[94] Longfellow’s “Hyperion.”
[95] Virgil.
[96] The Rhone is made to serve useful as well as æsthetic purposes; the great water-power of this river has been utilized by diverting that part passing on the left of the island into a canal, which conducts the water into a building containing twenty turbines, with four thousand four hundred net horse-power; this power is utilized in a variety of ways, from running sewing-machines to supplying power for an electric light plant; it is an enterprise very profitable to the municipality of Geneva.
[97] See Chapter on “Constitution.”
[98] In the Canton of Vaud, a short distance back from the lake is Avanche or Avanches, the ancient capital of Helvetia; near this place the Helvetians were defeated by one of Vitellius’s lieutenants, and “many thousand were slain and many sold as slaves, and after committing great ravages the army marched in order of battle to Aventicum, the capital of the country.” (Tacitus.)
[99] The first steamer on a Swiss lake was the “Guillaume Tell,” in 1823, on the Lake of Geneva.
[100] Whirlwinds of snow, or tourmentes (known in the Grisons), are tossed aloft by the gale, like the sandy vortices of Africa formed by the simoom; they are dangerous by blinding the traveller and effacing the track.
[101] On this passage of Helvetian history, there is a poem of exquisite beauty, by Mrs. Hemans, the “Record of Woman:”
“Werner sat beneath the linden tree,
That sent its lulling whispers through his door,