University of Virginia Library

111. LETTER CXI.

We have been two days and a half loitering down
through the Swiss canton of Valais, and admiring every
hour the magnificence of these snow-capped and
green-footed Alps. The little chalets seem just lodged
by accident on the crags, or stuck against slopes so
steep, that the mowers of the mountain-grass are literally
let down by ropes to their dizzy occupation.
The goats alone seem to have an exemption from all
ordinary laws of gravitation, feeding against cliffs
which it makes one giddy to look on only; and the
short-waisted girls, dropping a courtesy and blushing
as they pass the stranger, emerge from the little mountain-paths,
and stop by the first spring, to put on their
shoes and arrange their ribands coquetishly, before
entering the village.

The two dreadful curses of these valleys meet one
at every step—the cretins, or natural fools, of which
there is at least one in every family; and the goitre or
swelled throat, to which there is hardly an exception
among the women. It really makes travelling in
Switzerland a melancholy business, with all its beauty;
at every turn in the road, a gibbering and mowing
idiot, and in every group of females, a disgusting array
of excrescences too common even to be concealed.
Really, to see girls that else were beautiful, arrayed
in all their holyday finery, but with a defect that makes
them monsters to the unaccustomed eye, their throats
swollen to the size of their heads, seems to me one
of the most curious and pitiable things I have met in
my wanderings. Many attempts have been made to
account for the growth of the goitre, but it is yet unexplained.
The men are not so subject to it as the
women, though among them, even, it is frightfully
common. But how account for the continual production
by ordinary parents of this brute race of cretins?
They all look alike, dwarfish, large-mouthed, grinning,
and of hideons features and expression. It is said
that the children of strangers, born in the valley, are
very likely to be idiots, resembling the cretin exactly.
It seems a supernatural curse upon the land. The
Valaisians, however, consider it a blessing to have one
in the family.

The dress of the women of La Valais is excessively
unbecoming, and a pretty face is rare. Their manners
are kind and polite, and at the little auberges,
where we have stopped on the road, there have been
a cleanliness and a generosity in the supply of the
table, which prove virtues among them not found in
Italy.

At Turttmann, we made a little excursion into the
mountains to see a cascade. It falls about a hundred
feet, and has just now more water than usual from the
melting of the snows. It is a pretty fall. A Frenchman
writes in the book of the hotel, that he has seen
Niagara and Trenton Falls, in America, and that they
do not compare with the cascade of Turttmann!

From Martigny the scenery began to grow richer,
and after passing the celebrated Fall of the Pissevache
(which springs from the top of a high Alp almost
into the road, and is really a splendid cascade),
we approached Lake Leman in a gorgeous sunset.
We rose a slight hill, and over the broad sheet of water
on the opposite shore, reflected with all its towers
in a mirror of gold, lay the castle of Chillon. A bold
green mountain, rose steeply behind, the sparkling village
of Vevey lay farther down on the water's edge;
and away toward the sinking sun, stretched the long
chain of the Jura, teinted with all the hues of a dolphin.
Never was such a lake of beauty—or it never
sat so pointedly for its picture. Mountains and water,
chateaux and shallops, vineyards and verdure, could
do no more. We left the carriage and walked three
or four miles along the southern bank, under the
“Rocks of Meillerie,” and the spirit of St. Preux's
Julie, if she haunt the scene where she caught her
death, of a sunset in May, is the most enviable of
ghosts. I do not wonder at the prating in albums of
Lake Leman. For me, it is (after Val d'Arno from
Fiezoli) the ne plus ultra of a scenery Paradise.

We are stopping for the night at St. Gingoulf, on
a swelling bank of the lake, and we have been lying
under the trees in front of the hotel till the last perceptible
teint is gone from the sky over Jura. Two
pedestrian gentlemen, with knapsacks and dogs, have

just arrived, and a whole family of French people, including
parrots and monkeys, came in before us, and
are deafening the house with their chattering. A cup
of coffee, and then good night!

My companion, who has travelled all over Europe
on foot, confirms my opinion that there is no drive on
the continent equal to the forty miles between the
rocks of Meillerie and Geneva, on the southern bank
of the Leman. The lake is not often much broader
than the Hudson, the shores are the noble mountains
sung so gloriously by Childe Harold; Vevey, Lausanne,
Copet, and a string of smaller villages, all famous
in poetry and story, fringe the opposite water's
edge with cottages and villages, while you wind for
ever along a green lane following the bend of the
shore, the road as level as your hall pavement, and
green hills massed up with trees and verdure, overshadowing
you continually. The world has a great
many sweet spots in it, and I have found many a one
which would make fitting scenery for the brightest act
of life's changeful drama—but here is one, where it
seems to me as difficult not to feel genial and kindly,
as for Taglioni to keep from floating away like a smoke-curl
when she is dancing in La Bayadere.

We passed a bridge and drew in a long breath to
try the difference in the air—we were in the republic
of Geneva. It smelt very much as it did in the dominions
of his majesty of Sardinia—sweet-brier, hawthorn,
violets and all. I used to think when I first came
from America, that the flowers (republicans by nature
as well as birds) were less fragrant under a monarchy.

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 lok 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 strawbonneted
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.

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.