How like to a ruined Heaven is this earth! Nay, is it not more beautiful for being a ruin?
Who can speak of lakes and not think of thee, beautiful Leman? How calm! how exquisitely blue! Let me call it a liquid sky that is spread here beneath us. And note how, where the boat presses, or the oar strikes, it yields ever a still more exquisite hue—akin to the violet, which gives to the rude pressure a redoubled fragrance—akin to the gentlest of womankind, whose love plays sweetest round the strokes of calamity.
Oh, there is a woman's heart in thy waters, beautiful Leman!
I have seen thee in all thy moods, in all thy humours. I have watched thee in profoundest calm; and suddenly, with little note of preparation, seen thee lash thy blue waves into a tempest. How beautiful in their anger were those azure waves crested with their white foam! And at other times, when all has been a sad unjoyous calm, I have seen, without being able to trace whence the light had broken, a soft expanse of brightness steal tremulous over the marble waters. A smile that seemed to speak of sweet caprice—that seemed to say that half its anger had been feint.
Yes, verily there is a woman's heart in thy waters, beautiful Leman!
I lie rocking in a boat midway between Vevay and Lausanne. On the opposite coast are the low purple hills couching beside the lake. But there, to the left, what an ethereal structure of cloud and snowy mountain is revealed to me! What a creation of that spirit of beauty which works its marvels in the unconscious earth! The Alps here, while they retain all the aërial effect gathered from distance, yet seem to arise from the very margin of the lake. The whole scene is so ethereal, you fear to look aside, lest when you look again it may have vanished like a vision of the clouds.
And why should these little boats, with their tall triangular sails, which glide so gracefully over the water, be forgotten? The sail, though an artifice of man, is almost always in harmony with nature. Nature has adopted it—has lent it some of her own wild privileges—her own bold and varied contrasts of light and shade. The surface of the water is perhaps dark and overclouded; the little upright sail is the only thing that has caught the light, and it glitters there like a moving star. Or the water is all one dazzling sheet of silver, tremulous with the vivid sunbeam, and now the little sail is black as night, and steals with bewitching contrast over that sparkling surface.
But we fly again to the mountain. Tourists are too apt to speak of the waterfall as something independent, something to be visited as a separate curiosity. There may be some such. But in general, the waterfall should be understood as part of the mountain—as the great fountain which adorns the architecture of its rocks, and the gardens of its pine forests. It belongs to the mountain. Pass through the valley, and look up; you see here and there thin stripes of glittering white, noiseless, motionless. They are waterfalls, which, if you approach them, will din you with their roar, and which are dashing headlong down, covered with tossing spray. Or ascend the face of the mountain, and again look around and above you. From all sides the waterfalls are rushing. They bear you down. You are giddy with their reckless speed. How they make the rock live! What a stormy vitality have they diffused around them! You might as well separate a river from its banks as a waterfall from its mountain.