Letters from Switzerland

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

The gates of the town are closed on the Sabbath day during the hours of service, and an outward respect paid to the day which is creditable to the people. In the hotel, a small room has been fitted up neatly as a chapel for an English service, a custom not unusual in Switzerland, where English travellers are flocking constantly.

Basle is the great starting point for Swiss travelling for those who enter the German frontier. We have now come to the end of railroads, and must depend on horses or go afoot. The sooner one takes his place in the diligence after arriving, the more likely he is to have a good seat when he wishes to depart, and though we were early for this, no less than twelve had the start of us, and the coach carried only nine. “You shall have a supplement,” we were told, and at nine in the morning with twenty-five travellers we were at the Post Office, to be despatched with the mails and the females to Schaffhausen. This posting is a Government concern, and the postmaster has charge of the horses as well as the letters. There was no place but the middle of the street in which to remain, till at the appointed hour the heavy diligence lumbered up to the door: the nine predestinated thereunto took their seats; an omnibus and one or two carriages by way of supplement, received the rest of us, many grumbling grievously that they had not places in the coach, and others preferring as we did, an easy carriage with a party of four. The postillion dressed in a yellow jacket with a brass horn under his arm, with which he amused himself and the country people as he passed, mounted the box, and we soon crossed the Rhine, and followed its banks upward for many a pleasant mile. The morning was fine after a rainy night, clear, cool and bracing; the distant Alps were constantly in sight on the right, and the winding, often rapid, always beautiful river, with its vine-clad shores and smiling cottages was by our side. We left the carriage at Lauffenburg, and walked to the banks of the Rhine, where the river is choked into a narrow gorge, and dashes with terrible force through a deep sunk channel, among opposing rocks, making a fearful pass in which an English nobleman lost his life, attempting to make the rapids in a little boat. Resuming our seats, we found one of our fellow travellers belonging to the diligence, Alderman —— of New York left behind. The coach was out of call, and the best he could do was to mount the edge of the postillion’s single seat in front of our carriage and ride on to the next post town. The Alderman was heavy, the place was too strait for him, and I suggested that a franc would buy the whole seat. He tried the effect of it, the postillion took the silver, dropped down upon the foot rest, and the Alderman had the seat to himself. In an hour we stopped to dine. Perhaps we were here a few moments sooner than mine host of the Waldshut Hotel expected us, for the dinner was not on the table, but it gave us a fine opportunity to observe a specimen of manners sufficiently characteristic to be made a matter of record. At the table there sat ten English, six German, and seven American ladies and gentlemen. The dishes were slow in coming in; the English gentlemen all having ladies under their care, left the table, rushed into the kitchen, seized the best dishes of meats they could find, brought them to their own places, and helping themselves and their ladies, devoured them in the presence of the more barbarous Germans and Americans, who looked on with amazement. I took the liberty of remarking that it was an outrage, of which I had never before seen an example in civilized life, and was happy to observe that the practice was confined to a single nation out of the number represented here. An English lady gave me an approving nod, but the men were too far gone in beef and sour wine to pay any attention to lessons in good breeding. As might be expected, the leader in this grab-game grumbled at his bill, declared he was charged for more wine than he had drunk, and laid himself out in abusing Swiss taverns in general, and this in particular, till the postman’s horn summoned him and the rest to their seats.

The scenery improves as we ascend the Rhine. The banks are steeper, the hills are bolder; the water rushes more rapidly through winding channels, and the people we meet bear more characteristic features of another country. It is a Catholic holiday. We are meeting the peasantry in great numbers, dressed in their best clothes, some of them gaily; blooming lasses in snow white muslin and no bonnets, but sweet pretty head-dresses and pink ribbons tied as pretty girls in all countries know how to tie them; they are gathering at the churches, and as they wend their way through green fields to the highway, they give a romantic air to the rural picture we are looking on. Many of them are paired, and as they saunter along hand in hand, and now and then with an arm thrown lovingly round the waist, we know them as probably paired for life, and send up a little prayer that they may jog along as pleasantly all the way through.

