Part 26 (2/2)
”It is the silent grief that cuts the heart-strings.”
In sober sadness, one may well regret any country where his life has been filled fuller than elsewhere of suns.h.i.+ne and gladness; and such, by a thousand enchantments, has Italy been to me. Its climate is life in my nostrils, its hills and valleys are the poetry of such things, and its marbles, pictures, and palaces, beset the soul like the very necessities of existence. You can exist elsewhere, but oh! you _live_ in Italy!
I was sitting by my English companion on a sledge in front of the hotel, enjoying the suns.h.i.+ne, when the diligence drove up, and six or eight young men alighted. One of them, walking up and down the road to get the cramp of a confined seat out of his legs, addressed a remark to us in English. We had neither of us seen him before, but we exclaimed simultaneously, as he turned away, ”That's an American.”
”How did you know he was not an Englishman?” I asked. ”Because,” said my friend, ”he spoke to us without an introduction and without a reason, as Englishmen are not in the habit of doing, and because he ended his sentence with 'sir,' as no Englishman does except he is talking to an inferior, or wishes to insult you. And how did you know it?” asked he. ”Partly by instinct,” I answered, ”but more, because though a traveller, he wears a new hat that cost him ten dollars, and a new cloak that cost him fifty, (a peculiarly American extravagance,) because he made no inclination of his body either in addressing or leaving us, though his intention was to be civil, and because he used fine dictionary words to express a common idea, which, by the way, too, betrays his southern breeding. And if you want other evidence, he has just asked the gentleman near him to ask the conducteur something about his breakfast, and an American is the only man in the world who ventures to come abroad without at least French enough to keep himself from starving.” It may appear ill-natured to write down such criticisms on one's own countryman; but the national peculiarities by which we are distinguished from foreigners, seemed so well defined in this instance, that I thought it worth mentioning. We found afterward that our conjecture was right. His name and country were on the bra.s.s plate of his portmanteau in most legible letters, and I recognized it directly as the address of an amiable and excellent man, of whom I had once or twice heard in Italy, though I had never before happened to meet him. Three of the faults oftenest charged upon our countrymen, are _over-fine clothes_, _over fine-words_, and _over-fine_, or _over-free manners_!
From Simplon we drove two or three miles between heaps of snow, lying in some places from ten to six feet deep. Seven hours before, we had ridden through fields of grain almost ready for the harvest. After pa.s.sing one or two galleries built over the road to protect it from the avalanches where it ran beneath the loftier precipices, we got out of the snow, and saw Brig, the small town at the foot of the Simplon, on the other side, lying almost directly beneath us. It looked as if one might toss his cap down into its pretty gardens. Yet we were four or five hours in reaching it, by a road that seemed in most parts scarcely to descend at all. The views down the valley of the Rhone, which opened continually before us, were of exquisite beauty, The river itself, which is here near its source, looked like a meadow rivulet in its silver windings, and the gigantic Helvetian Alps which rose in their snow on the other side of the valley, were glittering in the slant rays of a declining sun, and of a grandeur of size and outline which diminished, even more than distance, the river and the cl.u.s.ters of villages at their feet.
LETTER LXIV.
SWITZERLAND--LA VALAIS--THE CRETINS AND THE GOITRES--A FRENCHMAN'S OPINION OF NIAGARA--LAKE LEMAN--CASTLE OF CHILLON--ROCKS OF MEILLERIE--REPUBLICAN AIR--MONT BLANC--GENEVA--THE STEAMER--PARTING SORROW.
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-gra.s.s 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 blus.h.i.+ng as they pa.s.s 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 moaning 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 hideous 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 has been a cleanliness and a generosity in the supply of the table, which prove virtues among them, not found in Italy.
At Turtmann, 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 Turtmann!
From Martigny the scenery began to grow richer, and after pa.s.sing the celebrated Fall of the p.i.s.sevache (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 sh.o.r.e, 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 alb.u.ms of Lake Leman. For me, it is (after Val d'Arno from Fiesoli) 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 sh.o.r.es are the n.o.ble 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 sh.o.r.e, the road as level as your hall pavement, and green hills ma.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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-briar, 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 look 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 straw-bonneted and white-ap.r.o.ned girls, ladies and peasants alike, were all out at their porches and balconies, lover-like couples were sauntering down the park-lanes, _one_ servant pa.s.sed 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 sh.o.r.e, our fair fellow-pa.s.senger gave way to her feelings, and sinking upon a seat, burst into a pa.s.sionate 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.
”Lake Leman wooed us with its crystal face,”
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 pa.s.senger breathes the air of heaven before it has pa.s.sed through that improving medium. Our youthful Niobe, two French ladies not particularly pretty, an Englishman with a fis.h.i.+ng-rod and gun, and a c.o.xcomb 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.
<script>