sempach, and the armour there stripped from the dead body of Duke Leopold. Of most of the villages on this central reach, or reaches (for the division is sub-divided by the narrow strait between the Nasen)—whether Weggis, Vitznau, Buochs, or Beckenried—there is little to be said, save that all are quaint and characteristic, and that all are delightfully situated on the margin of the lake. Each, of course, is not without its page in history—Buochs, for example, was burnt by the French in 1798; whilst Weggis was only finally incorporated into the Canton of Lucerne, after years of struggling independence, in 1535. Gersau, however, of all this group of littoral settlements, is in some respects by far the most significant. This is a mere village, at the foot of the wooded Hochfluh—the last big point to the cast of the strangely isolated Rigi massif, and apparently the loftiest (5,574 feet), with the exception of Rigi Kulm. Hardly bigger than Küssnacht, and decidedly smaller than Brunnen, this town—if town it may be called—of less than fifteen hundred souls, with its neighbouring strip of lake-side territory, maintained for more than four long centuries its status as the smallest independent sovereign state in Europe. The place once belonged to the Dukes of Hapsburgh, who "levied duties on lambs, goatskins, fish, and grey cloth," and by them it was mortgaged to the barons of Ramstein, who parted with its possession to the house of Von Moos, of Lucerne. From the latter Gersau bought its freedom in 1390 for the sum of 690 pfennigs, which it had painfully "scraped together after ten years of hard toil." "They had already, thirty-one years before, concluded a league with the Four Forest Cantons, and had even rendered assistance to the Confederates in the battle of Sempach; where a native of the town captured the banner of Hohenzollern and brought it home and placed it in the church of Gersau, which even in its present form bears witness to the pride of the little territory." Thus Gersau freed herself in the Middle Ages from the house of Hapsburgh, and triumphed against the house of Hohenzollern, just as civilized Europe, more than five hundred years later, agonised and struggled only yesterday:

"Haud aliter puppesque tuæ pubesque tuorum
Aut portum tenet aut pleno subit ostia velo,
Perge modo, et, qua te ducit via, dirige gressum."

LAKE URI FROM BRUNNEN.

This central compartment of the lake is closed towards the east, as already stated, by the bare rock peaks of the Great and Little Mythen. These have been compared, unless I mistake, to the twin Langdale Pikes, in Westmoreland, as seen from the head of Windermere; and probably the comparison has just as much validity as comparisons of the sort are ever capable of asserting. Nature, who is studious never to reproduce herself with complete and meticulous accuracy, is fond enough of teasing us with suggestion and reminiscence, and often enough finds pleasure in moulding "two lovely berries" on a single stem. The Mythen are removed, again like Wordsworth's "lusty twins," to a quite appreciable distance from the margin of the lake; but here, whereas in Westmoreland the intervening country is the sweetest confusion imaginable of undulating pasture and coppice along the broken course of the Brathay, the broad plinth that rises up in slow but persistent gradient from Brunnen to the foot of the Mythen is, to the writer's way of thinking (and he knows of no support from the judgment of other critics), the weakest bit of composition along the whole basin of Lucerne, and a tract of country—it is luckily very small—as dull and profitless as any to be found among the Alps. Yet this, in fact, as part and parcel of the Canton of Schwyz, is in a sense the very heart and core of Switzerland, and the veritable holy cradle of Swiss freedom. It has given its name to the whole Confederation, and the little town of Schwyz itself, which is visible rather too obviously as the land slopes up in the distance, though with less than eight thousand inhabitants, might very justly complain of Berne that the latter has usurped its proper dignity in attracting to itself the Swiss seat of federal government. Brunnen, which is called the port of Schwyz, and from which it is distant about three miles, is singularly crushed and over-weighted by the great hotels on the Seelisberg and the Axenfels, and has suffered perhaps more severely by the exploitation of its neighbourhood than any other single station on the lake. The attraction here, of course, is the majestic Bay of Uri, which comes into view with startling suddenness, in a few revolutions of the paddles, as the steamer approaches the quay at Brunnen; and whose splendour, luckily, neither monster hotel, nor monster crowd, nor the presence of the great St. Gothard railway (here first insistently apparent on the margin of the lake),

"nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy."

