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,