As you enter Sarnen you pass its asylum for the destitute. Upon its front is the inscription ‘Christo in pauperibus.’ I suppose this is meant as a reference to His saying that whatever is done to the least of His brethren—it being implied that those who have nothing in this world are least of all—He will regard as done unto Himself. He, then, is in the pauper, looking for, and ready to acknowledge, the charity of the disciple. The expression is worthy of the idea, and of the sentiment that animates the idea.
Sarnen is a quaint, quiet place. Ammer would have me go to the Hotel de Ville to see a model in relief of Switzerland, and the portraits of some score, or more, of landammans, enriched and sanctified, of course, by that of Nicholas Von der Flüe, for he is everywhere in Unterwalden. The preternatural ugliness, the out-of-the-world expression, ‘the abominable imitation of humanity’ of these old local celebrities seemed, somehow or other, in keeping with the place. The expression of the features is the expression of the mind: that, sometimes perhaps its absence, is what they express. But the generations of worthies, who had successively vegetated in this then both unvisited, and imprisoning, valley, which had neither ingress nor egress, could have had but little mind to express in their features. Some of them, methought, looked, what at the best they could have been only a remove or two from, like cowherds who had prospered in their world, and after a life spent on the mountains in summer, and in the stables in winter, waiting on their cows, had arrived at last at the happiness of being able to eat as much cheese as they pleased, without the trouble of making it: and so had grown fat. But this only puffed out, and so made more obtrusive, the indelible cowherd expression. Perhaps, too, their portraits would have been more pleasing, and more indicative of mind, if the worthies, and their fathers before them, had not been taught to believe in their troglodyte saint; and, as another perhaps, we will hope that the railway, by bringing the world to the rising generation, and taking them into the world, may do something to make their features and expression an improvement on those of their ancestors. At all events it will, I think, have the effect of lowering the place of the saint’s coat in the therapeutics of the valley.
August 5.—Left Sarnen at 6 A.M., and in little more than an hour reached Alpnach, where I breakfasted while waiting for the steamer, that was to take me to Stanzstad. Alpnach is a populous village at the head of the Alpnach See, a branch of the lake of the four Cantons, which from this point stretches away to the north-east. It stands at the bottom of the south-east slope of Pilatus, the well wooded flank of which here comes down to the lake. The walk had been through a broad grassy valley, thickly planted, in some parts, with fruit trees. Perhaps the walk on the eastern side of the valley, through Kerns, to Stanz, my immediate destination, would have been over more diversified, as it would have been over higher, ground. And this, I believe, would have brought me to Stanz sooner than the route I took, for I lost at Alpnach an hour in waiting for the steamer. The water was the attraction, and the view, I should have from the water, of Pilatus. But I was satisfied with the way I went, and that was enough.
The steamer was not long in reaching Stanzstad, where we again got on our legs, and in a little more than half an hour were in the Angel of Stanz—a quiet inn, about the centre of the place, facing the church. As the Commune of Stanz possesses an unusual amount of cultivable land, so much as to enable it to give to each of its numerous burgers an unusual amount of garden-ground, I spent the rest of the day here in looking into the working of the system. And again the next morning on the way to Buochs, where I was to take the steamer for the Canton of Uri, I inspected a large part of the Almend ground of Stanz. Each burger peasant is allowed 1,400 klafters, which is about equal to an English acre. Of this amount I found 800 in garden-ground, and the rest in marshy grass. Switzerland, speaking generally, has very little straw for foddering cattle, but a great many cattle to fodder. The rushes, sedges, and young reeds cut from such land, and dried, go some way towards supplying this want. This difficulty is so great that I have seen horse-keepers resort for bedding to a mixture of sawdust, and of leaves and weeds that had been collected in the woods, and then dried and stored away.
August 6.—While waiting for the steamer at Buochs, there was time to contemplate a charming piece of Swiss life, which is held up for you, to take your fill of looking at it, on the long slant of the opposite mountain, beyond the blue lake. It is on the broad south-eastern slope of the mountainous promontory called Obburgen, that runs out into the lake, midway between the Rigiberg and Pilatus, and would, but for two narrow straits, join on to the former on the right, and to the latter on the left. I see in Dufour’s map the place is called Ennetburgen. I did not set foot in it myself, nor am I acquainted with any one who has, but if the working of inner causes may, sometimes, be read on the outside of things, then, industrious, frugal, contented, happy Ennetburgen! that has neither riches, nor poverty; that knows neither waste nor want; and where every man feels that he is a man, because a portion of the earth, the common and ennobling inheritance of all, is his! For two thirds, or so, up the mountain, its gentle ascent is almost all in small prairies, very green, and thickly planted with fruit trees, with just here and there, as at Sacheln, small patches of, at this season, golden grain, to enrich the tender green of the grass, and the darker green of the fruit trees. The upper third of the mountain is in forests for fuel, and in summer grazing ground for cows. But the characteristic feature is the houses. There is no town. That has, as it were, been taken to pieces, and evenly dispersed, house by house, over the whole space of some thousands of acres. Each house is a modest carefully kept home.
This is a scene that tells its own tale. The properties must be small, because the owners of these dispersed houses must possess, each, the land immediately around his house; for, of course, in such a place there can hardly be any other means of living than that derived from the land. And nothing, but the fact that, here, each man cultivates with his own hands his own land, can account for the completeness with which the rocks have been quarried, and removed; and for the loving care with which the grass, and fruit trees, are tended. How unlike was this to the aspect of the Almend lands of Stanz I had just been looking at. There the plan is to do as little as possible for the land, and to get as much as possible out of it this current year. Next year, or at all events in a year or two, some other transitory occupant will be treating it with the same thoughts, and in the same fashion. Here the heart of the owner is in his land, as, for many generations, the hearts of his forefathers have been. We can show nothing of this kind in England. With us there is not the relation of man to the land which can alone produce such a scene. But I believe that in old, almost prehistoric Italy, before it was devastated, and ruined, by the greed, and brutality, of Rome, many such scenes might have been looked upon. The same careful culture of small properties was, probably, in very many places there the rule then; with the addition, in harmony with the circumstances of those times, of some loftily walled place of refuge, seen from far, on its coign of vantage: as Virgil describes them, ‘Towns perched on precipices of rock, with rivers gliding by beneath their antique walls.’
CHAPTER IV.
BUOCHS—GERSAU—THE BAY OF URI—ALTORF—AM STAG—WASEN—GÖSCHENEN—SCHÖLLINEN—THE DEVIL’S BRIDGE—THE URSEREN THAL—ST. GOTHARD.
Oh! how I love with thee to walk,
And listen to thy whispered talk!—Thomson.