The streets are kept scrupulously clean, as much so as the floor of a well-kept house; a gang is constantly at work sweeping and carrying off the dirt as soon as any can be found. Entering the town from the south, two gate-ways are passed, at short distances from each other, beneath towers which mark epochs in the extension of its walled period. In the upper portion of these gate-ways, still standing over the empty arches, where there is no longer a gate to shut, peaceful pigeons have a cote. They are the only wardens and watchful sentinels to challenge the passer-by. The fronts of the houses rest upon arcades, which form covered walks and are lined with shops. The heavy piers of the arcades exclude the sun, making the shops dark, and the arcade as damp as it is gloomy. All these objections are felt to be more than compensated by the protection furnished from the long winter’s snow. The streets are provided with numerous public fountains of strange devices. They are sculptured and decorated, as if the people loved the water and wished to heighten the pleasure of seeing, welcoming, and using it. This water is brought a great distance from mountain streams, and ceaselessly pours its limpid stream through the open viaducts, and at convenient places is diverted into gigantic stone basins; it is never muddy, and is always delightfully cool. Through each of the principal streets flow additional subterraneous streams of this water, furnishing the best of sewers. This is one of the most pleasing sights common to the smallest Swiss village,—the abundance of good water with which it is supplied; it is ever in sight; overflowing, sparkling everywhere, for every use of man and beast. These fountains resemble those of an Eastern well; to them daily come all the women of the village for the water they will require for their families; and they have other uses, the milk vessels and the cooking utensils are for the most part washed there, and on certain days they are surrounded by groups of blanchisseuses. Here, too, the daily news of the village is discussed. Besides their beauty and convenience, these fountains are a species of living records of the taste and manners of past ages. Many date from the sixteenth century, and are ornamented with colossal representations of Swiss warriors, clad in steel, with wasp-shapes and stuffed breasts, wearing diminutive caps, contrasting with their vast exuberance of beard and stern countenances; then come goddesses, archers, bagpipers, and one—the terror of children—the kinder-fresser-brunnen, or “child-gormandizer-fountain.” Upon the top of a stone pillar, ten feet high, is seated an obese-looking old man; he has the head and shoulders of one poor baby in his gaping mouth, in the very act of swallowing; a bag full of similar choice morceaus hangs around his neck, and they are apparently struggling to escape the fate of their comrade. In one hand of this ogre are the lower extremities of the child whose head he is masticating, and in the other a basket full of urchins to finish his repast; two or three of these have gotten out of the basket, and are scampering off around the pedestal. There is a very beautiful fountain in front of the Federal Palace, adorned with a statue of Berna. But it is the effigy of the bear that perpetually recurs to the eye in various forms and armor; it is the ensign of Bern, its heraldic animal, and cherished with religious care as the palladium of the state. On a fountain in the street of Justice, the Canton is represented in a militant attitude, by the figure of a bear in armor, with sword, belt, and banner; another fountain has a bear attending a cross-bowman as his squire; and the equestrian statue of Rudolph von Erlach is supported at the corners by four life-sized bronze bears as helmet-bearers. From the day of the legend connecting Bruin with the city’s foundation the bears have played a prominent part in local heraldry, that sage and grave beast being cunningly reproduced in print, coin, stone, wood, and confectionery of great artistic and amusing caricatures. The effigy appears upon the cantonal coat-of-arms, and is inseparably connected with the conquests of the warlike burghers. As a memorial of the seven hundredth anniversary, in 1891, of the foundation of the city, the municipal council intend opening a competition for designs of the statue of a bear more modern than that which has already existed for seven centuries. Every visitor to Bern is certain to see the Bärengraben, the bears’ den, containing the live animals. It is told that a whimsical old lady left a handsome estate to the town to maintain a family of bears. In 1798 they became associated with the spoliation of Bern, as they had been with its rise and prosperity. They were transported to Paris by Napoleon’s troops, the huge cage containing the father of the family having upon it an inscription not yet forgotten by the Bernese, “Avoyer de Berne.” For some time these bears, like the eagles of Geneva, held their court in the Jardin des Plantes, where the Gallic cock flapped his new-fledged wings and crowed over all the beasts in Europe—whether rampant or couchant—upon the field of honor. Only one lived to return to his home at the general restoration of the spoils; but this one was the aristocrat Martin, whose descent was traced directly from the pair given to the town by Réné of Lorraine, the ally of Bern in the war against Charles the Bold. Others were subsequently presented by friends of the town in Russia, and the family circle now numbers half a dozen. During the summer they enjoy a great feast from the constant stream of tourists, who persuade them to perform many antics by throwing them bread, fruits, and vegetables, of which they are fond; they literally lay themselves out for your amusement, catching these things lazily as they roll about on their backs. In the centre of the dens a pine stem is erected, and renewed annually; on this the bears take air and exercise, and practise a variety of gymnastics, to the great amusement of the spectators.
