Look! huge clouds are rising; one already veils the sun, its edges crimsoned, and its centre translucent. A moment more and the cloudy veil is torn aside as by the hand of a genie, and as the red rays of the great orb of day blaze into our faces like a huge conflagration, a universal burst of admiration follows at one of the grandest and most magnificent views the eye of man can look upon. The sudden effect of the sunburst revealed a spectacle that was like a vision of the promised land.
We realized now how "distance lends enchantment to the view." That blue atmosphere of distance, that seems to paint everything with its softening finish, is exquisite here. Lake Lucerne was at our very feet, and looked as though we might toss a pebble into it; eight other lakes, calm and still, and looking like polished blue steel plates resting in the landscape, flashed in the sunbeams, the little water-craft like motes upon their surface; silver ribbons of rivers glittered on the bosom of the mountains like necklaces, while villages appeared like pearls scattered on the dark-green carpet below, and we looked right through a great rainbow, "the half of the signet ring of the Almighty," at one, and the landscape about it—a singular and beautiful effect. Villages, lakes, landscapes were seen, as it were, through a river of light in a great panorama of hundreds of miles in extent, forming a view the grandeur and splendor of which it is impossible to describe.
But while we are looking at this wondrous picture, the sun sinks lower, and we raise our gaze to the grand chain of mountains, whose edges are now fringed with fire, or their snow peaks glowing in rose tints, sending back reflections from their blue glaciers, or sparkling in the latent rays.
There rises the great chain of Bernese Alps.
There are mountains—eight, ten, twelve thousand feet into the air. How sharply they are printed against the sky! and how they roll away off towards the horizon in a great billowy swell, till lost in the far distance, the white-topped peak of one tall sentinel just visible, touched by the arrowy beam of the sun that glances from his icy helmet!
Look which way you may, and a new scene of surpassing beauty chains the attention. Here rises rugged old Pilatus, almost from the bosom of Lake Lucerne; beyond Lucerne, the whole canton is spread out to view, with a little river crinkling through it, like a strip of silver bullion thread; away off, at one side, the top of the Cathedral of Zurich catches the eye; down at our very feet, on the lake, is a little speck—Tell's Chapel; right around us rise the Righi group of mountains, green to their summits, and in contrast to the perpetual snow mantles of the distant Bernese. But the sun, which has been like a huge glittering and red, flashing shield, is now only showing a flaming edge of fire behind the apparently tallest peak, making it look like the flame bursting from a volcano; the landscape is deepening in huge shadows, which we can see are cast by the mountains, half obscuring it from view; the blaze is fainter—it is extinguished; a few moments of red, fiery glow where it sank, and anon a great, rushing group of clouds, and the blackness of night closes in, and the fierce rush of the Alpine wind is upon us.
We turned and groped our way back to the house, whose brightly-lighted windows spoke of comfort within; and round the board at the meal, which served alike for dinner and supper, we exhausted the vocabulary of terms of admiration over the grand spectacle we had just witnessed, which seemed worth a journey across the Atlantic to see.
At the supper table, we fraternize with other Americans from different parts of our country; and even the reserved and reticent Englishman finds it pleasant to converse, or address a few words to those he has not been introduced to, it is "so pleasant to talk one's own language, you know." Out in a little sanded sitting-room, where cigars and warming fluids were enjoyed before retiring, the attention of us Americans was attracted to an old and familiar friend, whose unlooked-for presence in this quarter was no less surprising than it was gratifying to our national pride. It was nothing more nor less than a print of Trumbull's well-known picture of the Battle of Bunker Hill, suspended over the mantelpiece. There were General Warren, falling into the arms of the shirt-sleeved soldier, and the British captain, pushing aside the bayonets that were thrust at his prostrate figure. There was Pitcairn, falling backwards from the redoubt, shot dead in the moment of victory by the colored soldier in the foreground. And there was old Putnam, waving his sword over his head at the advancing grenadiers—the very same old picture that every one of us had seen in our histories and geographies in school-boy days.
"The thing was neither rich nor rare,
But how the devil it got there,"