F. Barham Zincke

“ You see a great deal in passing, of the indescribable clear blue of glacier ice—a tender, ethereal blue. Just as pearly pink, fiery red, fresh green, and imperial purple give rise within us to correspondent emotions, almost ideas, so does this glacier-ice blue. You have been admitted to look upon what has in it no smirch, no grossness, no warmth of earth—a purity not of this world. The man who can pass by this blue translucency without emotion, as if he had only looked upon a piece of blue serge, is of a hard heart and of a dull brain. ”

“ Black granite rises in sheer cliffs, mountain-high above you. The Reuss thunders seventy-five feet below the arch on which you are standing. You are wet with the spray. A sense of personal nothingness, of annihilation, comes over you. You feel as a shrimp might between the jaws of a whale.
The granite appears absolutely naked; but a closer inspection shows you a few humble Alpine plants in such crannies and crevices as their roots could find a hold in, together with a little mould from decayed lichens to feed upon. ”

“ For two thirds, or so, up the mountain, its gentle ascent is almost all in small prairies, very green, and thickly planted with fruit trees, with just here and there, as at Sacheln, small patches of, at this season, golden grain, to enrich the tender green of the grass, and the darker green of the fruit trees. The upper third of the mountain is in forests for fuel, and in summer grazing ground for cows. ”

“ There is something almost startling, from its instantaneousness, and completeness, in the change of view on reaching the summit of a col. You have been, for a long time, struggling up against the mountain: that side of it, and the mountains right and left of that side, have all the time been filling your eye. Without giving the matter a thought, you step upon the summit. Every object you have so long been looking at is out of sight; is gone; is down behind you. All that you are now looking upon is new, and generally very different—another valley ”

“ When Andermatt is in the clouds, the only local resources are the streams of carriages, and the arrival and departure of the diligences. The rolling rattle of the carriages, the jingling of the horses’ bells, and the clatter of their feet on the granite pavement, are incessant. The new monster Hotel, the Belle Vue, being a little to the north of the new road from the Rhone valley to the Grisons, sees and knows nothing of the up and down traffic on this line. ”

“ As looked down into from the top of the Eggischhorn, this little lake, with its green glass-smooth water, and white icebergs,—in part the cliffs from which they have fallen are of a tender blue,—and with the sober-coloured Alpine [Pg 246] pasture occupying the rest of the depression and reaching down to the Viescher glacier, and with the black mountain on the north of it, is a sight that must be quite unique, and is as charming and interesting as unique. ”

“ The bridge is of one arch over the Linth, here an Alpine torrent, that chafes, and dashes, and forces its way, hoarse and tormented, along the perpendicular-sided channel it has cut for itself, to the depth of nearly 150 feet below the bridge. Having crossed this bridge we went on, still ascending, about three quarters of a mile further, to the Ueli Alp. It was a strange wild scene—high above the valley we had come from—before us, right and left, only stupendous, sullen, mountain crags, with a glacier in front. ”

“ It would be thawed, like snow upon which the sun was shining. The perception by the community of the possibility of turning the land of the country to better account would be the sun that would melt it away; just as it had every system in its turn when its day was done, back to the beginning. For the people have a right to insist that the land shall be allowed to yield for them as much food as it is capable, under the circumstances of the times, of being made to produce. ”

“ At all events it is satisfactory to find that you are disposed to think so; for this will justify you in supposing that you are not one of those impetuous souls who have no idea of any pleasure in a Swiss excursion, except what they can extract from the fact that they got over a certain distance in less time than the books allow for it, or than their friends did it in: as if the merit of a book were to be measured by the rate at which it was written, or of a dinner by the rate at which it was eaten. Fair scenes and wondrous scenes are not to be scampered over, and toiled through. ”

“ The worst bit is on the last descent towards Muotta. There you have a long, broken-up staircase of glass-smooth (and, if there has been any rain, lubricated) blocks of stone. From the summit to Muotta is not impressive as Alpine scenery. But variety is pleasant; and to be passing through these mountain pastures among herds of cows, and cowherds, with somewhat mountainous barriers left and right, over short, smooth turf, and beside clear, lively streams, on a sunny day, with fresh, breezy air, will satisfy many. For those whom it does not satisfy we can only have—well—but imperfect sympathy. ”

“ I do not know where, from a near point of view, without a particle of intermediate distance, you could look over so wide an expanse of land, that has been, and shows palpably that it has been, brought so thoroughly and successfully into subjection to man. The expanse is vast, but man is everywhere. Everywhere cornfields, and vineyards, and orchards, and prairies; maize and potatoes; hemp and flax; sheep and cows; woods for fuel, and streams for irrigation. ”

“ What is now wanted is that all should have the chance of such an education as would properly qualify each for some form of industry, and enable him by perseverance, thrift, and cultivated intelligence to turn it to good account. This would enable all, and each according to his merits, which should be the first aims of society in the era of capital, to participate in the produce of the soil. Make the produce as abundant as possible, and at the same time make that, as far as possible, common to all, in proportion to the exertions, which mean the intellectual and moral merits, of each. ”

“ The regular increase in the variety and richness of the vegetation must strike even a somewhat unobservant traveller, as he rapidly makes the descent. The contour, too, and colouring of the mountains are somewhat distinctive. Those just below Faido had, this year, their barren tops in August flecked with snow. This attracts your eye as you are passing through fields of luxuriant maize, and trellised vineyards at their feet. You see how vegetation has struggled to ascend them. It begins by having it all its own way. Down below it covers all the ground. ”