Probably next in interest to the bear-pit comes the Zeitglockenthurm, or clock-tower. A minute or two before the hour strikes, a wooden chanticleer, as large as life, seated on a projection of the tower, flaps his wings and crows a warning twice, and at the corresponding time after the striking of the hour he repeats his salutations. A figure, representing Father Time sitting on a throne, marks the hour by reversing his hour-glass, a mail-clad figure strikes the hour on the bell at the top of the tower, then a circle of bears emerge and move round Father Time, who at every stroke of the bell slowly opens his mouth and inclines his sceptre as if he himself were rather bored with Time. Of other objects of interest there may be mentioned the military depot, erected at a cost of 5,000,000 francs, and used as a drilling-school for that military district; the Federal Palace, a handsome stone structure of the Florentine style, and though only in use since 1852, will soon be relegated to subordinate federal offices and a more modern and capacious building, now under construction, will take its place as the federal capitol; a public library, founded at the time of the Reformation, and containing more than fifty thousand volumes; a museum where is to be seen the stuffed skin of the famous St. Bernard dog Barry, who rescued and saved the lives of more than twenty persons overcome in snow-storms and drifts; botanical garden; mint; University, with its faculties of law, medicine, theology, science, languages, etc.; art gallery, and numerous scientific collections, and societies; arsenal with its mediæval treasures, and a most complete system of charitable institutions, including foundling, orphan, blind, mute, and lunatic asylums. The Münster, or Cathedral, is an immense Gothic structure, dating from 1421, with a most elaborate sculptured group on the principal portal, representing the last judgment and the wise and foolish virgins; it is otherwise adorned with endless carvings in stone and flanked with two lofty square towers, which still remain in an unfinished condition; few sacred edifices on the continent are better calculated to make a strong impression. In front of the Cathedral stands the fine bronze equestrian statue of Rudolph von Erlach, the brave defender of Bern at Laupin; it is a name celebrated in the Confederation for five hundred years. An ancestor led his countrymen in the fourteenth century, and Rudolph led the forces of the Canton against the French invasion at the close of the eighteenth century; descendants of the name still live in Bern and enjoy the highest respect and esteem of the people. The Cathedral platz, a small well-shaded park, raised and walled at a great expense, a hundred and eight feet above the river, overhangs the lower town, built on the narrow margin of the rapid Aar. The outer wall bears an inscription that, in 1654, a young student’s horse, frightened by some boys, plunged over this precipice with his rider, the horse being killed, but the rider escaped with only a broken arm and leg, and survived the accident thirty years as a preacher.
On market day, Tuesday in each week, the streets of Bern are crowded with booths and tables exposing for sale every sort of merchandise, garden and farm products, and live animals, from a goat to a cow, a dog to a horse; pigs and lambs are held in the embrace of their owners, happy and contented with the nursing-bottle. The Abattoir, just out of the town, on the banks of the river, with its handsome buildings and beautiful grounds, sooner suggests to the passer-by an attractive pleasure resort than a public slaughter-house.[111] Much of the garden truck and all the dairy product are brought into market in small carts, heavy and stoutly built, pulled by two dogs, one on each side of the shafts, between which is the woman to uphold and guide it, and for this motive power a woman and a dog or a boy and a dog tug together in friendly yoke-fellowship. Dogs are used throughout Switzerland for all light draught purposes; and not always very light, for these dogs have been bred through generations for this purpose, until they have almost the bone and strength of a small horse or ox. They do not seem to be of any distinct canine family, varying much in size, color, and appearance,—
“Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,
And curs of low degree.”
