Byron’s Home on Lake Geneva.--[Page 240.]
I could not help thinking of him and Shelley and Shelley’s wife, sitting out there on the veranda nights, telling ghost stories. I came across some letters the other day, long out of print, written by a Swiss, who also was whiling his days away on this lake in 1816. The first one says, “Last night I met Lord Byron at Madame de Stael’s. I can compare no creature to him. His tones are music, and his features the features of an angel. One sees, though, a little Satan shining in his eyes which, however, is itself half pious. The ladies are mad after him. They surround him like little bacchantes, and nearly tear him to pieces. I hold him as the greatest living poet. Every stormy passion is witnessed in his glance. One sees the corsair in his look, which, though, often is good, tender, and even melancholy.”
I also have followed Byron’s footsteps in his trips in the higher Alps. He went up into the Simmenthal to Thun, to Interlacken, and the heights near to the Jungfrau. “These scenes,” he wrote, “are beyond all description or previous conception.”
My boy made a picture of the old ruin of a tower near Interlacken, pointed out as the scene where the “Manfred” of the poem struggled with the spirits. Manfred was Byron’s best work, but the printers left the best line of it out, by accident. What would Tennyson nowadays say to a publisher’s leaving the best line out of his best poem?
Byron liked the Jungfrau better than Mt. Blanc, and the scenes about the upper end of Lake Geneva inspired him. “All about here,” he exclaimed once, “is a sense of existence of love in its most extended and sublime capacity, and of our participation of its good and its glory.”
His trip among the grandeur of the higher Alps did not tear him away from his wretched self. He could not forget that he was Byron, and his “Manfred,” arguing with ghosts in the old ruin by Lake Thun, might have been a photograph of himself. That’s what Goethe believed it to be, anyway.
Last week, Professor Ferdinand Keller, the Swiss antiquarian, asked me to visit the Lake Dwelling excavations at Robenhausen. This is an excavated village of the stone age, 5,000 years old, the experts think--maybe older still. The famous Keller himself is a marvel, and might be out of some other age. He is eighty or ninety years old, a little, short man, with white hair standing straight on end, shaggy eyebrows, perfectly immense in their projection above a pair of eyes that burn like stars. Spite of his many years, he is bright, cheery and active, and capable of labor as a boy of thirty. His face is as well known in Zurich as one of the city monuments. The young people think he has walked the streets always, and nobody expects him ever to die.
His antiquarian rooms look out over the lake. Indeed the old stone Helmhouse is built in the lake, and it contains the greatest curiosities of the world. One day Keller was looking out of his window and observed some queer shadows of things down in the water. Investigation proved these “things” to be piles, on which in some remote age, houses and towers had been built. Shortly, the shallow inlets of half the lakes of the country were found to have once been the abode of peoples. The oldest of all, like Robenhausen, were of the age of stone. I was glad of a chance to go, and excavate a little for myself in these towns that were old and forgotten a thousand years before Pompeii was even born. This particular village has been perhaps twelve hundred feet square and stood on a platform supported by 100,000 piles. It was three hundred feet from the shore and was once connected with the mainland by a bridge. In some of the villages once lived a people possibly as much civilized as the Mexican of to-day. This is proved by the relics found in the later ones of looms and cloth, and swords and jewelry of lovely patterns. At Robenhausen life had been simple, but I myself dug out specimens of good cloth. There is nothing to see at Robenhausen save the myriad of rotting piles where the turf bed that took the place of what was once a lake has been removed. All the belongings of the village are buried in mud and water. The cedar and beech poles on which the town once stood had been sharpened by fire before driving. They were twelve feet long and eighteen inches around and stood in regular rows. The huts on the platform (two or three complete ones have been found) were one story high, twenty-two feet wide and twenty-seven feet long, built of upright poles matted together with willows and plastered with clay inside and out. The floors, too, were plastered and the roofs were made of rushes. The remains of grinding stones and mills have been found in every cabin. Not the sign of a hieroglyphic or an alphabet has ever been found, to show who those people were.
I prepared for Harper’s Magazine a paper called “The Swiss Lake Dwellers,” describing the excavations at all the Swiss lakes up to the present time. A Swiss artist illustrated it for me.[9]