One would have preferred, no doubt, to have approached this inner shrine of the hills—which is also the inner shrine of the great traditions of Swiss liberty—with somewhat less obtrusive parade of the engineering triumphs of the nineteenth century. One remembers for the moment how William and Dorothy Wordsworth came hither, and on foot, in 1820. "We descended," writes Dorothy in one of her journals, "by a long flight of steps, into the Vale, and, after about half a mile's walking, we arrived at Brunnen. Espied Wm. and M. [her brother, William, and his wife] upon a crag above the village, and they directed us to the Eagle Inn, where I instantly seated myself before a window, with a long reach of the Lake of Uri before me, the magnificent commencement to our regular approach to the St. Gothard Pass of the Alps. [Hitherto their approach from Calais had been devious, by way of the Rhine and the Oberland.] My first feeling was of extreme delight in the excessive beauty of the scene—I had expected something of a more awful impression from the Lake of Uri; but nothing so beautiful." There was then no St. Gothard railway; no over-weening hotels; not even, perhaps, a steamboat on the lake!

It is singular, perhaps, that neither this superlative Bay of Uri, nor all its varied traditions of the Tellsplatte or the Rütli, should have succeeded in evoking a single verse from the poet whose inspiration had been kindled to such splendid effort in Scotland, less than twenty years previously, by the vision of a sweet-voiced girl by the spray of a Highland waterfall, by the careless evening greeting of a woman by a lake. The magic period of plenary inspiration was passed, indeed, for Wordsworth at the time of this continental tour in 1820; and yet it was after his return to England that he composed the great sonnet on King's College Chapel. The Rütli lies across the lake scarcely half an hour's row from Brunnen, yet it does not appear from Dorothy's journal that her brother even visited it. Here, on a green shelf of meadow by the side of the greener lake, and over-topped towards the west by the dark woods and cliffs of the Sonnenberg, are the few square yards of sacred soil where the three founders of Swiss freedom met together and conspired, if fables do not lie, for the rooting out of the Austrian tyrant in 1307. Their actual names are given, and the very day of meeting—November 7, in "the dead vast and middle of the night"—yet the imp of modern criticism, which has spared neither Tell nor Arnold von Winkelried, is clamorous again to rob us of this famous drama of conjuration on the Rütli. On the opposite shore of the lake, but considerably further to the south—to the south, in fact, of the little village of Sisikon, which itself may be reckoned as roughly the centre of the Bay of Uri—on the immediate margin of the water, and below the great, vertical, twisted precipices of the dark and towering Axenberg, is the little ledge of the Tellsplatte, where Tell is said to have sprung ashore from the boat, and from the custody of his warders, during the onslaught of a sudden squall, when on his way as a prisoner from Altdorf to Küssnacht. The chapel was rebuilt towards the close of last century, and is visible as we pass from the steamer. Behind it runs the great St. Gothard railway, on its way from Bâle to Milan; and higher up the cliff is the famous highroad of the Axenstrasse, which was driven along the face of these sheer and impracticable precipices, in alternate cutting, embankment and tunnel, by the zeal of the Federal Government in 1863–64, in order to better the communication between Canton Ticino and the rest of Switzerland. Ticino, or Tessin, the fifth largest of the states in acreage but the seventh in population, lies to the south of Uri, across the wild pass of the St. Gothard, on the sunny Italian side of the Alps, and was only admitted to the Confederation in 1803, though earlier by a dozen years than units of such importance as Neuchâtel, Geneva, and the Valais. One is rather apt to forget that the Switzerland of the days before the French Revolution—the Switzerland whose name is a synonym for liberty; the Switzerland of Sempach, Morat, and Morgarten—consisted only of the thirteen German-speaking states that are clustered mostly to the north and west of the original mountain nucleus of Uri, Unterwalden, and Schwyz.