They serve the twofold purpose of beasts of burden and vigilant guardians; the moment the woman stops and puts down the shafts of the cart the dogs go beneath it and lie down, but their eyes never leave a stranger who comes near, and he would find it dangerous to attempt to touch anything in the absence of their mistress. In the evening, when readiness is made to return home, these dogs express their pleasure with a deep-mouthed barking, forming a chorus of corresponding variety to their breeding; as in procession they pass through the streets this barking becomes a deafening yelp; in their struggle to pass one another, the carts being lightened of their loads, often the women are unable to check them with their own force and that of the brakes, with which the cart is provided, and a general stampede occurs. The dogs are highly valued and kindly treated by their owners; passing along at noon, when the women and the dogs are taking their dinner side by side from their respective tin buckets, you will find that the dogs are not eating of the crumbs which fall from their master’s table, but are furnished with rather a more generous repast. The law limits how many pounds these dogs shall pull, but the woman may pull all she can.
Though Bern is the national and cantonal capital, it has an essentially small-town, provincial system of life. There is no capital in Europe more remote from the stir and impulse of the world’s activities. Isolated by its insignificance rather than by any geographical position, free from all extraneous influences, it maintains a mummy condition, bound up in the swaddling-clothes of quaint customs and antiquated ideas. It has been within this generation that a butcher of the town made the advertisement that “all persons, without respect of religion, can have fresh meat every day.” To the stranger, life in Bern soon stagnates into a fearsome weariness. There is absolutely nothing to break the tædium vitæ unless you devote yourself to the task of doing it. From the first of December to the middle of April there is an annual hibernation. Silence reigns in the streets, and the tradesmen will tell you they do not make enough to pay for their light. Amusements are few and too poor to lure one from his melancholy, and, tired with all things else, the weary heart must seek new life and joy in nature. Yet the very silence and absence of bustle, a certain stateliness and reserved demeanor in the inhabitants, showing it not to be a money-making town, imply that its importance at some time must have sprung from more solid and permanent sources than trade can afford, and that another spirit animated its inhabitants. Aristocratic pride is still excessive, and the antique simplicity of its magistrates, the plain and easy manners they uniformly preserve in their intercourse with the people, are not by any means at variance with the assertion. For that external simplicity and affability to inferiors is one of the characteristics of the aristocratic government; all assumption of superiority being carefully avoided when real authority is not in question. Zurich suggests the idea of a municipal aristocracy; Bern of an ancient one. In the one we think we see citizens of a town transformed into nobility, in the other ancient nobles who have made themselves citizens. By the side of those gigantic terraces, of those fine fountains, those massive arches and noble shades you now see none but simple and solid dwellings, yet scarcely any beggarly ones; not an equipage to be seen, but many a wagon, with a fine team of horses or oxen, well appointed in every way. The aristocracy of Bern, in times past, was distinguished by its elegant accomplishments and the splendid ornaments and furniture of its houses, heirlooms of the wall and of the cupboard, which were the pride of generations. The value of the furniture of a Bernese patrician, called Zeguti, was ascertained by his last will, A.D. 1367, to be equal to the public revenue of the city for one year. The aristocratic Bernese officials of those days had under their door-bells written: “Ici on sonne et attend.” Bern is in the centre of one of the most beautiful landscapes in Europe; the country is broken, but cultivated like a garden, and so well wooded as to resemble a vast park. Every town in Switzerland possesses some feature of originality, and none are destitute of lovely and refreshing walks; but there is none richer in umbrageous roads, or where they are kept in better repair, than Bern. Graceful foot-paths wind among the fields, which are little encumbered with fences or hedges, and roads as good as those which are seen in pleasure-grounds. The fine wood of Bremgarten, with its magnificent avenues of trees, extends almost to the very gates of the town, and is reached by a boulevard lined on each side with limes, which in their season perfume the