PHOTOGRAPHS, casts and carvings of the Lucerne Lion are well-nigh as plentiful as copies of the Beatrice of the Palazzo Barberini. All—even the best of these—fall lamentably short of expressing the simple grandeur of Thorwaldsen’s boldest work. The face of a perpendicular sandstone cliff was hewn roughly,—not smoothed nor polished in any part. Half-way up was quarried a niche, and in this, as in his lair, lies a lion, nearly thirty feet long. The splintered shank of a lance projects from his side. The head—broken or bitten off in his mortal throe, lies by the shield of France, which is embossed with the fleur de lys. One huge paw protects the sacred emblem. He has dragged himself, with a final rally of strength to die upon, while caressing it. He will never move again. The limbs are relaxed, the mighty frame stretched by the convulsion that wrenched away his life. He is dead—not daunted;—conquered,—not subdued. The blended grief and ferocity in his face are human and heroic, not brutal. In the rock above and below the den are cut a Latin epitaph, and the names of twenty-six men.
“Helvetiorum fidei ac virtuti. Die X Aug. II et III Sept., 1792;” begins the inscription. The date tells the story.
Who has not read, oft and again, how the Swiss Guard of twenty-six officers and seven hundred and fifty privates were cut to pieces to a man in defence of the royal prisoner of the Tuileries against the mob thirsting for her blood? In the little shop near the monument they show a fac-simile of the king’s order to the Guards to be at the palace upon the fatal day. Trailing vines have crept downward from the top and fissures of the cliff. Tall trees clothe the summit. A pool lies at the base, a slender fountain in the middle. There are always travelers seated upon the benches in front of the railing guarding the water’s brink, contemplating the dead monarch. It is the pride of Lucerne.
Just above it is the Garden of the Glacier, lately uncovered. The earth has been removed with care, revealing cup-like basins in the sandstone, worn by the glacial action of the round stones lying in the bottom of the hollows.
“Do you believe it?” I overheard an American girl ask her cavalier, as they leaned over the railing of a rustic bridge crossing the largest “cup.”
“Not a bit of it! It’s gotten up to order by some of these foreign scientifs. Stones are too round, and the marks of grinding too plain. Fact is—the Glacial Theory is the nobby thing, now-a-days, and if there’s no trick about this concern, it’s proved—clear as print! But they’ve done it too well. Nature doesn’t turn out such smooth jobs.”
It is very smooth work. Those who believe in the authenticity of the record, gaze with awe at the stones, varying in size from a nine-pin ball to boulders of many tons’ weight, forced into their present cavities by the slow rotation of cycles. Ball and boulder have been ground down themselves in all this wear and tear, but the main rock has been the greater sufferer. The glacier was the master and resistless motive-power.
The great Glacier of the Uri-Rothestock was in sight of my bed-room windows, flanked by the eternal snow-line of the Engelberger Alps. Across the lake from the city loomed Mt. Pilatus.
“If Pilatus wears his cap, serene will be the day;
If his collar he puts on, you may venture on your way.