Mont Blanc loomed up very white in the south, but like other distinguished persons of whom we form an opinion from the description of poets, the "monarch of mountains" did not seem to me so very superior to his fellows. After a look or two at him as we approached Geneva, I ceased straining my head out of the cabriolet, and devoted my eyes to things more within the scale of my affections—the scores of lovely villas sprinkling the hills and valleys by which we approached the city. Sweet—sweet places they are to be sure! And then the month is May, and the straw-bonneted and white-aproned girls, ladies and peasants alike, were all out at their porches and balconies, lover-like couples were sauntering down the park-lanes, one servant passed us with a tri-cornered blue billet-doux between his thumb and finger, the nightingales were singing their very hearts away to the new-blown roses, and a sense of summer and seventeen, days of sunshine and sonnet-making, came over me irresistibly. I should like to see June out in Geneva.
The little steamer that makes the tour of Lake Leman, began to "phiz" by sunrise directly under the windows of our hotel. We were soon on the pier, where our entrance into the boat was obstructed by a weeping cluster of girls, embracing and parting very unwillingly with a young lady of some eighteen years, who was lovely enough to have been wept for by as many grown-up gentlemen. Her own tears were under better government, though her sealed lips showed that she dared not trust herself with her voice. After another and another lingering kiss, the boatman expressed some impatience, and she tore herself from their arms and stepped into the waiting batteau. We were soon along side the steamer, and sooner under way, and then, having given one wave of her handkerchief to the pretty and sad group on the shore, our fair fellow-passenger gave way to her feelings, and sinking upon a seat, burst into a passionate flood of tears. There was no obtruding on such sorrow, and the next hour or two were employed by my imagination in filling up the little drama, of which we had seen but the touching conclusion.
I was pleased to find the boat (a new one) called the "Winkelreid," in compliment to the vessel which makes the same voyage in Cooper's "Headsman of Berne." The day altogether had begun like a chapter in a romance.
"Lake Leman wooed us with its crystal face,"
but there was the filmiest conceivable veil of mist over its unruffled mirror, and the green uplands that rose from its edge had a softness like dreamland upon their verdure. I know not whether the tearful girl whose head was drooping over the railing felt the sympathy, but I could not help thanking nature for her, in my heart, the whole scene was so of the complexion of her own feelings. I could have "thrown my ring into the sea," like Policrates Samius, "to have cause for sadness too."
The "Winkelreid" has (for a republican steamer), rather the aristocratical arrangement of making those who walk aft the funnel pay twice as much as those who choose to promenade forward—for no earthly reason that I can divine, other than that those who pay dearest have the full benefit of the oily gases from the machinery, while the humbler passenger breathes the air of heaven before it has passed through that improving medium. Our youthful Niobe, two French ladies not particularly pretty, an Englishman with a fishing-rod and gun, and a coxcomb of a Swiss artist to whom I had taken a special aversion at Rome, from a criticism I overheard upon my favorite picture in the Colonna, my friends and myself, were the exclusive inhalers of the oleaginous atmosphere of the stern. A crowd of the ark's own miscellaneousness thronged the forecastle—and so you have the programme of a day on Lake Leman.
LETTER LXV.
LAKE LEMAN—AMERICAN APPEARANCE OF THE GENEVESE—STEAMBOAT OF THE RHONE—GIBBON AND ROUSSEAU—ADVENTURE OF THE LILIES—GENEVESE JEWELLERS—RESIDENCE OF VOLTAIRE—BYRON'S NIGHT-CAP—VOLTAIRE'S WALKING-STICK AND STOCKINGS.
The water of Lake Leman looks very like other water, though Byron and Shelley were nearly drowned in it; and Copet, a little village on the Helvetian side, where we left three women and took up one man (the village ought to be very much obliged to us), is no Paradise, though Madame de Stael made it her residence. There are Paradises, however, with very short distances between, all the way down the northern shore; and angels in them, if women are angels—a specimen or two of the sex being visible with the aid of the spyglass, in nearly every balcony and belvidere, looking upon the water. The taste in country-houses seems to be here very much the same as in New England, and quite unlike the half-palace, half-castle style common in Italy and France. Indeed the dress, physiognomy, and manners of old Geneva might make an American Genevese fancy himself at home on the Leman. There is that subdued decency, that grave respectableness, that black-coated, straight-haired, saint-like kind of look which is universal in the small towns of our country, and which is as unlike France and Italy, as a playhouse is unlike a Methodist chapel. You would know the people of Geneva were Calvinists, whisking through the town merely in a diligence.
I lost sight of the town of Morges, eating a tête-à-tête breakfast with my friend in the cabin. Switzerland is the only place out of America where one gets cream for his coffee. I cry, Morges mercy on that plea.