With Flüelen, exactly at the head of the lake, we conclude our perambulation of the Vierwaldstättersee. I do not know that this little village has much of particular interest; but a couple of miles beyond it is the small mountain capital of Uri, where Tell is reported in the immortal legend to have shot the apple from off his boy's head, and where his statue still stands in the diminutive market-place. The vale of the Reuss at Altdorf, and indeed as far south as Amsteg, where it is blocked, as it were, by the huge pyramid of the Bristenstock, and where the floor of the valley first begins to rise in earnest towards the far-away col of the St. Gothard, is merely a prolongation of the mountain basin of the Urnersee, with the substitution of flat green pasture for a pavement of crystal lake. Of the Bay of Uri itself I feel that I have said little, yet feel, with some sincerity, that there is little to be said. Its elements, though majestic, are exceedingly downright and simple, whereas those of the rest of the Lake of Lucerne are multiform, subtle, and complex. Whatever be the impression that it effects on the spectator, it is likely to accomplish this at once; it is no finer at the head than at the foot; and all that it has of grandeur (and nothing of the kind in the Alps is grander) is flashed upon us in a moment, in complete and final revelation, when first it comes into vision between the piers at Trieb and Brunnen. It varies, of course, in splendour as the day is bright or dull; but less, I imagine, than the lower reaches of the lake, which depend more for their effect on screens of mountain more remote, and are capable of assuming softer and lovelier colouring exactly because their atmospheric distances are greater. In gloom, or rain, or heat-haze, it is the one division of the lake that will fail to disappoint us, but perhaps it is also the one division that responds less readily to the vivifying influences of sunshine and blue sky. Nor is it really wild, if one may say so without paradox, in the sense in which Ennerdale is wild, or Wastdale Head, or Langstrath, among the familiar fells of Cumberland. The cliffs that drop directly to its eastern shore are indeed tremendous and unapproachable, but above them, as we know, are gentle Alpine pastures that are musical with cow-bells, and meadows that are fragrant with hay and flowers. The tops of distant snow-clad mountains, again, though visible from its waters, are really removed to immense distances, above it and beyond it, and though they ring it round in insuperable barrier, almost belong to another world. Land where you can, or will, and you find your immediate environment scarcely wilder, if wilder at all, than the lower slopes of Pilatus or Rigi. It is only, in fact, in the upland vales of Switzerland—at spots like the Grimsel Hospice, or towards the summits of passes like the Simplon or the Splügen—that the ordinary wanderer, who is not a climber, will realize that abandon of wild and savage sterility that delights him in a hundred glens among the mountains of Scotland or Carnarvonshire, in Glen Sannox, or Glen Sligachan, in Llanberis, or Cwm Llydaw. The Bay of Uri is indeed majestic, and its framework of distant summits is indeed magnificently wild, yet not here, I think, shall we taste with Shelley the strange

"Pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be."

[INDEX]

[The principal reference is given first.]

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BILLING AND SONS, LTD., GUILDFORD

[Transcribers' Notes]

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

This book does not have a Table of Contents.

Text uses both "Küsnacht" and "Küssnacht"; both retained.

Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.

Frontispiece: "FLÜELEN" was printed as "FLUELLEN" and "FLUELEN" but changed here for consistency with all other occurrences of the name.

Page [9]: "Vierwaldstättersee" was printed as "Vierwaldstattersee" but changed here for consistency with all other occurrences of the name.

Page [19]: "courve" probably is a misspelling for "couvre".

Page [48]: "Engelberg" was printed as "Engelburg" but changed here for consistency with all other occurrences of the name.

Index: "Tellsplatte" was printed as "Tellplatte" but changed here for consistency with all other occurrences of that name. "Axenstrasse" was printed as "Axentrasse" but changed here to match the [correct] spelling on page [60]. "Lopperberg" was printed as "Loffenberg" but changed here to match the spelling on page [42]. "Spreuerbrücke" is printed as two words on page [18].