“Go forth, young hearts! Go quench your thirst at this unknown spring. Follow up the torrents and lose yourselves in the plaintive forests. The Genius of the Alps is waiting for you, and there also is the secret home of the Genius of the Fatherland.”
Rogers took this same route and wrote about it, almost a hundred years ago, at this very same Saint-Maurice where we now arrived:—
“Still by the Leman Lake, for many a mile,
Among those venerable trees I went,
Where damsels sit and weave their fishing-nets,
Singing some national song by the way-side.
But now the fly was gone, the gnat was come;
Now glimmering light from cottage-windows broke.
‘Twas dark; and, journeying upward by the Rhone,