“ If it were to begin to act upon the principle of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and this for all, it would cease to be the Church of Rome. It lowers to the level of its own worldly interests, for everything must be subordinated to them, the life of the individual, of the family, of society, and of the state; in three words, truth, virtue, and religion: that is to say, all that is best among men, all their dearest interests, all that makes life desirable, and even tolerable. ”

“ It has bound itself, irrevocably, to the maintenance of everything it ever taught or did. Its assumption of Infallibility obliges it to hold that everything it has taught, and is teaching, rests upon precisely the same ground and authority; that all must stand, or that all must fall, together; and that all must stand, or that all must fall, together with its system: the black-faced image, and the plenary remission, of Einsiedln, belief in the being of God, and in the infallibility of the Pope of Rome, truth of every kind, and the practice of every virtue. ”

“ So is it also with the opposite picture seen from the Rigi Kulm—the other strangely-contrasted half of the wonderful whole—the long range of Alps on the south. It is not their mountain massiveness, and colouring only—unwonted sight to English eyes—that are capable of interesting. They are something more than Nature’s architecture in many forms—pyramids, towers, buttresses, pinnacles—appealing merely to the sense of grandeur, of power, and of awe. ”

“ As I looked out from this terrace over the blue expanse below, with Gibbon and Voltaire in my mind, I thought it not improbable that the day might come when it will be seen that their faults belonged to their age, and to the conditions under which their work was done. Society, if its regeneration was to be attempted, required then, first of all, the clearance of many inveterate, strong, and poisonous overgrowths. ”

“ France, Italy, and Spain will recover. Morality and religion are eternal; for morality, as we now know by an induction from all kindreds of men, through all ages, in every form and stage of barbarism, and in every form and stage of civilization, is the order of the family, and of society: the very word itself indicates this. And religion is morality, practised not merely with reference to the requirements of the family, and of society, but also with reference to what in these, and in all other, domains of morality is required of us by our conceptions of God, and of a future life. ”

“ As the herd is driven by, through the village, with bells tinkling, and joyous at the prospect of returning at last to the fresh, thymy, mountain herbage, he looks on in silence, with his mouth open, as if his hopes, and his wits, too, were departing from him, through the passage he is providing for their exit.
He cannot understand how things have come to be as they are. He worked hard all the summer. ”

“ And, as you note the countless divisions of the plain below, you think that its existing state is not unworthy of attention; for there is evidence before you not only that the old freedom has been maintained, unimpaired, on the two bases of general possessive, and of universal political, equality, but also that unflagging industry, the associate of much manly virtue, has aided in its maintenance. You see that every little plot of prairie, or of corn land, and every fruit tree, you are looking upon, is watched, and tended, with an interest none but small proprietors can feel. ”

“ And so it is with everything: the mountain, the plain, the city, the châlet, the flower, the grasshopper. At first, and to the mechanical bodily eye, they are but unintelligible symbols and figures. It is the mind that enables us to know what the symbols and figures stand for. If your thought has not made out, or endeavoured to make out, with respect to these objects, what they are in themselves, how they came to be what they are, what they do, what is stirring within them, what are their relations to each other and to the great whole, then they are to you so many nothings ”

“ Mountains and glaciers have souls; still there can be no Landseer for them. They are too vast and too simple, and the scene, though its objects are so few, is too expanded for the canvas. In the foreground is the dark Todensee, surrounded with its scanty, yellowish, sober herbage, interspersed with granite slabs and rocks. In the middle distance the central object is the great glacier, majestically descending from between the Gerstener snow-fields and rock ridges on the left, and the snow-capped summits of the Galenstock on the right. ”

“ No more grand views of snow-fields and ice-rivers. No more of nature’s battlemented and pinnacled ramparts and castles far above us while the storm was raging far below us. No more pleasant halts at mountain châlets, or on the turf by the huddling streamlet, in such haste to get down to the valley. ”

“ What is the intellectual life of the peasants of Am Stag? If even in a broad country-side, where a bookseller can live, and the world is not quite unknown, the one subject of conversation that interests all, and alone never flags, is one’s neighbours, and their affairs; and if, even in its larger atmosphere, petty jealousies and heart-burnings abound; and often grow, for the soil and atmosphere have some qualities that stimulate such growths, to not insignificant dimensions, from beginnings no bigger than, and as unsubstantial as, the midge’s wing ”

“ August 8.—‘Now, Ammer, for a glimpse of Italy;’ as, at 6 A.M., starting from the almost undistinguishable watershed that divides the head-stream of the Reuss from that of the Ticino—an affluent of the Rhine from an affluent of the Po—we began to cut off the many zigzags of the Vale of Trembling, at a good pace, as became the frosty morning—frosty at that altitude—and our inspiriting destination. ”

“ There is therefore no longer any point in the Frenchman’s sarcasm, ‘We fight for honour, but you fight for money.’ Nor in the Switzer’s rejoinder, ‘It is only natural that each of us, like the rest of the world, should fight for what he has not got.’ The Swiss have at last come to be so prosperous, and to have so many other means of making money, both at home and abroad, that they would not in these days risk their lives in foreign military service for a franc a day. ”

“ Before us are land and water, mountains and plains, variety of outline, variety of culture, variety of objects, variety of life. You are [Pg 162] among orchards and meadows, cornfields and vineyards. You look down over them to the blue lake. Beyond the lake, on its further side, reaching far right and left, is a broad expanse of undulating ground. In this expanse, every here and there, a house is showing, very white and cheery, among the dark green trees and the light green grass—the houses of well-to-do people. ”