Joseph E. Morris

“ The attraction here, of course, is the majestic Bay of Uri, which comes into view with startling suddenness, in a few revolutions of the paddles, as the steamer approaches the quay at Brunnen; and whose splendour, luckily, neither monster hotel, nor monster crowd, nor the presence of the great St. Gothard railway (here first insistently apparent on the margin of the lake) ,
"nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy." ”

“ Beyond Sorel Point comes suddenly the deep hollow of La Houle, guarded by granite cliffs of sheer sublimity; and beyond this, in long succession, round innumerable intervening points, come Mourier, and Bonne Nuit, and Giffard, and Bouley, and Rozel, and Fliquet Bays. A week may well be spent, and more than a week, in leisurely exploration of this gloriously broken coast. Or the visitor who has less energy, or is weary of much scrambling, may sit here day after day in the sunshine, on promontory or cliff, watching the "blind wave" at its never-ending business of "feeling round its ocean hall." ”

“ The church, in fact, looks, when viewed externally, more like four separate churches than one; and when we step inside, with all the best will in the world to make the best of it, it is hard to find, much to admire, and anything at all to love, in these acres of dismally whitewashed walls, and long, feeble lines of arcades without capitals. The inherent vice of Belgian architecture—its lack of really beautiful detail, and its fussy superfluity of pinnacle and panelling—seems to me here to culminate. ”

“ So vast, indeed, is this huge building, and so flat the surrounding plain, that it is said that it is possible from the strangely isolated hill of Cassel, which lies about eighteen miles away to the west, just over the border, in France, on a really clear day—I have only climbed it myself, unluckily, in a fog of winter mist—to distinguish in a single view, by merely turning the head, the clustering spires of Laon, the white chalk cliffs of Kent, and this vast pile of building, like a ship at sea, that seems to lie at anchor in the heart of the "sounding plain." ”

“ Those who approach Lucerne directly by the railway fitly approach the most dramatic of lakes by the most dramatic of vestibules. For those who use their eyes, indeed, there are abundant distant hints of the coming splendour; the Alps are first visible, in tolerably clear weather, as we descend the long wall of Jura on to the Aar at Aarberg; and further on, beyond the peaty flats round the Mauensee, and as we quit the lake of Sempach, Pilatus and Rigi, like two tall sentinels ”

“ Patrick's Island, indeed, whether viewed at close quarters from the little pier on the opposite side of the harbour—where sometimes at night one almost stumbles over piles of freshly caught fish that are left there to glimmer and glint in the moonlight—or seen from a distance from the coast to the north of Peel Bay, is probably the most striking object in the whole Kingdom of Man. ”

“ The road from Lucerne to Küsnacht, where it skirts this bay beyond the big, scrambling village of Meggen, is one of the pleasantest view-points within easy touch of Lucerne whence to enjoy across the water the noble mountain background that screens the south shore of the main lake. On a mild spring evening, when this splendid landscape is an ætherialized study in black and white; when the snowflakes and cowslips are pushing up in thousands through the quickly growing grass; when the host of margent rushes scarcely quivers in the stillness ”

“ Peter Port is an admirable centre from which to visit every quarter of the compact little island; but, indeed, as already adumbrated, there is but little in Guernsey (except for the antiquarian) that is really worth seeing outside its capital, except the south coast. St. Sampson's may be visited for its picturesque church, which is one of the oldest and most interesting on the island. The road by which we gain it is so ugly—one continued line of houses—that no one need hesitate to use the electric tram, which was one of the earliest of its kind in the British dominions. ”

“ If Ypres is to be praised appropriately as a still delightful old city that has managed to retain to a quite singular degree the outward aspect and charm of the Middle Ages, one feels that one has left one's self without any proper stock of epithets with which to appraise at its proper value the charm and romance of Bruges. Of late years, it is true, this world-famed capital of West Flanders has lost something of its old somnolence and peace. ”

“ Sempach itself, like Sursee, is a picturesque old town, with another quaint old gateway. The lake, though five miles long, is quite outside the mountains, though the splintered crags of Pilatus give a distant hint of Alpine splendour. The remaining nine miles or so to Lucerne are perhaps a trifle dull, and the entrance to the city is through the usual straggling suburb—out of all reasonable proportion to the place itself—that conducts us too frequently to a town in Switzerland. ”