air. A more beautiful or highly-cultivated region is scarcely to be found than the banks of the Aar in its vicinity. The environs abound in views over hill and dale, over wood and river; and the most unobservant cannot fail to remark how superior in brilliancy of color and elegance of form even the wayside flowers appear; the very weediest of weeds seem attractive and ornamental. In the rare pure air of this mountainous section the whole plant population becomes, as it were, refined and aristocratic. Then Bern looks from her peninsula on the beauties and snows of her Oberland, a continuous chain the most regular in all Switzerland, and the most imposing and pompous panorama that can be found in the whole realm of mountains. In the grand barrier which separates Bern from the Valais there are six celebrated peaks, commencing on the east with the Wetterhorn,[112] then the Schreckhorn, the Finsteraarhorn, the Eiger, the Mönch, and the Jungfrau, ranging in height from twelve thousand to fourteen thousand and twenty-six feet. They all pierce the empyrean, but the Finsteraarhorn overtops all the others. They look so sharp and wildly precipitous that the bare thought of standing on any one of them would make you shudder. The horizontal extent of this range is vast, the grouping magnificent, the scene unparagoned. They present bold outlines cut sharply against the sky, summits veiled with clouds, crests alternately gently rounded or rugged and broken, noble slopes, steep precipices, outlines of mingled grace and boldness.[113] In the course of a clear day there is a beautiful variety of aspect, bright, pure, rich, harmonious,—from the dark shadows cast by the rising sun, the brilliancy of mid-day, the violet hues at sunset, and the ashy and almost ghostly paleness of evening. Imagine frozen snow piled in the heavens and stretching miles across the boundary of an otherwise beautiful view, having its sides shaded by innumerable valleys, with here and there a patch of hoary, naked rock, and the upper line all tossed into peaks and swelling ridges, like the waves of a colossal ocean. The grandest scene of all, and seen in greater perfection at Bern than any other point in Switzerland, is that brief period when the majestic architecture of the Alps, with its capitals and bastions, is flushed with the warm light of the lowering sun; when the Alpenglühen[114] (Abendglühen) bathes the stern faces of the ramparts with a flood of light and shade such as only nature can produce from the rarest tints of infinite beauty. As the sun sinks lower the ruddiness of his light seems to augment until the filaments resemble streamers of flame; when the sun sinks deeper the light is gradually withdrawn, all is cold and gray again; the stars come out all at once and leave the mountain like a desolate old man whose
“Hoary hair
Stream’d like a meteor in the troubled air.”
The vapor at times causes a great deal of refraction, and above the clouds rises the whole of the Oberland to an altitude which seems greater than usual; every peak and all the majestic formation are clearly visible, though the whole range appears to be severed from the earth and to float in the air; the line of communication is varied, and while all below is enfeebled by the mist, the snow and ice above throw back the fierce light of the sun with powerful splendor. The people of Bern, of all conditions and ages, may be seen, day after day, waiting and watching for the Alpenglühen. As the hour of sunset approaches, the numerous little parks which furnish a view begin to fill up with the old and young; with the first announcing ray of the Alpenglühen the children cease to be boisterous, the fingers that ply the knitting-needle are still, the laborer at work pursues his vocation sedately, and all gaze in silent admiration. Bern abounds in these humanizing, tranquillizing, and health-giving parks or promenades, ornamented with beds of bright flowers and provided with comfortable seats. Although the Alps are not necessary to render the views from these parks pleasant, yet there they are, to add a background of sublimity to a foreground of surpassing loveliness. The Aar flows towards Bern in a northwest direction, through a valley of some width and several miles in length: to this fact the Bernese are indebted for their fine view of the Oberland Alps, which stretch themselves exactly across the mouth of the gorge at a distance of forty miles in an air-line. There is a story of a king, who said he dearly wished he had never had any picture or statue in his palace so that he could once again have, even for a moment, the crude, sincere delight of a boy staring at a wax-work group. The Bernese will never have need to frame such a wish. To them their Oberland will always be new, a picture that can never fade, a strain of music which can never sound tuneless or harsh.