“The finest Cataract in Europe” is at Schaffhausen. We arrived at sunset, just in time to see the falls before the last rays had faded into night. The Rhine is here 300 feet broad, and after foaming and rushing furiously for a mile or two it takes a bold leap over a shelving precipice sixty feet high, and plunges into a bay of waters below, boiling like a mighty caldron and sending up perpetual clouds of spray. In the midst of the cataract two columnar rocks rise perpendicularly, dividing the fall into three unequal parts. One of these rocks is clothed with shrubbery and the steep banks on either side are lined with trees. A castellated mansion crowns the summit on one side, and several buildings grace the other, so that nature and art have here combined to make a picture of wild romantic beauty, in which there is enough of grandeur to entitle it, at times, to be called sublime. Certainly we should so pronounce it, if we had not seen the waterfalls of America.

The only place to see a fall to perfection is directly in front of it. We are told to cross the river and go up the hill to a jutting crag and there in the midst of the spray, contemplate the “hell of waters,” roaring and tumbling madly on their way into the dreadful deeps below. We went over, but nothing satisfies me but to see a waterfall from its base. It was an easy matter to induce two stout oarsmen to put the nose of their skiff into the teeth of the cataract, and drive her up as near to the falling torrent as their strength would fetch her. I knew the strong current would send the little shell down stream, like an arrow, when they crossed the eddies and struck the channel; and so it proved. We toiled on till the spray-like rain covered us, and there we looked up at the white waves as they marched in fury down upon us, threatening to overwhelm the frail bark tossing on the surface as a shell. When we had studied the scene from various points of view, we returned to the shore and met a party of English gentlemen and ladies at Castle Worth, which commands a fine sight of the falls. “How does it compare with Niagara,” one of them enquired of me. I replied, “We do not love to make comparisons between these beautiful scenes and those we have left at home. Nature there is more majestic in her works, and there is no sight on earth where so much majesty crowned with beauty is revealed as in the cataract of Niagara. You see that hill which bounds this valley on the west and that higher one which shuts it in above where the Rhine comes down: those hills are not so far asunder as the river of Niagara is at the moment it falls! It is a lake broader than this beautiful vale and the precipice to whose brow it comes is loftier than the turrets of that castle, now fading from our view. It comes not creeping down the rocks like that, but gathering itself up and with one mighty leap, clearing the barrier, it pours its awful flood, as if an ocean had been spilled, into the abyss below. In the moonlight and in the sunshine rainbows are twined upon its brow, and garlands of diamonds hang from the summit to the base, in beauty indescribable.”

We climbed up to the hotel Weber, which stands on the brow of the hill, and the good man of the house gave us a chamber in full view of the falls, where we went to sleep with the roar of the tumult of many waters in our ears, making music the last we heard at night, and the first in the morning. Now the grandeur of the distant Alps began to appear. Long ranges, peak towering above peak, are seen; the names of some of them are familiar, as they stand there inviting us to come to their feet. Let us go.

Aug. 16.—Refreshed by a sweet sleep, and ready for another fine day, we were taken after breakfast to the village of Schaffhausen, where a small steamboat received us for Constance. The current of the Rhine above the falls is not so swift as below, but the waters are the same deep green, increased by the reflection of the beautiful sloping banks, covered with luxuriant vineyards. The vines are trained on short upright poles, not on arbors as with us, and at a distance they look not unlike our corn fields. But the river is so narrow here that we seem to be in the midst of them, and enjoy the labors of the dressers, as they work in the sun. Now we are passing the old nunneries of Paradies, and Katherinethal, and that ancient castle above the town of Stein is Hohenlingen, once the abode of the masters of all this soil. Here is the island of Reichenau, where the remains of an ancient monastery are seen, and on the right as we are ascending is the castle of Gottlieben, where John Huss and Jerome of Prague were confined in gloomy dungeons from which they were dragged to trial and death.

And this brings us to Constance.

CHAPTER II.
CONSTANCE AND ZURICH.

A decaying Town—the Kaufhaus—Famous Council—Dungeon of Huss—Scene of Martyrdom—House of Huss—Lake Constance—the Ride to Zurich—Villages—the Valley—Hotel Baur—a Swiss Cottage—the Furnishing—Miles Coverdale—Zwingle—Lavater’s Grave—the Library—Sunset View from the Botanical Garden.