“ GUERNSEY Jersey, with larger acreage and a bigger population, is content to form a kingdom by itself; Guernsey is fain to ally itself with its immediate neighbour, Sark, and even seek bonds of union with Alderney, twenty miles away. The diversity maintained jealously in these little islands, which an Englishman is too hastily accustomed to regard in a lump, is complex and even amusing. ”

“ Those who prefer a watering-place that is almost wholly watering-place, and not yet spoilt by extravagant building (though the hands that direct its destinies had better call a halt) ; who are content to be included in a definite bay that is bounded by definite cliffs; and who are willing to look westward over unlimited space, in which the sun sinks magnificently in his "ocean-bath," will get what they like at Port Erin. Those, on the other hand, who like to face eastward, and to vary the monotony of the seascape by distant lines of low coast; who dislike to be cooped in a narrow space ”

“ Nothing, perhaps, in Europe is so strangely significant of vanished greatness—not even Rome, with its shattered Forum, or Venice, with a hundred marble palaces—as this huge fourteenth-century building, with a facade that is four hundred and thirty-six feet long, and with its lofty central tower, that was built for the pride and need of Ypres, and as a market for the barter of its priceless linens, at a time when Ypres numbered a population of two hundred thousand souls (almost as big as Leicester at the present day) , and was noisy with four thousand busy looms ”

“ The sea, however, as we draw near Dhoon Glen—a deep gash down below us on the left—grows more and more magnificent beneath us; and presently, just before doubling the sudden corner that gives access to Glen Laxey, road and tramway run together (the latter might be spared) on the edge of a sheer cliff that looks down from an almost giddy height on the waves that break far down below. This is one of the finest "bits" on a hard highroad in Man, but to the cyclist it is gone in a moment. ”

“ Mont Orgueil, where we stand, is not a bad starting-point from which to commence our exploration of Jersey. Happy, indeed, the visitor who arrives at this little port from France—and the steamer comes from Carteret in little more than an hour. Most English tourists, on the other hand, make Jersey first at St. Helier, which happens to be a town of considerable dulness, and compares very badly with St. Peter Port, in Guernsey. Mont Orgueil, however, may be reached at once from St. Helier by one of the two strange little railways that traverse the south coast of the island. ”

“ The redeeming point, as always, is that infinitely superior good taste which presents us, in the midst of coal-mines and desolation, not with our own unspeakably squalid Sheffields or Rotherhams, but with a queenly city, with broad and handsome streets, with a wealth of public gardens, and with many stately remnants of the Renaissance and Middle Time. It is possible in Liege to forget—or rather impossible to recall—the soiled and grimy country that stretches from its gates in the direction of Seraing. ”

“ The most immediately mountainous in character, because no other big Swiss lake, as already intimated,7 extends itself so deeply into the heart of giant hills, or is bordered so immediately by steep and rugged mountains. Thus Lucerne gains in surprise and mystery what it loses in simple graciousness; is dramatic and startling where other lakes are tranquil and merely soothing; and is certainly, to sum up, the most splendid and magnificent lake in the Alps, if not the most dignified and beautiful. ”

“ Laxey, to the writer's taste, is far too big and straggling—untidy, perhaps, is too unkind a word to use of it—to make an idyllic centre from which to explore the hills. It should be borne in mind, however, that it is a nearer starting-point to Snaefell than any other centre in the island: the mountain tram, in fact—if that be not, indeed, a positive detraction—actually starts from its doors. ”

“ Yet even if German "kultur" in the end sweep wholly into ruin the long accumulated treasures of Belgian architecture, sculpture, and painting—if Bruges, which to-day stands still intact, shall to-morrow be reckoned with Dinant and Louvain—yet it would still be worth while to set before a few more people this record of vanished splendour, that they may better appreciate what the world has lost through lust of brutal ambition, and better be on guard in the future to protect what wreckage is left. ”

“ This was an old centre for goat-whey cure, and the inns are delightfully old-fashioned of aspect; the whole appearance of the spot, indeed, is full of local character, whereas most other settlements on the Rigi are cosmopolitan and commonplace. The salvation of the place is its utter lack of view: you must scramble up steep grass slopes, towards the south, to the summit of the saddle, to enlarge your horizon in a few steps from a barrier of green hill-side to a prospect so vast that you seem suddenly to have before you all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory thereof. ”

