Cathedral and Platform at Berne.
By stopping over from one train to another you will see all that is worth seeing in the quaint old city of Berne,—the German for Bear,—the city of Bears, so called because it is built on the spot where its founder, Berchthold, of Zahringen, slew a bear long time ago. So the people keep three or four of them in a stone pit, at the public expense, for the idle and youthful to look at and feed and see them climb a tree. It is amusing to see a city worshipping bears. Therefore go to see the bears, when you go to Berne. Do not fall over the parapet, for if you do, the bears will tear you to bits, as they did an unfortunate Englishman on the 3d of March, 1861. If you happen to be at the old clock tower when it is striking the hour, you will see a curious procession, which presents a very striking appearance; and, indeed, every fountain and statue and mountain is deformed with ugly bears, till you cannot bear to see them. You will be quite willing to leave the city after walking through its principal streets, where the second story of the houses projects over the sidewalks, making a covered promenade, and the shops are half-way in the street, and the market-women sit all along the way with their baskets of vegetables, and the chicken vendors are ready to cut off the heads of the fowls over a drain that carries off the blood, and so forth.
Besides the hotels, the only notable edifice is the Federal Palace, a new and truly beautiful building. Here the National Diet, or Congress of Switzerland, meets annually in July. There are twenty-two cantons, or states, in the Swiss Confederation, and they are severally independent, but unite in this council for purposes of mutual protection and support. Each canton has a dialect, or patois, peculiar to itself, and sometimes unintelligible to its neighbors; and the French, the German, and the Italian languages are so generally spoken in distinct cantons, that they are obliged to have an interpreter in Congress to redeliver a speech, or restate an argument in two other languages after a member has made it first in the only one that he understands. What a blessed thing it is that our congressmen understand, at least, each other’s language, for if their speeches had to be repeated three times, when would the assembly ever break up?
The grandest sight in Berne is the range of Bernese Alps, and a grander spectacle, perhaps, the country itself cannot present. When that long, white, rifted, mountain-boundary of the world stands up in its majesty, lighted as we saw it by a blazing noonday sun, it is sublime as well as beautiful.
On the Lake of Thun.
It is only an hour by rail to Thun, and then we are on a lovely little lake ten miles long, with lofty mountains on each side of it; so lovely indeed is this lake, that days after we had left it, when other views were spoken of, Thun always had its admiring advocates, who claimed for it the pre-eminence in beauty over all that we had seen. And so in this land of glorious natural scenery, where every valley is a subject for a picture, every mountain a study, and every lake a gem, it is easy to exhaust the words of admiration, and then fail to convey any adequate idea of the constant succession of splendors that greet the traveller’s never-wearied eye.
Writing these last words, I look up, and before me is the Jungfrau, clothed in white raiment from crown to foot. The sky kisses her cold brow. As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so are the everlasting hills about her now and ever. But no words can give to you, beyond the sea, the faintest conception of what one feels who exposes his soul to these visions of grandeur and beauty, and rejoices as he thinks “My Father made them all.”