“ The writer has travelled over most of the island on foot to explore its twelve old churches, and investigate its coast. Frankly, he is driven to put on record that he found it a dismal task. Features, of course, remain of interest and beauty, if one is willing to walk about in blinkers, and seldom raise one's eyes above the ground. The old, granite-built farmhouses, standing back, as a rule, but a little from the road, are uncommon, and extremely picturesque. Inland Guernsey, again, possesses one single glory that is almost unknown in Jersey. ”

“ Rather one recalls that old persistent creed, exemplified perhaps in the mysteries, now of the Greek Adonis, now of Persian Mithras, and now of the Roman priest of the Nennian lake, that it is only through the gates of sacrifice and death that the world moves on triumphant to rejuvenation and life. Is it, in truth, through the blood of a bruised and prostrate Belgium that the purple hyacinth of a rescued European civilization will spring presently from the soaked and untilled soil? ”

“ Its elements, though majestic, are exceedingly downright and simple, whereas those of the rest of the Lake of Lucerne are multiform, subtle, and complex. Whatever be the impression that it effects on the spectator, it is likely to accomplish this at once; it is no finer at the head than at the foot; and all that it has of grandeur (and nothing of the kind in the Alps is grander) is flashed upon us in a moment, in complete and final revelation, when first it comes into vision between the piers at Trieb and Brunnen. It varies, of course, in splendour as the day is bright or dull ”

“ JERSEY If on a fine day we take our stand on one of the terraces, or battlements, of Mont Orgueil Castle—and there is hardly a pleasanter spot in Jersey in which to idle away a sunny summer afternoon—we shall realize more completely than geography books can tell us that the Channel Islands really constitute the last remnants of the ancient Norman dukedom that still belong to the English Crown. ”

“ Belgian towns, moreover—again unlike our own big cities in England—are mostly extremely handsome, and generally contrive, however big, to retain, at any rate in their heart, as at Antwerp, or in the Grande Place at Brussels, a striking air of antiquity; whilst some fairly big towns, such as Malines and Bruges, are mediaeval from end to end. This, of course, is not true of Belgian Luxembourg and the region of the Ardennes, where the population is much more sparse; where we do not stumble, about every fifteen miles or so, on some big town of historic name ”

“ Whether it is likely long to survive is a question one fears to ask. In Sark, again, the primrose—though here it is no marvel—carpets the ground like daisies on a "wet bird-haunted English lawn"; like daisies, too, in Switzerland, the stalks of the Sark primrose grow to remarkable length. But as soon as we cross to Jersey—and when the writer noted this strong contrast, he crossed directly from Guernsey to Jersey, and almost directly from Jersey to Sark—the primrose is seen no more by thousands in the hedge-side. ”

“ It is bad enough that a hill should be desecrated by a single mountain28 railway: it is intolerable that it should be degraded by three! How many people ascend to the Rigi Kulm on a day of tolerable weather in August from either Vitznau or Arth-Goldau one would hardly dare to guess; how many are housed at night in one or other of the monster hotels—at Rigi Kulm, at Rigi Kaltbad, at Rigi Staffel, at Rigi Scheidegg—that oppress and burden its weary summits is a matter not to be dwelt on. ”

“ Personally I find them a trifle disappointing; they come, no doubt, as a welcome relief after the rest of Belgian landscape, which I have heard described, not altogether unjustly, as the ugliest in the world; but the true glory and value of Belgium will always be discovered in its marvellously picturesque old towns, and in its unrivalled wealth of painting, brass-work, and wood-carving. Compared with these last splendours the low, wooded wolds of the Ardennes, with their narrow limestone valleys, seem a little thing indeed. ”

“ The Land of Promise lies fair before us; but here, on the saddle of the Rigi, we still linger on the threshold, though the biting morning breeze come, pine-scented, through the forest, and though the musical cow-bells tinkle for ever on the "high mountain pastures, where day first appears." ”

“ Bruges, of course, like Venice, and half a dozen towns in Holland, is a strangely amphibious city that is intersected in every direction, though certainly less persistently than Venice, by a network of stagnant canals. On the other hand, if it never rises to the splendour of the better parts of Venice—the Piazza and the Grand Canal—and lacks absolutely that charm of infinitely varied, if somewhat faded or even shabby, colour that characterizes the "Queen of the Adriatic," there is yet certainly nothing monotonous in her monotone of mellow red-brick ”